Current Bands
- Ezekiel’s Wheels is a freewheeling five-piece acoustic chariot of fiery klezmer majesty. We play traditional Jewish music and 90′s pop covers like they’re something in between.
- Forks of Nature is often a double-fiddle string band with optional vocals; sometimes it is just me and Jonah on an adventure with surprise guests. We play for contra dances and parties in castles.
- Mierlita is a Romanian/Moldovan gypsy fiddle band.
- Delta Wave is my fiddle techno duet with Julie Vallimont, who does literally all of the work and then calls me up to goof around over her sick beats.
Other Folks I Play With
- I am extremely happy when I get to play guitar with Firefly, consisting of fiddler Cedar Stanistreet, clarenetist Rebecca Bosworth-Clemens, and either me or a more competent guitarist like Max Newman or Bethany Waickman.
- Some of my favorite Boston-area contra buddies are fiddler Julie Metcalf, fiddler Edward Wallace, and mandolin/guitarist Eric McDonald.
- I have a special place in my heart for the music of Bennet Konesni and take any opportunity to make some of it with him.
- When I’m super lucky, I get to play shows with virtuosos like pianist/mandolinist Neil Pearlman and electric accordionist Cory Pesaturo.
- I have a great fondness for contra dance band The Free Raisins, who I accidentally named and with whom I pinch-hit.
- I am an occasional sub with The Goodtime String Band, an old-time/western swing wedding band.
Bands on De Facto Hiatus
- Garlic and Moonshine is an acoustic singer-songwriter trio that sits squarely at the intersection of folk, jazz, blues, and Forks of Nature.
- The Salt Wives are a Judaic chamber-folk trio on accordion, euphonium and fiddle with activist tendencies and the singular ability to convert intra-band friction into sublime musical darkness.
- The Contra Dance String Quartet (with Rachel Panitch, Daniel Hawkins, and the aforementioned Julie Metcalf) performed exactly once, but might very well continue to exist some day.
Bands That Are Still Playing, But Without Me
- Somerville Symphony Orkestar is a six-piece electric all-original Eastern-European Punk-Funk band that somehow summons an elephant in a tutu to dance at the end of most of their shows.
- Sharks Come Cruisin’ adapts sea shanties for rock, and brings cue cards so that everyone can join in for the chorus.
- Barnacle is a peppy western-hemisphere-trad band that play an average of six instruments per band member per show.
- Gypsy Nights is a rolling-cast Hot-Club jazz combo fronted by one-man-band Chuck Rejto on guitar and foot-pedal chromatic harmonica.
- ARRR!!! is the Brown pirate a-cappella “choir.” Repertoire is mostly sea shanties, with a little Muppet Treasure Island on the side. ARRR!!!
