NORA BROWN & HANNAH READ

Nora Brown plays old-time traditional music with a particular interest in eastern Kentucky and Tennessee banjo playing. Along with the banjo she also sings traditional unaccompanied ballads from southeast Appalachia and beyond. Now 15, she has already been playing Brooklyn stages and the festival circuit for years and continues to travel and learn from old masters. She has taken regular trips to eastern Kentucky studying under the late master banjo player and former coal miner Lee Sexton and master banjo player and historian George Gibson.

Her second album, Sidetrack My Engine, was just released by Jalopy Records

Hannah Read’s music straddles both sides of the Atlantic. She is a versatile collaborator and forges her own singular musical landscape that draws from American and Scottish folk traditions as well as from contemporary indie-pop and rock. Equally at home improvising on fiddle, playing Appalachian old-time music or delivering finely wrought original songs, she is an artist who can’t be pinned down to one continent, one city, one project, one mode of expression.

As a songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and bandleader, Hannah released her full-length debut Way Out I’ll Wander on Hudson Records in 2018. The album’s “nine gorgeous originals” (The Guardian) unfurl around Hannah’s sterling vocal and deft instrumental work on fiddle and guitar, supported by guest musicians including Jefferson Hamer, Jeff Picker, Sarah Jarosz, and album producer Charlie Van Kirk. The songs tell stories of a life lived in transit, conjuring its most vivid characters and images from Hannah’s youth in Edinburgh and on the Isle of Eigg, a remote island off the western coast of Scotland.