See the Future! Sampler Concert at Caffe Lena - 01/20/2012

Featuring Jan Bell & the Maybelles and Sheesham & Lotus

Tonight's See the Future! Sampler pairs two bands from beyond our borders who fell in love with American roots music and traveled to the land of it's birth to play for delighted audiences. The daughter of a Yorkshire coal miner, Jan Bell now resides in Brooklyn and leads the Maybelles (Maybelle Megan Palmer and May-Bro Tim Luntzel, bassist for Roseanne Cash) in up-tempo, soulful country. Their Celtic-tinged, Appalachian influenced repertoire features fabulous harmonies, marvelously balanced instruments, contemporary lyrics and sassy attitude. They play Joe's Pub, The Woody Guthrie Archives, The Highline Ballroom and Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival. Village Voice picked them for their Top Ten Folk Albums, Now Toronto gave them 4 out of 4 stars, and they won an Independent Music Award for Alt. Country Album of the year. Canadian duo Sheesham and Lotus love to play fiddle tunes, hokum blues songs and ragtime string music. "The sounds of the south are near and dear to our hearts," says Lotus, "from the old fiddlers on the Lomax collections to the Memphis jug-bands and the Mississippi Sheiks and Narmour and Smith...there is so much to hear and learn." They play fiddle and banjo respectively, with an additional array of home-made curiosities of noise-makery. Sheesham makes gourd banjos and fiddles, and Lotus plays an invention called the contra-bass harmoniphoneum, which is a self-contained bass-harmonica and euphonium horn which can be used while plucking a banjo (!).