Out of towners who came to the 2013 Festival of the Bluegrass at the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington, Ky., may not have been familiar with Bluegrass Collective, but you can be sure those who saw the quintet’s performance won’t be forgetting the band anytime soon.
Bluegrass Collective has been a local institution for years in and around Lexington, first starting out as the jam band Green Genes before going straight bluegrass. The quintet is composed of frontman and mandolin player Danny Williams, bassist Roddy Puckett, fiddler Don Rogers, guitarist Dove Gevedon, and Brandon Bowlds on banjo.
Playing together for so many years has given the talented musicians a virtual audio sixth sense on stage, anticipating each others’ next course with simple note intonations. As long time fans of the Grateful Dead, Bluegrass Collective brings a hefty dose of improvisation to the stage as each member shows off their musical chops.
Instead of opting for bluegrass standards the audience knows by heart, the setlist from this performance is punctuated with rollicking instrumentals and deep cuts from the catalogs of familiar artists, such as Bill Monroe’s “Letter from My Darling” and John Hartford’s “Let Him Go Mama” and even George Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass.”
