Furtado brings eclectic bag of tricks to Opera House
Published: Thursday, March 8, 2007 9:52 PM CST
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Show at 10 p.m. on Saturday
By Katie Klingsporn
To watch Tony Furtado up close is to have your mind boggled. His fingers are like deft little creatures, running up and down the strings, bending and picking with what seems like singular intentions. His play a sizzling steel guitar. He sings, he writes instrumentals, he'll bust out everything from progressive bluegrass to blues and Celtic, and he's not afraid to cover pop rock.
Furtado is a local favorite in Telluride; he's played many a Bluegrass Festival and he's appeared on stages all over town. However, two years ago the relentless touring musician decided to take a break, and settled in Portland, Ore., to make an album.
The break is over. The Tony Furtado Band will return to the Sheridan Opera House on Saturday with opening act Scraptomatic. And Furtado will be bringing with him a suitcase of new material from his recently-released “Thirteen.”
“I'll play a good deal of stuff from ‘Thirteen,'” Furtado said. “But I'll still play a lot of banjo in the show, I still like to do older songs, I like to get the crowd dancing.”
Furtado will be backed by a three-man band of musicians he hooked up with in Portland; Drew Shoals on drums, Damian Erskine on bass and Al Toribio on guitar.
Furtado rounds it out on vocals and a couple different stringed instruments, and the result is a complimentary foursome that riffs well off one another.
“I think it's my strongest setting now, with this band,” Furtado said. “It's definitely a lot of fun.”
As a banjo virtuoso, Furtado is well-known for his envelope-pushing, progressive bluegrass stylings. His picking is rapid-fire quick, sharp and clear, and puts him in the school of Béla Fleck and David Grisman.
But Furtado has never been content to settle into one genre, and his interest often spills over and runs down new paths. This is evident on “Thirteen,” on which Furtado writes, sings and dips into a pot of solemn, nostalgic and reflective material.
The album is his thirteenth, but the title also comes from the track “Thirteen,” which is about the Sago mine disaster that trapped 13 men in January of 2006. Of the 13, one survived.
The title also represents one of many allusions to the theme of good luck/bad luck/no luck that Furtado stumbled across everywhere across the album. It wasn't a conscious thing, Furtado said, but in the end, there was definitely a recurrence.
The album consists of ten Furtado originals and three covers, and songs feature a whole spectrum of instruments played by an all-star cast of producers like Jim Kickinson (Ry Cooder), Dusty Wakeman (Lucinda Williams and Dwight Yoakam) and Craig Schumacher (Iron & Wine).
“Thirteen” certainly sounds different than the string-heavy, bluegrassy “Tony Furtado Band,” or the bluesier “Roll My Blues Away,” but eclectic is Furtado's hallmark.
As a young banjo player, Furtado found himself playing the genre of music most represented by the instrument - bluegrass. But all along, he was listening to Tom Petty and Jackson Brown, he was watching MTV and he was delving into his parents collection of classic rock records.
“I think I was kind of doomed to be a multi-genre player from the start,” he said. If he relegated himself to one genre alone, he said, he would likely end up frustrated or bored.
“I just like to take my influences and play music,” he said.
Furtado became a banjo player in sixth grade after doing a report on the instrument, making a rough banjo out of household items and studying the history of it. Before long, he dove headlong into banjo playing, practicing for hours each day. By 19, he has won a pair of National Bluegrass Banjo Championships and was deemed a prodigy.
But being as he is, Furtado doesn't like to limit himself to one thing, and he also plays steel guitar and sings.
Opening for the Tony Furtado Band is a duo that Furtado said should not be missed.
Scraptomatic consists of Mike Mattison (lead singer of the Derek Trucks Band) on vocals and Paul Olson.
These guys, who both hail from the twin cities in Minnesota, have been playing together since the mid-'90s. After gaining recognition in the midwest, they transplanted to Brooklyn and began to haunt all the New York venues. Now they are touring the country to promote their new album “Alligator Love Cry.”
“It's just a duo, but it supposed to be just slammin',” Furtado said.
Tickets for this seats-out show are $20 and available at the Opera House Box Office, Wizard Entertainment, www.tellurideticket.com or by calling 728-6363.
