Newly formed Capital Region bluegrass group, The Millstone Rounders, return to Caffe Lena on Friday, November 28.
The band is fronted by Louisville, KY, native James Gascoyne on mandolin and fiddler Oona Grady (Finger Lakes, NY/Ireland), who perform regularly as Celtic influenced duo Drank The Gold. Oona and James have teamed up with guitarist Matt Griffin (Blue Ranger and Let’s Be Leonard), banjo player Scott Hopkins (The McKrells, The Upstate Bluegrass Band, and Wernick Method instructor), and upright bassist Dylan Perrillo (Dylan Perrillo Orchestra and The Hot Club of Saratoga) to create an authentic and fresh take on American roots music.
The Millstone Rounders were born in 2017 at a recording session with Chris Carey (Millstone Studios), when gathered around a single microphone, James exclaimed, “Hey, we’re The Millstone Rounders!”
The Millstone Rounders sing and play a unique blend of Americana, incorporating country, gospel, blues, trans-Atlantic fiddle breakdowns, and proto rock & roll; creating a sound that is both timelessly classic and thoroughly contemporary. They perform on acoustic instruments around a single microphone, capturing a natural sound that is both sonically compelling and visually interesting.
The sound that The Millstone Rounders seek to create harkens back to a not-so-distant musical past where musicians played acoustically, standing close to one another balancing their voices and instruments using their ears and technique. Until the widespread use of amplification, this would have been the norm everywhere. Prior to the advent of the recording industry, the idea of musical genres was much less of a thing than it is today. When groups of performers from different regions got together it was truly an event. Because music wasn’t widely disseminated through recordings or the internet, folks from divergent backgrounds would bring together songs and tunes from a wide variety of traditions. Perhaps a gospel hymn might be followed by an old English ballad, a jug band breakdown, an Irish pub song, some country blues, and then a rollicking Scottish fiddle tune.
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