Orquesta Northwest and Town Hall Seattle present
Las Posadas
Featuring Ballard Civic Orchestra, World Youth Orchestra, North Seattle Mariachi, and Jose Rubio
Rental Partner: University of Washington Office of Public Lectures presents
Gangstagrass
Blending America’s Rural and Urban Music Traditions
Note: A livestream will be available for this event.
Presented by the University of Washington Office of Public Lectures. For questions about this event, please contact lectures@uw.edu.
A true example of the belief that we are better together, Gangstagrass combines great American traditions of bluegrass, hip-hop, and beyond to create a whole new musical genre that is more than the sum of its parts.
Gangstagrass is a multi-racial collective of musicians who demolish every preconception you have about country music and hip-hop music. These string pickers and MCs create a shared cultural space for dialogue and connection between folks that usually never intersect. The boundaries are gone and Gangstagrass is out there doing things nobody thought would work but when you hear it you know, down in your soul, that it does. Gangstagrass is here to help us party together with an irresistible blend of America’s rural and urban music traditions.
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Integrating banjo and fiddle with hip-hop beats and rapping may be something Gangstagrass does for the love of the music, but it has led them to face a history of racialized genres and a deeply ingrained sense of cultural incompatibility. Creating music that turns what some would consider opposite musical styles into a rollicking party that suddenly makes sense, they found a byproduct of their disregard for the traditional sense of genre was that they got people who normally would consider themselves to have nothing in common dancing to the same beat. Forget everything you thought you knew about our cultural divisions: when Gangstagrass starts playing, those preconceptions are relegated to the dustbin of history. Banjo and fiddle seamlessly meet verbal acrobatics from skilled MCs. High lonesome harmonies flow over block-rockin’ beats.
When the band’s fifth studio album No Time For Enemies was released in 2020, Americana Highways proclaimed Gangstagrass “America’s Band” because they take so much of what’s amazing about this country — the ingenuity, creativity, strength, and struggles of such different people to forge a path into the unknown — and distill it into a message of common ground and unity across differences. The album quickly rose to #1 on the Billboard bluegrass chart, the first time in history that hip-hop MCs achieved that top spot.
More recently, between appearances on America’s Got Talent and PBS’s The Caverns Sessions that made everyone’s highlights list, and a glowing full-page article in the New York Times print edition headlined “This Is the Music America Needs,” the band is geared up to get us all dancing on common ground for their national and international tours and their forthcoming full-length album release in the summer of 2024.
Sponsoring Departments: The Graduate School
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