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Laurie Lewis tour dates 2024

Laurie Lewis is currently touring across 1 country and has 1 upcoming concert.

The final concert of the tour will be at Freight & Salvage in Berkeley.

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Freight & Salvage

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HopMonk Tavern - Novato

Strings N Things Music Festival

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The Banks Are Covered In Blue

Freight '98

And Laurie Lewis

Skippin' and Flyin'

The Hazel and Alice Sessions

LIVE Laurie Lewis & The Right Hands

One Evening in May Laurie Lewis, Tom Rozum and Nina Gerber

Laurie & Kathy Sing the Songs of Vern & Ray

Hills To Holler LIVE! Laurie Lewis, Linda Tillery, Barbara Higbie

Jubilee Tom Rozum

Winter's Grace

Steam and Steel

Kristin's Story

Laurie Lewis Berkeley, California

For fiddler, guitarist, singer, and songwriter Laurie Lewis, the traditions of bluegrass and folk aren’t so much tools in her hands, but burning sources of inspiration that have driven her through a 30+ year career at the forefront of American roots music. A pioneering woman in bluegrass, Laurie has paved the way for many, always guided by her own love of traditional music. ...   more

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Laurie Lewis

Latest setlist, laurie lewis on september 30, 2023.

Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, California

Note: Banjo Stage

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ConcertFix is thrilled to shine a spotlight on the legendary Laurie Lewis, a renowned bluegrass musician, songwriter, and producer. With a career spanning over three decades, Lewis has rightfully earned her place as one of the most respected figures in contemporary bluegrass music. Her extraordinary talent as a fiddler and her emotive, crystal-clear vocals have captivated audiences worldwide. Lewis has released over a dozen albums, many of which have been critically acclaimed, showcasing her deep understanding of the bluegrass tradition and her ability to innovatively expand its boundaries. Beyond her solo career, her collaborative projects have also garnered attention, further cementing her status as an influential figure in the music industry. Laurie Lewis's dedication to her craft and her unwavering passion for bluegrass music make her a true gem in the music world. With ConcertFix, keep track of her upcoming performances and experience the magic of her live concerts.

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Laurie Lewis

The name Laurie Lewis is one of the most recognizable in bluegrass today. Singer/ songwriter/ fiddler/ bandleader/ educator – Lewis understands the multi-faceted role that artists specializing in tradition-based music must play to ensure that bluegrass passes to new generations. Sam Bush warns against calling Lewis influential merely because she is a female fiddler from the West Coast. He says, “I just think of her as an artist: a great singer, terrific fiddle player, a fine songwriter, and one very good band leader.” A San Francisco native, Lewis was drawn to the bluegrass music that was part of the city’s folk scene in the mid- to late-1960s and she started to develop a reputation for her fiddle playing while still in her teens. Her decision to study the vocal style of Ralph Stanley brought her more attention, establishing Lewis in the growing newgrass camp. Lewis remains a favorite on the roots music concert circuit, adding master classes and workshops to her schedule when she can. She is lead instructor and program coordinator for Bluegrass at the Beach, a week-long bluegrass instructional camp on the Oregon coast. A West Coaster, protecting the environment and preserving nature for generations to come has also become an important issue for Lewis to champion.

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Poetic invocations of living nature . . . some of the most moving I’ve heard.

—Barbara Kingsolver

For nearly four decades, California bluegrass fiddler Laurie Lewis has gathered fans and honors for her powerful, emotive voice and her versatile, dynamic songwriting. She is a sought-after producer and an equally skilled teacher and mentor. And she is an inspiration and a groundbreaker—across genres, across geography, and across gender barriers.

Lewis has shown us how a woman can blend into any part of the classic bluegrass singing trio, and she has shown us how a great voice could move fluidly between bluegrass and other genres. She has shown us how a female fiddler could emulate the strength and grit of the early bluegrass musicians. She has shown how a Californian can appeal to traditional bluegrass audiences and win acclaim in Americana and folk music.

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Laurie Lewis Releases Title Track of Forthcoming Album - TREES

Article contributed by dreamspider pu… | published on saturday, april 27, 2024.

With five decades of music-making to her credit, multi-GRAMMY nominee Laurie Lewis has emerged as both a successor and contemporary of the many greats in bluegrass, old-time, and folk music. Unafraid to venture beyond established boundaries, she has carved out her place as a uniquely singular vocalist, songwriter, instrumentalist, and frontwoman in genres revered for their adherence to tradition, authenticity, and the canon of the forebearers. She’s won IBMA Awards, sung and recorded with Linda Ronstadt, set poems by Wendell Berry to music—at his request. She’s influenced and inspired folks like guitarist phenom Molly Tuttle—one example of an entire generation of pickers and singers who call her a mentor. Ultimately, Lewis occupies a unique, superlative niche in American roots music that is all her own.

Lewis' 24th album, TREES, presents a profound and multifaceted perspective with life, loss, and grief.  While deeply ruminative, this set includes danceable music that drips with community and never feels burdened by its subject matter or apparent solitude. These songs—seven originals and a handful of covers—aren’t too concerned with genre, especially given that bluegrass and old-time tend to spout from Lewis like a bubbling mountain spring, in so many distinct manifestations. Self-produced, TREES will be released on Lewis’ own Spruce and Maple Music label on May 31.

Lewis has chosen today, Arbor Day, to release the title track from her upcoming album. The a cappella quartet, “ Trees ” is an imagined message from our fellow inhabitants of this planet, whose sense of time is measured in decades rather than seconds. Lewis says, “The stubbornness and indomitable striving of these providers of the oxygen we breathe give me hope for the future of life on Earth.”

Would you try to turn this whole world into dust? Don’t you know you cannot wrest the land from us? For we are patient, we are old And though we fall, our roots will grow

Folk Alley calls TREES a “stunning new album” and premiered the “Trees” music video. Henry Carrigan writes, “‘Trees’ reminds us just how deeply planted we are in the natural world, and it encourages us to celebrate the moments of joy and to be aware of the enduring beauty that surrounds us in nature and that will be here long after we’re gone.”

As on many of her past recordings, Lewis finds her music-making rooted in the natural world. As an avid walker, she is both an urban explorer and a wilderness wanderer—plus a self-taught naturalist and conservation activist. Her skillset in songwriting and recording is frequently outward-looking, text-painting to evoke the landscapes she adores and to interpret their voices to us. On TREES, Lewis looks inward instead, while utilizing all of the literary and naturalist skills at her disposal to observe and process seasonal, organic, inevitable life changes.

TREES expresses the emotional turmoil in Lewis’ life at the time of its making. On the upside, there is the unbridled joy of a walk in the mountains, where she spent many a happy day while unable to play music communally during the COVID pandemic. The flip side of that period—and its long wake—includes a six-month period of grappling with the loss of her singing voice, and most notably, the landmark of creating a recording without her musical and life partner, Tom Rozum. The pair met and began making music together in 1986 and for every album since 1989’s Love Chooses You they’ve been credited alongside each other, often in duet. In recent years, Rozum developed Parkinson’s Disease and the illness’s progression has left him unable to play mandolin or guitar, or to tour with Lewis, record, and perform—as they have done, full time, for decades.

Granted, picking up the album will immediately reveal Rozum is still, in fact, credited alongside Lewis, singing harmony vocals and drawing the cover artwork for TREES. The vacuum left by Rozum as a creative partner on these recordings is most perceptible not musically, but in Lewis’ reckoning with that vacuum: naming, processing, and contemplating the losses, myriad and varied, when a lifelong musical partner is forced to step aside. With these intentions and her trademark deliberation, Lewis has framed TREES as a long-play journey, a vinyl trek, inviting each of us to put the needle to the record and join her as she traverses the Sierra Nevada or rafts the Tuolumne River, singing.

Her band has chameleonic quality, varying a bit across the entire sequence. It includes Lewis on guitar and lead vocals throughout (along with fiddle on one track), Hasee Ciaccio on bass, Brandon Godman on fiddle, Patrick Sauber on banjo, and George Guthrie on guitar and banjo. Special guests on the album include Andrew Marlin on mandolin, Sam Reider on accordion, and Nina Gerber on guitar.

“ Long Gone ” (written by Bill Morrissey) was the first single released and its video was premiered by the Bluegrass Situation and featured in Cowgirl Magazine. That song, along with album opener, “Just a Little Ways Down the Road” (an original, inspired by writings of ecological thinker and environmental advocate John Muir, featuring Marlin on mandolin), feel like classic Laurie Lewis, forward-leaning, categorical bluegrass ready for the radio.

A stand-out track from TREES, among a veritable forest of stellar company, is “Enough,” which concerns California wildfires and the ever-accelerating climate crisis. The song features Guthrie's honeyed, low-tuned banjo and Reider's cinematic accordion, as well as Guthrie, Ciaccio, and Rozum harmonizing with Lewis, who sings, “I’ve had enough fire, I’ve had enough rain; Lord, I’m so tired of all this pain.”

“Why’d You Have to Break My Heart” is reminiscent of lyrics by Lewis’ friend, mentor, and collaborator Alice Gerrard—timeless, storied, and burnished. Written on the occasion of John Prine’s death, it grapples with grief as a facet of the everyday, instead of an outlier or aberration, utilizing a question Prine asked her, directly—years prior to his loss. More minimal musically—with Lewis on guitar and lead vocals accompanied by Guthrie on lead guitar—the song speaks volumes.

“The Banks are Covered in Blue'' is a collaboration with Godman, and Lewis says “Brandon wrote this lovely waltz, and posted it on a social media platform as part of the ‘Quarantune Challenge,’ wherein he had to produce a tune every day for a month during the quarantine. I took a listen, wrote the lyrics, and posted them in the comments. And our first co-write was done!” Premiered by Bluegrass Today, the song is available now exclusively at Bandcamp .

The nostalgic and uplifting original tune, “Texas Wind,” recalls an incredible rainstorm of the past, while reflecting on present circumstances, and was dubbed a "country love song" by J. Poet of the East Bay Express. Lewis further mixes in a handful of covers on TREES including the upbeat tunes “Quaking Aspen” (featuring Lewis on fiddle, written by Mark Simos), “Hound Dog Blues” (Tom T. Hall), “Down on the Levee” (John Hartford), and “The Day is Mine” (Kate MacLeod).

The album’s final tune, “Rock the Pain Away,” another highlight of the record, listens like a lullaby, with Lewis’ signature intimacy underscored by her tender, emotional vocal, mixed so close to listeners’ ears it feels like you’re in the booth with her. Here, Lewis’ perspective feels most like a mother tree, an old-growth survivor of wildfires, lightning, and droughts, inviting us to rest beneath her boughs and in the crook of her roots. Gerber joins the band on this gentle song on lead on guitar, while Laurie sings:

Let me hold you for awhile Enfold you in my arms like a child And if you could let go And if you would let me, you know, I would try to rock the pain away

TREES is not simply a metaphor or parable; it’s not merely an introspective, emotional inventory; it’s not a performative challenge to the powers and systems that be—powers and systems that leave us alone to encounter, interpret, and reckon with such grief and loss. This LP is all of these things together, at the same time, held in place by a remarkable linchpin and a gorgeous, maternal tree under which all of us can learn, grow, and flourish. Each of us on this beautiful, complicated Earth should count ourselves lucky to encounter TREES as stately and as nurturing as Laurie Lewis.

For more information and to stay up to date on new from Laurie Lewis, please visit: www.laurielewis.com , www.facebook.com/laurielewismusic , and www.instagram.com/laurielewismusic .

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• March 30, 2022

Get to know Laurie Lewis

CSMA welcomed GRAMMY award-winning fiddler, guitarist, singer and songwriter Laurie Lewis to a free in-person concert at Tateuchi Hall on Saturday, April 23, 2022 at 7:30pm. She and her band performed bluegrass and folk music featuring Laurie’s original compositions and some classic favorites.

We spoke with Laurie Lewis to learn more about her and what the audience can expect from her performance in Tateuchi Hall.

Laurie Lewis

Tell us a little about yourself. how did you begin playing and performing music.

Although I was not a child prodigy, I loved to sing and have been a singer all my life. I began playing violin at age 12, then guitar at 14, but it wasn’t until I heard Doc Watson, Jean Ritchie, the Greenbrier Boys, Mississippi John Hurt and others at the Berkeley Folk Festival that I discovered the music that spoke to me and sparked me. But it took me almost 20 years to commit to becoming a professional who could actually make a living as a musician.

Did you have access to music education in school?

Yes, I did. I attended Berkeley, California public schools which in the 1960s had excellent orchestra programs.

Where does your musical inspiration stem from?

My dad played flute and the music we were exposed to growing up at home was almost exclusively classical. Bluegrass was definitely NOT a part of my upbringing, but as soon as I heard it, the depiction of the natural world in the lyrics and the plain-spoken emotions it evoked, grabbed me. These qualities became and continue to be the template and foundation for my music.

What advice do you have for aspiring musicians?

These days, it is essential to have a backup plan. We have seen the music community decimated by the pandemic and live shows are hard to come by. This could happen again at any time. Even in non-COVID times, musicians’ opportunities to make money by selling their own music have been seriously eroded by the concept that music should be free to everyone and by streaming services. It takes 5000 streams to put as much money in a musician’s pocket as the sale of one CD.

Music is so important to the well-being of our society, but it isn’t valued monetarily as such—especially in the folk/bluegrass genres. Although it isn’t impossible to “make it,” these days you must be extremely diligent and creative in your approach to becoming a professional musician. You have to wear many hats and run your art like a business. Be sure you have a safety net and a Plan B to be able to support yourself and your music starting out. Align yourself with others who can do the things you can’t or don’t want to do, like booking and promoting. Most importantly, love what you are doing or do something else.

Tell us about your band.

Brandon Godman grew up in Kentucky on a tobacco farm playing the fiddle. He has played with Doyle Lawson, Dale Ann Bradley, The Band Perry and many other prominent musicians. He moved to San Francisco in 2016 and has been playing with me ever since.

Sam Reider is known in jazz circles for his composing and stunning piano work. He has a deep regard and interest in old-time string bands, bluegrass music and plays accordion and sings with us in this version of the Right Hands. We met in June 2021 at a fiddle camp and immediately hit it off.

Mark Schatz is one of the premier bassists in the bluegrass and acoustic music scenes. He has played with such notables as Tony Rice, Bela Fleck, Claire Lynch, Tim O’Brien and others too numerous to mention. In addition to the upright bass, Mark is an exemplary clawhammer banjo player, dancer and is adept at hambone. He is a must-see entertainer, esteemed and loved by his peers and audience alike.

I have always surrounded myself with stellar performers, whether in my sizzling bluegrass band, as a duo with guitar goddess Nina Gerber or long-time musical soulmate Tom Rozum. I have toured with countless great musicians in a wide variety of ensembles.

What can the audience expect during the performance in Tateuchi Hall?

I love this roster of some of the finest musicians anywhere! They are sure to delight and thrill the audience with their adept instrumental and singing abilities. The core of our repertoire will feature my original compositions and material drawn from other contemporary writers, plus favorites from our traditional heroes including Bill Monroe (the Father of Bluegrass), the Stanley Brothers, Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard and more.

Anything else you would like to share with us?

Due to circumstances beyond our control, we have been on a forced hiatus for over a year. This pent-up energy and our desire to share the absolute joy of playing music together and performing again is sure to spill out from the stage to the audience. This is why we play: to share that infectious joy and the spirit of live music with our audiences. The opportunity to perform at Tateuchi Hall is a dream come true for us.

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And Laurie Lewis

Over the past four decades, Laurie Lewis’ name has become synonymous with the West Coast Bluegrass Scene. Her contributions to the genre through recordings, performances, songwriting, and producing have earned her two Grammy nominations, two International Bluegrass Music Association Female Vocalist of the Year awards, and deep-seated respect from her peers, inspiring multiple new generations of musicians in the process. On her new album, “and Laurie Lewis,” she presents a collection of duets, joined by ten West Coast musicians with whom she has shared touchstone moments throughout her career. With the album’s thirteen tracks Lewis demonstrates her commitment to making music as an act of community building, sharing what she describes as “intimate conversations” with musicians from her past, present, and future.

* You Are My Flower * Baby, That Would Sure Go Good * Rooster Crow * My Last Go-Round * Old Friend * Mama Cry * The Lonely One * Ain’t Nobody Got the Blues Like Me * Will the Circle Be Unbroken * The Pika Song * O The Wind and Rain * Troubled Times * This is our Home *

Laurie Lewis is a national treasure, one that keeps giving us fantastic music across the bluegrass and folk spheres of influence. On  And Laurie Lewis , what started as a simple project to record duets with some of her favorite musicians, the diva of West Coast bluegrass has emerged with a CD filled with great songs, wonderful singing, and glorious playing from the likes of Molly Tuttle, Tom Rozum, Mike Marshall, Tatiana Hargreaves, Craig Smith, Kathy Kallick, Todd Phillips, and more.

Much as she imagined it, this album brings the listener into closely held duets that feel truly intimate and shared. The opening cut “You Are My Flower” gives us Molly Tuttle channeling Clarence White’s timing and syncopation like he did on “I Am A Pilgrim,” coupled with her lovely, lighthearted vocals blending gorgeously with Laurie’s darker, time-worn alto voice. Once again, Tuttle shows the bluegrass world a new direction for the future of flatpicking guitar.

Tunes roll off this CD like High Sierra snowmelt filling rivers and streams with fresh hope. The Cindy Walker tune “Baby, That Would Sure Go Good” reveals Lewis’s love for Western Swing, with her on fiddle and the incomparable Todd Phillips on bass, complete with a bass solo that Eldon Shamblin would have loved playing behind. Similarly, she joins forces with former bandmate Barbara Higbee to render a Golden Age jazz blues tune, “Ain’t Nobody Got The Blues Like Me.”

One of the great features of this project is that Laurie made a point of including detailed notes on the instruments each musician played here, including a wonderful story on how Phillips acquired and modified the German double-bass that became his constant companion through so many great sessions. While not what purists would call bluegrass, Laurie’s music is timeless, effortless, and enchanting. And we’re all the richer for her releasing this project for the world to savor. ( www.laurielewis.com )DJM

The Deep Roots of Laurie Lewis Peghed Nation ~ Derk Richardson

For the better part of five decades—ever since she emerged as a leading voice in the San Francisco Bay Area’s New Grass scene—Laurie Lewis has cultivated collaborations and long-term creative friendships with an extraordinary assortment of musicians. Ten of those dearest companions—from all across the panorama of bluegrass, country, and traditional folk in which they thrive, and from several generations—join Lewis on her latest album, the humbly titled and Laurie Lewis (Spruce and Maple Music). It is must listening for all fans of “peghead” instruments.

But the timing of its release could hardly have been worse: The rapidly growing COVID-19 pandemic put an indefinite hold on Lewis’s plans to support the album with live concerts, both in the Bay Area and on tour. The itinerary page on her website is a cascade of “cancelled” notices on gigs across the U.S. and Europe, in clubs and concert halls, at festivals and music camps, and on Lewis’s popular river rafting trips.

While the possibility of hearing Lewis in person has been diminished, the music on and Laurie Lewis nonetheless provides 50 minutes of exquisite listening in the form of 13 intimate duets. Lewis pairs off with one friend or another on six original compositions, several traditional tunes (“You Are My Flower,” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?,” “O The Wind and Rain”), a bit of “golden age” jazz and Western swing, a Rosalie Sorrels classic, and a contemporary contribution from young songwriter Emily Mann.

Growing up in Berkeley, where she was born in 1950, Lewis experienced musical epiphanies hearing Doc Watson, Jean Ritchie, the Greenbriar Boys, Jesse Fuller, Reverend Gary Davis, Mississippi John Hurt, and others at the Berkeley Folk Festival. Already a classically trained violinist, she then took up guitar and bluegrass banjo. Another revelation was hearing bluegrass fiddlers onstage at Paul’s Saloon in San Francisco; Lewis realized she could do that too.

In the open-ended traditional and progressive Bay Area bluegrass scene, Lewis’s journey from neophyte to matriarch is marked by too many milestones to name, but here are some: playing with the pioneering Phantoms of the Opry, playing bass and singing in Dick Oxtot’s Golden Age Jazz Band, co-founding the all-female bluegrass band Good Ol’ Persons, organizing her own bands (Laurie Lewis and Grant Street, Laurie Lewis and the Right Hands), recording nearly 20 albums, racking up IBMA (International Bluegrass Music Association) awards, and working alongside Ralph Stanley, Linda Tillery, Alice Gerrard, Linda Ronstadt, Cris Williamson, Scott Nygaard, Dave Alvin, Tom Russell, Joan Baez, and many more.

and Laurie Lewis Lewis is a Peghead geek’s paradise of stringed instruments, played by Lewis and . . . They are annotated in detail in the liner notes, including a Carl. C. Holzapfel early 20th century 12-string guitar, a 1927 Vega Tubaphone banjo, Charles Sawtelle’s 1929 Martin 000-45, an 1889 Jerome Bonaparte Squier violin, a 1922 Gibson Master Model mandolin, a 1962 reissue Fender Stratocaster, and many more.

More important are the players and singers, with appearances by rising-star guitarist and singer Molly Tuttle, string bassist Todd Phillips, banjo player Craig Smith, guitarist Nina Gerber, guitarist and singer Kathy Kallick, fiddler Tatiana Hargreaves, pianist and singer Barbara Higbie, guitarist Mike Marshall, singer Leah Wollenberg, and mandolinist and singer (and Lewis’s longtime partner) Tom Rozum. And yes, the effect of the whole is indeed greater than the sum of those impressive parts.

Given the diversity of the material (inspired by everything from the Carter Family and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band to a small mammal in the High Sierra), the consistently superior level of musicianship, and the emotional range, it’s impossible to pick out only one or two favorite performances. They change for me every time I listen to the CD. High on my list at the moment are the interweaving of Tuttle and Lewis’s voices and acoustic guitars on “The Lonely One,” the palpable, profoundly seasoned comradeship of Kallick and Lewis on “Old Friend,” and the ethereal wistfulness of the two tracks featuring Nina Gerber (longtime accompanist of the late Kate Wolf and current duo partner of singer Chris Webster) on electric guitar—Sorrels’s “My Last Go-Round” and the album closer “This Is Our Home,” a poignant, shimmering “lament for the planet.”

When Lewis was ready to release and Laurie Lewis last March and COVID-19 hit, she assumed she’d have to stay off the road for a few months. It’s been seven, and counting. Scheduled to appear at the 20th annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in early October, Lewis instead made filmed appearances in the beautifully produced Let the Music Play On, HSB’s three-hour movie, streamed in lieu of the cancelled festival. No one really knows when we’ll get back to the inimitable experience of enjoying music live and in person whenever we want. In the meantime, grant yourself the pleasures of the hardly strictly bluegrass duets gathered on and Laurie Lewis.

G. Reid Laurie Lewis: And Laurie Lewis (SMM-1014-CD)

And Laurie Lewis is a collaborative effort that pairs her with pickers and singers who have been a part of her musical landscape. Laurie describes the collection as “intimate conversations” with Nina Gerber, Tatiana Hargreaves, Barbara Higbie, Kathy Kallick, Mike Marshall, Todd Phillips, Tom Rozum, Craig Smith, Molly Tuttle, and Leah Wollenberg. Material comes from a variety of sources including the Carter Family and the Monroe Brothers (she and Tom Rozum offer up a nice Monroe-inspired “Will the Circle Be Unbroken”), folk singer Rosalie Sorrels, and a hefty batch of Lewis originals. With Laurie as the common thread, the unique assemblage of artists effortlessly glide through a diversity of styles including old-time, bluegrass, blues, and folk. As with all of Laurie’s previous recordings, this one features musicianship and production values of the highest order. The accompanying booklet contains lyrics and commentary from Laurie on each track. Feeling that each musician’s instrument is an extension of themselves, there is a two-page description of the instruments used in the making of the project. Kudos to Tom Rozum for the cover illustration and to Lisa Berman for the graphically appealing layout and design.

Mercury News ~ By Andrew Gilbert

“I can’t stop listening to this CD these last few days. I’m looking for a word: prescient perhaps. It’s as if she knew I needed to hear this collection of songs right at this time. Of course, that’s incredibly selfish for me to say. She is reaching out to all of us.”

Some albums provide a snapshot of a musician at a particular instant in time, capturing the mood and feel of the moment. “And Laurie Lewis,” the latest release by the Berkeley bluegrass icon, works more like a time-lapse montage, distilling a thick web of friendships forged over a lifetime.

A series of duets with some of acoustic music’s most accomplished artists, it’s an intimate portrait of her musical family tree. The album’s striking cover art conveys the depth of the relationships with an image of the intertwined roots of a California live oak and California bay laurel, It was created by Lewis’ longtime musical partner Tom Rozum (the mandolinist is featured on a haunting version of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” based on a recording by the Monroe Brothers).

“When I set out to make this album it took me a while to realize how deep the connections run,” says Lewis, 69, who earned a Grammy nomination for 1995’s “The Oak and the Laurel,” a duo album with Rozum. “Everyone is such an old friend or they are someone I’ve known almost since they were born. And they’re all West Coast people.”

In many ways “And Laurie Lewis” embodies the vital intergenerational nature of an acoustic scene that encompasses bluegrass, old-time music, jazz and kindred traditions. On the opening track “You Are My Flower” she’s joined by 27-year-old bluegrass star Molly Tuttle, a vocalist and guitarist she’s known and championed since her early teens.

“Molly was the perfect person for this traditional song I first heard on a Nitty Gritty Dirt Band album,” Lewis says. “She’s a guitar goddess and she created such a beautiful blend vocally. She can just lay her voice on mine. It sounds as if she’s been listening to me her whole life,” which is pretty much the case. They also recorded “The Lonely One,” a beautiful ballad written by Emily Mann, a brilliant young banjo player, fiddler and vocalist who performs in the old-time duo Paper Wings. Much like with Tuttle, Lewis took Mann under her wing after meeting her as a young teen at the Big Sur Fiddle Camp.

The youth wave continues with two duets featuring fiddler and vocalist Tatiana Hargreaves, 24, who came into Lewis’ orbit at the age of 7 via Bluegrass at the Beach, a music camp on the Oregon coast. The Lewis originals explore divergent emotional terrain. Hargreaves evokes an anguished parent on “Mama Cry” while skittering exuberantly on “The Pika Song,” an affectionate ode to the frisky Sierra Nevada-dwelling rodent.

Their ties run deep. Hargreaves spent several years touring with Lewis and contributed some powerful fiddle work on her 2017 Grammy-nominated album “The Hazel and Alice Sessions.” It’s work that established Hargreaves as a creative force in bluegrass, a position she never anticipated before her stint with Laurie Lewis & the Right Hands.

“I never considered myself a bluegrass fiddler,” says Hargreaves, who’s on the music faculty at the University of North Carolina in Durham. “I was old-time. But in college Laurie called and recruited me for the Right Hands and she made me a bluegrass fiddler. Now I teach bluegrass fiddle at UNC. Somehow she knew I had it in me. Laurie is such an important figure connecting these different generations, and this album is such a great example of that.”

Not that the kids get all the attention on “and Laurie Lewis.” She tracked down a bevy of former bandmates for some of the album’s most memorable pieces, like a romping version of “Baby, That Would Sure Go Good” with bass master Todd Phillips and a glowing reunion with vocalist Kathy Kallick on Lewis’s “Old Friend.”

No piece better captures the breadth of Lewis’ music than Dick Oxtot’s “Ain’t Nobody Got the Blues Like Me,” a rollicking duet featuring another longtime friend, Barbara Higbie (on piano and vocals). Higbie was still a teenager in the mid-1970s when she started singing with Lewis in Oxtot’s traditional New Orleans-style Golden Age Jazz Band every weekend at The Point in Pt. Richmond, four sets a night. A banjo player, cornetist and singer, Oxtot was more than pleased to feature the talented young women.

“We were so lucky to be the youngsters on that scene,” Higbie says. “Everybody but us in that band was collecting Social Security. I played piano, Laurie played bass, and we sang a lot of duets. Even way back then her voice was a commanding force. She did a lot of big Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith blues, a real departure from bluegrass singing that showcased her voice in a different way.”

The sound is timeless, but Lewis also seems dialed into the anxiety-ridden zeitgeist on the album’s only a cappella track, the lament and clarion call for solidarity “Troubled Times.” With Leah Wollenberg joining Lewis on vocals, it’s an arresting performance that seems to speak directly to our sheltered-in-place moment, though she actually wrote the song years ago. Their rough-hewn harmonies evoke the struggles and resilience that have carried Americans through previous dark passages as they sing the refrain “We’ll face these troubled times and see them through.” Amen.

No Depression, April 7, 2020

While Lewis did not record an album till 1983, our paths crossed somewhere along the bluegrass line nearly a decade before. She first stood out as women were then rare in bluegrass (except for on the progressive West Coast), then as an outstanding guitarist, and rarer still, band leader. In the intervening years she became a staple on the circuit, and now a icon, an influence and inspiration to many younger women who have taken up the mantle. This not to say that Lewis has given up the ghost, not by a long shot. Billed as an album of duets (with Molly Tuttle, Mike Marshall, Tatiana Hargreaves, Barbara Higbie, and more), and Laurie Lewis is pure Lewis while also permitting friends to pay tribute to her.

Mixing originals with covers (all but one are by women), Lewis’ brilliance shines in her reverence and quiet understatement. Of particular interest is Rosalie Sorrels’ “My Last Go-Round,” a beautiful lullaby that pretty well encapsulates Sorrels’ troubadour life. Lewis continues that theme with the original “This Is Our Home” that closes the album, an introspective piece that’s as post-modern as any younger artist could muster. As the traditional “You Are My Flower” opens the album, these 13 duets constitute a retrospective song cycle of a different sort, one that traverses where she’s been and where’s she headed.

Hudson River Bluegrass Association, March 28, 2020

It’s Saturday, March 28, 2020, as I look out at the empty street. New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo gives an update on the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. We are bombarded with hourly updates on a local, national and global scale. I sit down at my desk and absorb the magical elements in the CD cover: and Laurie Lewis.

I have known Laurie Lewis for many years, at least since the late 1980’s. I can also say that I have a pretty healthy collection of her recorded work in all of those years, and– get this– I can’t stop listening to this CD these last few days. I’m looking for a word: prescient perhaps. It’s as if she knew I needed to hear this collection of songs right at this time. Of course, that’s incredibly selfish for me to say. She is reaching out to all of us.

Artistry is not commonplace. I’m talking about the stuff that’s beyond just good pickin’ and singin’. I’m talking about how an artist, a writer and singer, grapples with her own feelings, her genre, her own station in life and processes all of this into a coherent musical message. This beautiful collection of songs transmits empathy, melancholy, intimacy and an embrace that one can only call love. With every listen, that emotional tsunami keeps getting stronger and stronger.

OK, for all bluegrassers wary of the touchy-feely, don’t take me wrong. Let me just name a few songs for you: You Are My Flower, Ain’t Nobody Got The Blues Like Me, Old Friend, O The Wind and Rain, Will The Circle Be Unbroken, Troubled Times. Did I mention that all of the songs on this CD are duets? Laurie has teamed up with some long-time friends and associates for this recording. Here’s the great list of folks she has recruited: Nina Gerber, Tatiana Hargreaves, Barbara Higbie, Kathy Kallick, Mike Marshall, Todd Phillips, Tom Rozum, Craig Smith, Molly Tuttle and Leah Wollenberg. There is so much good playing and singing here. I mean, sweet Jesus, Tatiana is a fiddler’s fiddler and when Nina Gerber plays electric guitar (you’ll think sometimes it is a pedal steel) the greater trochanter of my femur starts to turn into jelly.

So, I say you should have this CD in your collection today. Pour yourself a glass of wine, go for a hike with your headset or do whatever it is you like to do to give some space for this music. Free yourself, let the tears flow if they may. Laurie Lewis has been a creative and inspirational force in bluegrass and folk music for a long time. Let her reach out and touch you. The last song is called This Is Our Home. Boy, as I look out at the lonely street today, I feel that more than ever.

– Chris Brashear

For the better part of five decades—ever since she emerged as a leading voice in the San Francisco Bay Area’s New Grass scene—Laurie Lewis has cultivated collaborations and long-term creative friendships with an extraordinary assortment of musicians. Ten of those dearest companions—from all across the panorama of bluegrass, country, and traditional folk in which they thrive, and from several generations—join Lewis on her latest album, the humbly titled and Laurie Lewis (Spruce and Maple Music). It is must listening for all fans of “peghead” instruments.

But the timing of its release could hardly have been worse: The rapidly growing COVID-19 pandemic put an indefinite hold on Lewis’s plans to support the album with live concerts, both in the Bay Area and on tour. The itinerary page on her website is a cascade of “cancelled” notices on gigs across the U.S. and Europe, in clubs and concert halls, at festivals and music camps, and on Lewis’s popular river rafting trips.

While the possibility of hearing Lewis in person has been diminished, the music on and Laurie Lewis nonetheless provides 50 minutes of exquisite listening in the form of 13 intimate duets. Lewis pairs off with one friend or another on six original compositions, several traditional tunes (“You Are My Flower,” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?,” “O The Wind and Rain”), a bit of “golden age” jazz and Western swing, a Rosalie Sorrels classic, and a contemporary contribution from young songwriter Emily Mann.

Growing up in Berkeley, where she was born in 1950, Lewis experienced musical epiphanies hearing Doc Watson, Jean Ritchie, the Greenbriar Boys, Jesse Fuller, Reverend Gary Davis, Mississippi John Hurt, and others at the Berkeley Folk Festival. Already a classically trained violinist, she then took up guitar and bluegrass banjo. Another revelation was hearing bluegrass fiddlers onstage at Paul’s Saloon in San Francisco; Lewis realized she could do that too.

In the open-ended traditional and progressive Bay Area bluegrass scene, Lewis’s journey from neophyte to matriarch is marked by too many milestones to name, but here are some: playing with the pioneering Phantoms of the Opry, playing bass and singing in Dick Oxtot’s Golden Age Jazz Band, co-founding the all-female bluegrass band Good Ol’ Persons, organizing her own bands (Laurie Lewis and Grant Street, Laurie Lewis and the Right Hands), recording nearly 20 albums, racking up IBMA (International Bluegrass Music Association) awards, and working alongside Ralph Stanley, Linda Tillery, Alice Gerrard, Linda Ronstadt, Cris Williamson, Scott Nygaard, Dave Alvin, Tom Russell, Joan Baez, and many more.

and Laurie Lewis is a Peghead geek’s paradise of stringed instruments, played by Lewis and . . . They are annotated in detail in the liner notes, including a Carl. C. Holzapfel early 20th century 12-string guitar, a 1927 Vega Tubaphone banjo, Charles Sawtelle’s 1929 Martin 000-45, an 1889 Jerome Bonaparte Squier violin, a 1922 Gibson Master Model mandolin, a 1962 reissue Fender Stratocaster, and many more.

More important are the players and singers, with appearances by rising-star guitarist and singer Molly Tuttle, string bassist Todd Phillips, banjo player Craig Smith, guitarist Nina Gerber, guitarist and singer Kathy Kallick, fiddler Tatiana Hargreaves, pianist and singer Barbara Higbie, guitarist Mike Marshall, singer Leah Wollenberg, and mandolinist and singer (and Lewis’s longtime partner) Tom Rozum. And yes, the effect of the whole is indeed greater than the sum of those impressive parts.

Given the diversity of the material (inspired by everything from the Carter Family and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band to a small mammal in the High Sierra), the consistently superior level of musicianship, and the emotional range, it’s impossible to pick out only one or two favorite performances. They change for me every time I listen to the CD. High on my list at the moment are the interweaving of Tuttle and Lewis’s voices and acoustic guitars on “The Lonely One,” the palpable, profoundly seasoned comradeship of Kallick and Lewis on “Old Friend,” and the ethereal wistfulness of the two tracks featuring Nina Gerber (longtime accompanist of the late Kate Wolf and current duo partner of singer Chris Webster) on electric guitar—Sorrels’s “My Last Go-Round” and the album closer “This Is Our Home,” a poignant, shimmering “lament for the planet.”

When Lewis was ready to release and Laurie Lewis last March and COVID-19 hit, she assumed she’d have to stay off the road for a few months. It’s been seven, and counting. Scheduled to appear at the 20th annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in early October, Lewis instead made filmed appearances in the beautifully produced Let the Music Play On, HSB’s three-hour movie, streamed in lieu of the cancelled festival. No one really knows when we’ll get back to the inimitable experience of enjoying music live and in person whenever we want. In the meantime, grant yourself the pleasures of the hardly strictly bluegrass duets gathered on and Laurie Lewis.

PHOTO BY JEFF FASANO

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Laurie Lewis Concert Setlists & Tour Dates

• Laurie Lewis ( bluegrass artist and violinist )
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Laurie Lewis at Sweetwater Music Hall, Mill Valley, CA, USA

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Laurie Lewis at Hopmonk Tavern, Novato, CA, USA

Laurie lewis at hardly strictly bluegrass 2023.

• Just A Little Ways Down The Road
• How Many Times
• We Stand Waiting
• Quaking Aspen
• Red Rockin' Chair
• Rock The Pain Away
• Working Girl Blues
• Love Chooses You
• This Little Light of Mine

Laurie Lewis at Love You Madly Benefit for Santa Cruz Fire Relief 2020

Laurie lewis at hardly strictly bluegrass 2019, laurie lewis at point richmond summer music festival 2018, laurie lewis at hardly strictly bluegrass 2017, laurie lewis at hardly strictly bluegrass 2014, laurie lewis at sunoco performance theater, harrisburg, pa, usa.

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DP World Tour Soudal Open 2024: Schedule, venue, prize purse and more

A s the 2024 PGA Championship comes to an end, the DP World Tour moves to Belgium for the Soudal Open. The tournament will be played at Rinkven International Golf Club in Schilde, Belgium from May 23 to 26.

With the Soudal Open, the European swing will begin after the Asian swing. This year, the purse has jumped from $2 million (in 2023) to $2.25 million. The winner will take home $382,500, while the runner-up gets $247,500.

The 2024 Soudal Open has been known as the Belgian Open for the most part. After being sponsored by Soudal, it was renamed as Soudal Open. The tournament has been played sporadically from 1910 to 2000. It wasn't played from 2001 to 2017 and returned in 2018 as Belgian Knockout.

2024 Soudal Open schedule

The 2024 Soudal Open is a 72-hole format tournament with a cut after 36 holes. It will start with the first round on Thursday, May 23, and run through the weekend to conclude with the final round on Sunday, May 26.

Here is the schedule for the 2024 Soudal Open:

• Date: May 23, 2024
• Day: Thursday
• Date: May 24, 2024
• Day: Friday
• Date: May 25, 2024
• Day: Saturday
• Date: May 26, 2024
• Day: Sunday

2024 Soudal Open venue

This year, Rinkven International Golf Club in Schilde, Belgium will be hosting the tournament. The tournament will be hosted for the third consecutive time at the course after a break in 2020-2021 due to Covid-19.

The course is 71 par and of 6,924 yards. Belgian golfer and coach Paul Rolin designed the course in the 1980s. The cut at the venue is expected to remain low after -17 and -13 in the last two winning scores.

2024 Soudal Open prize purse

Of the total $2.25 million doled out, the winner will take home $382,500, The runner-up will get $247,500 and the third position will win $141, 750. Last year, the total prize purse was $2 million.

Here's a list of prize money till the 50th position at 2024 Soudal Ope.

• 1st : $382,500
• 2nd : $247,500
• 3rd : $141,750
• 4th : $112,500
• 5th : $95,400
• 6th : $78,750
• 7th : $67,500
• 8th : $56,250
• 9th : $50,400
• 10th : $45,000
• 11th : $41,400
• 12th : $38,700
• 13th : $36,225
• 14th : $34,425
• 15th : $33,075
• 16th : $31,725
• 17th : $30,375
• 18th : $29,025
• 19th : $27,900
• 20th : $27,000
• 21st : $26,100
• 22nd : $25,425
• 23rd : $24,750
• 24th : $24,075
• 25th : $23,400
• 26th : $22,725
• 27th : $22,050
• 28th : $21,375
• 29th : $20,700
• 30th : $20,025
• 31st : $19,350
• 32nd : $18,675
• 33rd : $18,000
• 34th : $17,325
• 35th : $16,650
• 36th : $15,975
• 37th : $15,525
• 38th : $15,075
• 39th : $14,625
• 40th : $14,175
• 41st : $13,725
• 42nd : $13,275
• 43rd : $12,825
• 44th : $12,375
• 45th : $11,925
• 46th : $11,475
• 47th : $11,025
• 48th : $10,575
• 49th : $10,125
• 50th : $9,675

2024 Soudal Open complete field

Simon Forsström won the 2023 Soudal Open by one stroke over Jans Dantorp. He would look to register his second victory on the DP World Tour .

The 156 players in the field for the 2024 Soudal Open are as follows:

• Laurie CANTER (ENG)
• Adrian OTAEGUI (ESP)
• Darius VAN DRIEL (NED)
• Dylan FRITTELLI (RSA)
• Todd CLEMENTS (ENG)
• Daniel HILLIER (NZL)
• Thriston LAWRENCE (RSA)
• Dale WHITNELL (ENG)
• Pablo LARRAZÁBAL (ESP)
• Simon FORSSTRÖM (SWE)
• Marcel SIEM (GER)
• Jordan SMITH (ENG)
• Daniel GAVINS (ENG)
• Yannik PAUL (GER)
• Guido MIGLIOZZI (ITA)
• Maximilian KIEFFER (GER)
• Callum SHINKWIN (ENG)
• Sean CROCKER (USA)
• Richie RAMSAY (SCO)
• Adri ARNAUS (ESP)
• Ashun WU (CHN)
• Jordan GUMBERG (USA)
• Matteo MANASSERO (ITA)
• Daniel BROWN (ENG)
• Nick BACHEM (GER)
• Matthew BALDWIN (ENG)
• Dan BRADBURY (ENG)
• Antoine ROZNER (FRA)
• Luke DONALD (ENG)
• Kristof ULENAERS (BEL)
• Christopher MIVIS (BEL)
• Jean DE WOUTERS (BEL)
• Frank KENNEDY (ENG)
• Conor PURCELL (IRL)
• Alexander LEVY (FRA)
• Louis THEYS (BEL)
• Leopold ISSERENTANT (BEL)
• Arthur HAGHEDOOREN (BEL)
• Nathan COSSEMENT (BEL)
• Jarno TOLLENAIRE (BEL)
• Lev GRINBERG (UKR)
• Nicolas COLSAERTS (BEL)
• Adrien DUMONT DE CHASSART (BEL)
• Thomas PIETERS (BEL)
• James MEYER DE BECO (BEL)
• Yente VAN DOREN (BEL)
• Alan DE BONDT (BEL)
• Joost LUITEN (NED)
• Romain LANGASQUE (FRA)
• Zander LOMBARD (RSA)
• Grant FORREST (SCO)
• Julien GUERRIER (FRA)
• Matthew SOUTHGATE (ENG)
• Jeff WINTHER (DEN)
• Julien BRUN (FRA)
• Connor SYME (SCO)
• Jens DANTORP (SWE)
• Nacho ELVIRA (ESP)
• Marcus HELLIGKILDE (DEN)
• Calum HILL (SCO)
• Hurly LONG (GER)
• Marcus ARMITAGE (ENG)
• Richard MANSELL (ENG)
• Matthew JORDAN (ENG)
• Shubhankar SHARMA (IND)
• Jason SCRIVENER (AUS)
• Louis DE JAGER (RSA)
• Aaron COCKERILL (CAN)
• Niklas NORGAARD (DEN)
• Alex FITZPATRICK (ENG)
• Masahiro KAWAMURA (JPN)
• Scott JAMIESON (SCO)
• Santiago TARRIO (ESP)
• Alejandro DEL REY (ESP)
• Adrien SADDIER (FRA)
• Gavin GREEN (MAS)
• David LAW (SCO)
• Marcel SCHNEIDER (GER)
• Fabrizio ZANOTTI (PAR)
• Andy SULLIVAN (ENG)
• Marcus KINHULT (SWE)
• Rafa CABRERA BELLO (ESP)
• Eddie PEPPERELL (ENG)
• Daan HUIZING (NED)
• Edoardo MOLINARI (ITA)
• James MORRISON (ENG)
• Jayden SCHAPER (RSA)
• Johannes VEERMAN (USA)
• Angel HIDALGO (ESP)
• Lukas NEMECZ (AUT)
• Gunner WIEBE (USA)
• Chase HANNA (USA)
• Paul WARING (ENG)
• Mike LORENZO-VERA (FRA)
• Jeong weon KO (FRA)
• Ross FISHER (ENG)
• Justin HARDING (RSA)
• Mikko KORHONEN (FIN)
• Espen KOFSTAD (NOR)
• Søren KJELDSEN (DEN)
• Bernd WIESBERGER (AUT)
• Jamie DONALDSON (WAL)
• Stephen GALLACHER (SCO)
• Matthias SCHWAB (AUT)
• Jonas BLIXT (SWE)
• Marco PENGE (ENG)
• Casey JARVIS (RSA)
• Manuel ELVIRA (ESP)
• Ugo COUSSAUD (FRA)
• Adam BLOMME (SWE)
• Lorenzo SCALISE (ITA)
• Andrea PAVAN (ITA)
• Ricardo GOUVEIA (POR)
• Tom VAILLANT (FRA)
• Frederic LACROIX (FRA)
• Francesco LAPORTA (ITA)
• Will ENEFER (ENG)
• Ivan CANTERO (ESP)
• Joel GIRRBACH (SUI)
• Sam BAIRSTOW (ENG)
• Brandon STONE (RSA)
• Maximilian ROTTLUFF (GER)
• Stuart MANLEY (WAL)
• David MICHELUZZI (AUS)
• Jaco PRINSLOO (RSA)
• Guxin CHEN (CHN)
• Om Prakash CHOUHAN (IND)
• Darren FICHARDT (RSA)
• Renato PARATORE (ITA)
• Joe DEAN (ENG)
• David RAVETTO (FRA)
• Freddy SCHOTT (GER)
• Filippo CELLI (ITA)
• Matthis BESARD (BEL)
• Sebastian FRIEDRICHSEN (DEN)
• Tom LEWIS (ENG)
• Sam JONES (NZL)
• Sebastian GARCIA (ESP)
• Kristian Krogh JOHANNESSEN (NOR)
• Haydn BARRON (AUS)
• Jack DAVIDSON (WAL)
• Kiradech APHIBARNRAT (THA)
• Andrew WILSON (ENG)
• Benjamin RUSCH (SUI)
• Garrick PORTEOUS (ENG)
• Nicolo GALLETTI (USA)
• Joshua BERRY (ENG)
• Pieter MOOLMAN (RSA)
• Lauri RUUSKA (FIN)
• James NICHOLAS (USA)
• Alfredo GARCIA-HEREDIA (ESP)
• Pedro FIGUEIREDO (POR)
• Søren BROHOLT LIND (DEN)
• Nicolai VON DELLINGSHAUSEN (GER)
• Jannik DE BRUYN (GER)
• Rhys ENOCH (WAL)

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The Man Who Made Roulette Into New York’s Music Lab

Jim Staley has led the experimental venue since it began as a concert in his TriBeCa loft. After 45 years, he’s stepping down and looking back.

By Steve Smith

Saturated in sunlight on a recent afternoon, the spacious TriBeCa loft that once housed Roulette somehow feels smaller than it looms in memory. For nearly 25 years, a stellar array of established and emerging composers, improvisers, electronic producers and choreographers held court in the long, tall main room. Visitors had to pass through a kitchen: a reminder that the loft was also the home of Jim Staley, the trombonist and composer who was a founder of Roulette.

Unlike many similar experimental arts venues now lost to time, Roulette has thrived and grown, now occupying a 14,000-square-foot space in Downtown Brooklyn. But Staley, 73, who still lives in the TriBeCa loft, has decided that after 45 years of leading Roulette, the time has come to step away. When this season ends in June, he will give up his role as artistic director.

It’s another evolution for a vital institution that has seen many. Roulette was established in Chicago in 1978 as a way for five recent University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign graduates, including Staley, to produce their own work. But the collaborative changed course after Staley, a well-traveled Army veteran, moved to New York.

Joined by two other Roulette founders, the graphic artist Laurie Szujewska and the composer David Weinstein, Staley hosted a modest five-concert series at his loft in 1980. After that, “We got a lot of proposals,” Staley said. “And we just decided, let’s do ’em all. We ended up doing about 30 concerts in the fall.”

Pursuing an aesthetic guided as much by John Coltrane as by John Cage, Roulette became a crucial laboratory for the downtown-music scene, providing artists like John Zorn, Shelley Hirsch, George Lewis, Ikue Mori and many more with space, resources and recorded documentation of their work. Those artists still perform at Roulette, forming an enduring community with newer generations whose development they helped to nurture.

Zeena Parkins, the estimable harpist and composer, recalled starting there as a fledgling sound engineer in 1986, soaking up all the sounds on offer.

“I learned how to mix sound,” Parkins said in an interview, “how to run cables, how to record, and I would get to see all of the artists who performed there.” By 1987 she was presenting her own work at Roulette, and she now serves on the organization’s artistic advisory council.

In 2003, Staley moved Roulette to Location One, a SoHo gallery. Seven years later, Roulette left Manhattan for a new home in Brooklyn , a Beaux-Arts theater renovated and rewired with state-of-the-art audio and video facilities. Orchestral concerts, staged operas and multimedia events became part of the mix.

In planning for his departure, Staley split his leadership role between two staffers with long ties to the institution. Matt Mehlan, a musician and producer who joined Roulette in 2006 as a sound engineer, will become artistic director. Jamie Burns, who came from the publishing world in 2014, now serves as its executive director.

Mehlan, a founder of the now-defunct community art space Silent Barn , said in an interview that the core mission Staley conceived would remain — but evolve. “The experimentalism that Roulette is premised on has seeped into so much of culture,” he said. “I have this deep belief that experimental music is at the core of all music. So we have this opportunity to educate our future audiences on what our history means, and where it takes us into the future.”

That future includes a role for Staley as a producer. Interviewed at the loft where Roulette first planted roots in New York, he discussed its conception and evolution, and why it was time to move on. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Roulette has been an archetypal New York City space for decades, but most people don’t know it started in Chicago . How did you wind up in TriBeCa?

JIM STALEY I’d just finished up at the University of Illinois. The year before, I went out to California, the Bay Area and L.A. — this was in 1977. While I loved it out there, because I’d been in San Francisco when I was in the Army, I was looking for a place that had the intensity I’d had at university, but at a professional level. So New York ended up making the most sense.

Were you already aesthetically aligned with the music scene that was evolving in New York’s downtown when you arrived?

When I was in Berlin, again in the Army, I’d made connections with [the composer and trombonist] James Fulkerson, and I played in some of his things. Minimalism was really strong at that time, in ’72, ’73. At the same time, I was very close with Slide Hampton , who was very generous with me, so there was the jazz influence.

I took all of that back to the university, so when I came here there were strong connections already. John Cage had been in Illinois. It wasn’t such a leap to come to New York, particularly downtown. I walked into a building that Meredith Monk lived in, and Margaret Beals, and Roma Baran, Laurie Anderson’s producer and recording engineer, and that just said, “This is the right place to be.”

What made you turn your home into a performance space?

Everybody was doing things in their lofts at that time — theater, music, dance, whatever. I thought, Let’s try it out; people would get to know the place, and then it won’t be so hard to get somebody to come hear your own work.

The first one was supposed to be Ben Johnston, but he postponed. So Malcolm Goldstein [a violinist and composer] ended up being the first concert . The place was filled, with Cage and [Merce] Cunningham and everybody in the scene. The room sounded great, it looked great, it felt great. So all these people said, Well, I’d like to do something.

Why did you move Roulette out of your loft to Greene Street?

The building had been brought up to code, so it was no longer commercial-with-living. This was during Bloomberg, and his people decided that artist live-work meant I personally could do my work here and perform for people, but I could not have a series where other people’s work is being presented.

After that, why did you leave Manhattan?

I decided, OK, it’s time to move to Brooklyn. The critical mass of artists and people interested in this work are in Brooklyn now. And when I walked into that space, it was like when I walked into this space. It was: “This is an incredible space. This is wonderful. It feels great, if we can afford this and make it work.”

You’re still a performing artist and composer. How much of your own work were you able to do while operating Roulette?

A lot, up through Greene Street. But when we moved into the new space in Brooklyn, it really took over. I stopped doing my own concerts; I just didn’t feel like it was the right venue for what I wanted to do.

I did a couple of things with other people, and of course I played on improv things that Zorn put together. The nice thing about improv is that you work with what you have, so it’s not such a leap to jump back into it. But I haven’t been focused on projects, and now I’m rethinking what I might want to do, creatively, and whether it’s starting over or picking up from what point.

So this was the time to step away?

It’s not something I needed to do, to stop. It’s something I felt was best for the organization, for someone else to come in. I’m having less and less of a relationship or understanding of a lot of the younger artists and what they need, what they want to do, what their work is. I can see the value of it, and it has to be presented. But I don’t always feel as much of a connection with the work or the people, and it’s important that the artistic director is connected with the people.

What made Matt Mehlan the right person to take over?

I knew he was somebody who really understood. He’s a composer and a musician himself, and he understands that you give people what they need. You don’t need to hold their hands; you just make sure they have what they need to realize the work they want to do.

But you’re not leaving Roulette completely.

I’ll be there as a producer. I’ll do special projects, if I have things I want to do. There are a number of things that carry over from this year that I’ve programmed for next year. But the majority of it is going to be Matt’s programming, and he’ll go forward from there.

So what are you looking forward to doing next?

You know … I’m looking forward to looking forward.

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