It's all about being at the same place at the same time for one local band.
The Cottonweeds, a combination of several well-known Prince George musicians, will come together to perform Friday, Sept. 14 and Saturday, Sept. 15 at Art Space.
This group of musicians find themselves working on the same projects, year in and year out and decided to make it official.
"When Raghu and I started to play together he was playing these local gigs," said Jeremy Stewart. "He got the idea that he wanted to learn a whole bunch of Americana folk songs out of Alan Lomax's book The Folk Songs of North America - it's a huge doorstop kind of book. So we just thought this would be the thing and Raghu thought he wanted to learn to play the banjo and I wanted to learn to do harmony singing and we both wanted to learn all these songs."
So they went through the book and arranged the songs, because in the book it's the melodies and the lyrics, but not the chords, Stewart added.
"It was a cool little project to arrange the songs ourselves and come up with how the vocal harmonies should be, too," said Stewart. "So we did that and it was so much fun and it was so interesting. We started doing some shows at Art Space and they were very well received and then we played a bunch of festivals on tour and recorded some CDs. Everywhere we went people seemed to really like it -- and my mom loved it and she is so demanding. So if my mom likes it that pretty much proves it's good!"
The rest of the band includes Lloyd Larson, best known for his work in the band The Pucks, who plays upright bass and anything else with strings, Peter Stevenson, who played keyboards and sax, Case Lettinga plays euphonium, a brass instrument, and Justin Arding plays drums while Jim Sayle fiddles and is best known as a member of the Celtic band Out of Alba.
"The audience can expect a whole lot of music as we're going to play at least three sets during the show," Stewart said. "Please make an evening of it and sit down and listen to the first two sets and for the third one we're going to bust out our favourite big dances and polkas. We've also got a bunch of big danceable arrangements of African American spirituals that we'll be doing in that set and some gypsy music. It's really going to be a show for everyone."
The Cottonweeds concerts start at 8 p.m., doors 7:30. Tickets are $15 at the door or in advance at Books & Co.
