Darrell Scott, J2B2, Karan Casey, and more

For more than 30 years, Mountain Stage has been the home of live music on public radio. Produced by West Virginia Public Broadcasting and distributed by NPR Music, each two hour episode of Mountain Stage can be heard every week on more than 240 stations across America, and around the world via NPR Music and www.mountainstage.org. Recorded in front of a live audience, Mountain Stage features performances from seasoned legends and emerging stars from genres across the board.

Mountain Stage

Join NPR and WVPB's Mountain Stage for a live performance taping to later air on over 240 public radio stations.

Culture Center Theater

Darrell Scott

J2B2

Karan Casey

Malcolm Holcombe

Jonathan Wilson

Tickets for this show are no longer available online. Remaining tickets may be available at Taylor Books in Downtown Charleston, West Virginia or at the door. Doors to the lobby of the Culture Center Theater open at 5pm day of show. Doors to the Theater open at 6:30pm.

<h1><a href="https://www.darrellscott.com/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Darrell Scott</a></h1>

Multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter Darrell Scott mines and cultivates the everyday moment, taking the rote, menial, mundane, and allowing it to be surreal, ever poignant, and candidly honest, lilting, blooming, and resonating. The words he fosters allow us to make sense of the world, what is at stake here, and our place in it. And ultimately, Darrell knows the sole truth of life is that love is all that matters, that we don’t always get it right, but that’s the instinctive and requisite circuitous allure of things, why we forever chase it, and why it is held sacred.
Darrell Scott comes from a musical family with a father who had him smitten with guitars by the age of 4, alongside a brother who played Jerry Reed style as well. From there, things only ramped up with literature and poetry endeavors while a student at Tufts University, along with playing his way through life. This would never change. 
After recently touring with Robert Plant and the Zac Brown Band (2 years with each), and producing albums for Malcolm Holcomb and Guy
Clark and being named “songwriter of the year” for both ASCAP and NSAI, these days find him roaming his Tennessee wilderness acreage hiking along the small river, creating delicious meals with food raised on his property and playing music. He often leads songwriting workshops to help people tell their own truths with their stories, and is as busy as always writing, producing, performing, and just plain fully immersing himself in life.

J2B2 is an all-star bluegrass supergroup featuring four legendary, award-winning musicians – John Jorgenson on acoustic guitar, mandolin and vocals; Herb Pedersen on banjo, acoustic guitar and vocals; Mark Fain on bass; and Patrick Sauber on acoustic guitar and vocals – delivering bluegrass like no one has ever heard it before. The band’s undeniable live shows have received stellar reviews and have the bluegrass world buzzing. The four combine forces to form a spot-on union of impeccable musicianship, incomparable songwriting, incredible harmony vocals (a fresh twist combining bluegrass with elements of West Coast folk rock) and seasoned showmanship. This is the “high lonesome sound” of American roots music at its finest.
Jorgenson and Pedersen are founders (with Chris Hillman) of the formative country rock group Desert Rose Band. After working as a freelance musician in Southern California, Jorgenson met Hillman and soon formed the Desert Rose Band. In 1990, Jorgenson went on to found the Hellecasters and toured with Elton John’s band for six years. Artists ranging from Barbra Streisand to Bonnie Raitt to Earl Scruggs have sought out Jorgenson’s guitar work. Jorgenson portrayed Django Reinhardt in the Hollywood feature film Head in the Clouds. In 2008, Jorgenson won a Grammy for Best Country Instrumental with Brad Paisley and was nominated for Best Bluegrass Album with Earl Scruggs.
Herb Pedersen was a member of legendary bluegrass band The Dillards as well as bluegrass super-group Old and In the Way. A sought-after singer and musician, he has worked with such music legends as Chris Hillman, Earl Scruggs, Gram Parsons, Emmylou Harris, Tony Rice, Dan Fogelberg, Stephen Stills, Linda Ronstadt, Kris Kristofferson, John Prine, Jackson Browne and John Denver.
Mark Fain toured and recorded as bass player for Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder for 13 years. He’s toured and recorded with the Dixie Chicks, Alan Jackson, Travis Tritt, Dwight Yoakam, Allison Krauss and Dolly Parton, as well as producing many artists in jazz, country, bluegrass and gospel genres.
Patrick Sauber is a multi-instrumentalist who has quickly made a name for himself in the world of bluegrass and old time music. Equally adept on guitar, mandolin and banjo, Sauber has toured with Peter Rowan and Laurie Lewis and appeared on screen in “The Mighty Wind.”
J2B2’s debut album, From The Crow’s Nest, was recorded in Sheryl Crow’s home barn studio in Nashville, Tennessee. The album was recently released as part of a John Jorgenson limited edition, 3-CD box set called DIVERTUOSO (Cleopatra Records), which has received vast critical acclaim. DIVERTUOSO includes three new distinct albums by Jorgenson: J2B2 – From The Crow’s Nest; John Jorgenson Quintet – Returning (gypsy jazz); and John Jorgenson – Gifts From The Flood(instrumental electric guitar).
In addition to recording their first album as a group, J2B2 has played several major tour dates over the course of the past two and a half years, including tours of Norway and the UK, performances at the annual RockyGrass Festival in Lyons, Colorado; the Joe Val Festival in Framingham, Massachusetts; and headlining the Guitar Town Festival in Copper Mountain, Colorado, three years in a row. J2B2 made its Grand Ole Opry debut in October 2013 and has returned several times to the Opry since.
J2B2 has created quite a buzz, and The International Bluegrass Music Association is among the many giving the newly formed band’s live performance high marks. In a review, the IBMA noted, “There was warmth, and storytelling, and lots of laughter as this fresh band of legends made their debut…but with their expertise combined, you would think they had been playing in this configuration for years.”

<h1><a href="http://karancasey.com" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Karan Casey</a></h1>

Karan Casey has long been recognized as one of the most innovative, provocative and imitated voices in Irish traditional and folk music. Singing songs charged with a sense of social responsibility in a career spanning over 25 years, Karan has released 7 solo albums as well as an album for children, a duet album with John Doyle and numerous contributions to other artists' projects. She has toured extensively throughout North America, Europe and Japan, performing with her own band as well as collaborating with such diverse musicians as James Taylor, Bela Fleck, Boston Pops Orchestra, Liam Clancy, Maura O’Connell, The Chieftains, The Dubliners, Peggy Seeger, Karen Matheson, Mick Flannery, Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, Tim O’Brien, Solas and Lúnasa. 
In 2017 Karan was Traditional Artist in Residence at University College Cork, toured the UK with the Transatlantic Sessions, performed at Glasgow’s Celtic Connections, and toured in the US both with her own band and with Lúnasa, including a performance at New York’s Carnegie Hall. In 2018 Karan helped to found FairPlé which is an organization aimed at achieving fairness and gender balance for female performers in Irish traditional and folk musics. 
Karan recently released her new album Hieroglyphs That Tell the Tale on the Vertical Records Label. Produced by renowned Scottish producer and Bafta-nominated composer Donald Shaw, the album also features Karan’s long-time musical collaborators Sean Óg Graham &amp; Niamh Dunne (Beoga), Kate Ellis (The Crash Ensemble) and Niall Vallely (Buille). Drawing inspiration from contemporary folk writers Janis Ian, Eliza Gilkyson, Mick Flannery and Bob Dylan, the album displays Casey’s impressive talent as a song writer. She is joined on vocals by some of the women singers she’s long-admired, including Karen Matheson, Niamh Dunne, Pauline Scanlon, Maura O'Connell and Aoife O Donovan.

<h1><a href="http://www.malcolmholcombe.com" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Malcolm Holcombe</a></h1>

On the North Carolina side of the Southern Appalachians, the land still retains its secrets.It’s a place of paradoxes, where poverty is handed down from one hardscrabble generation to the next in towns passed over by the New South progress that gives a city like Asheville its bourgeois charm. It’s a resilient pocket of wilderness where a small band of Cherokee once disappeared into the misty hollers to wait out the white man’s ire, back in the deep woods where old growth timber blocks out the sunlight and compass needles sometimes spin crazily and the trappings of civilization give way to things beyond human understanding.On the cusp of releasing his 13th studio album — “Come Hell or High Water,” out XXX on Singular Recordings — singer-songwriter Malcolm Holcombe is a both a part of and apart from those Blue Ridge hills, a Southern folk golem brought to life by the deeper mysteries that give these hills so much of their folklore.His songs belong in the same Western North Carolina echelon of mysteries like the Brown Mountain Lights or the ghostly apparitions along Helen’s Bridge or the phantom choir of Roan Mountain — things that surpass conventional explanation but summon forth a combination of awe and primal longing, an ache to understand the great questions of the human condition. Malcolm may not have the answers to those questions, but his songs are drawn from the same waters that begin as a trickle in the deep woods: wild, untamed, filled with the whispers and roars of all the mysteries and wonders those hills contain. And like the region’s otherworldly manifestations, they come from a place that transcends easy understanding, even by their creator.“I don’t know, man; people ask me that stuff, and I can’t really tell you where it comes from,” Holcombe says. “I’m not really good at pulling a Houdini and getting the pencil to levitate. Getting my pencil to levitate is impossible; it’s not in my realm of being. Like my friend Eddie from up here in Swannanoa says, ‘If you like to get corn, you got to get out the hoe.’”For “Come Hell or High Water,” he wields that hoe with a deft set of hands, gnarled fingers smelling of tobacco and fresh dirt and the resin from thousands of worn-out guitar strings. It’s his third record in as many years, but it’s a pointless endeavor to talk to him about his creative process, because Malcolm isn’t the sort of songwriter to poke those dark recesses of the mind to figure out where the words that bubble up there come from.“It’s like a friend of mine said years ago — everything’s a miracle or nothing’s a miracle,” he says. “It’s just miraculous to be in this situation with some wonderful folks that I’ve been working with over the years, and to be supported by my wife and friends and fans.”Two hundred years ago, early settlers might have visited a man like Malcolm in a cave cut into the side of a North Carolina mountain, hauling tobacco or hides through the Southern Appalachian woods to receive words of wisdom. Even with the contemporary trappings of internet songwriting and email and digital studio wizardry at his disposal, he’s not that far removed from that wild-eyed hermit who speaks in riddles and metaphors and delivers prophecies and portents of troubled times. If there's one thing you can depend on Holcombe to deliver, it's honesty — often searing, often painful, always with the sort of deft turn of phrase that has made ardent admirers out of his contemporaries.“Malcolm Holcombe is an artist of deep mystery and high art; he is who I listen to, and have for over 20 years,” says Darrell Scott, one of Nashville’s premier sessions instrumentalists and a nationally respected singer-songwriter. “All the goods that I value in songs and artistry are in Malcolm.”

<h1><a href="https://www.songsofjonathanwilson.com/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Jonathan Wilson</a></h1>

Critically acclaimed artist, producer and musician Jonathan Wilson has had a busy few years, producing records for Father John Misty, Conor Oberst, Karen Elson, and Dawes. He also spent much of 2017 and 2018 on the road supporting his most recent album Rare Birds as well as performing alongside Roger Waters as vocalist/lead guitarist during the epic, worldwide Us + Them tour. Rare Birds is Wilson’s third solo album and featured special guest contributions from Lana Del Rey, Father John Misty and Lucius and Brian Eno collaborator Laraaji. Born and raised in North Carolina, Wilson spend years in Los Angeles, where his did much of his work. When he took a break from the road late last year, he packed up his studio and went Nashville with 20 new songs in tow. He recruited revered musicians that included Mark O’Connor, Kenny Vaughan, Jim Hoke, Dennis Crouch, Russ Pahl, Pat Sansone, and Jon Radford to record the new material. The result is an album unlike anything Wilson has recorded before, inspired by the region he spent his formative years immersed in. Look for the new music in 2020.
Sept. 18, 2019- Critically-acclaimed artist, multi-instrumentalist and producer (Father John Misty, Laura Marling, Dawes) Jonathan Wilson returns with the first new music since his sprawling 2018 opus Rare Birds. Today he unveils “So Alive” and double A-side “Skinny Legs” which were recorded earlier this year in Nashville, TN. Listen to “So Alive” HERE.
“’So Alive’ is a rumination on a love that arrived perfectly in tune and on time, a reunion really, as the song says that is both familiar and ‘from the unreal” Wilson says. “I sing that there are angels still among us, I believe that wholeheartedly…It was one of the first things we cut with Mark O’Connor, Dennis Crouch, and the rest of the band. We cut it all live at Cowboy Jack Clement’s Sound Emporium Studio, nothing is overdubbed on the track.”
Last week, Wilson made his debut at the annual AmericanaFest in Nashville with a headlining performance opening night at City Winery where he debuted “So Alive” and other tracks from his forthcoming album, to be released in 2020 on BMG. For this new LP, Wilson went back to his roots and the music he fell in love with while growing up in North Carolina. Joined on stage by the legendary musicians that include O’Connor (fiddle/guitar) and Crouch (upright bass) among his eight piece band, Wilson showcased his trademark sonic density and complexity paying homage to Country, Bluegrass &amp; Americana. This new body of work has recaptured Wilson’s innate love of American music and brings it all home after years of endless touring and life spent on the road, most recently as guitarist and singer with Roger Waters.

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