Branimir Lokner

It’s circa 1982, in a small zydeco club called The Boulevard in Beaumont, TX, not far from the Louisiana and Texas state line. Austin blues impresario Clifford Antone, who discovered Stevie Ray & Jimmie Vaughan, Charlie Sexton, Doyle Bramhall Sr and Jr and just about every other guitar player from Austin, has made a special trip from his own venue, Antone’s Blues Club, along with his bodyguard Sugar Bear, to see a very young Jesse Dayton play. “Who the hell is this kid? He can play it all, country, blues, zydeco!”, he tells the club owner. Clifford walks to the stage, pulls out a napkin with his number written on it and tells young Dayton he has an open invitation to come to Austin and play at Antone’s. Sure, there we’re small country and western gigs at the State Fair, mandatory family piano lessons, a few private parties for kids and Shriners, but the invite from Clifford Antone is how it all started for Jesse Dayton and he’s been playing live ever since.

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Head for the Hills has a simple but continuing dilemma they can’t seem to resolve. Specialists have been hired to no avail and the predicament persists: how does one describe the multifarious music of Head for the Hills? Among the top contenders are catchy turns of phrase like post-bluegrass, progressive string music, modern acoustic noir, and bluegrass bricolage. “On top of modern string music,” (Bluegrass Today), “Cutting edge” (Drew Emmitt) or “Best in Colorado Bluegrass” (Westword Magazine Readers Poll)—those are up there too. Strip away the artful descriptors and you have a forward thinking group of {mostly} acoustic musicians drawing on eclectic influences, tastes and styles. They didn’t grow up immersed in bluegrass music but came to it later in life, with each other. The result is a sound based in bluegrass that reaches into indie rock, jazz, hip hop, world and folk to stitch together fresh songs that bridge the divide between past and future acoustic music.

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Hayley Jane and the Primates deliver a rich, genre-bending sound with a tantalizing live performance. Winners of the New England Music Awards’ Roots/Americana act of the year, The Primates have created a serious buzz in the music world. Their music draws inspiration from many styles including early rock and pop; old musical theater; folkadelic, bluegrass and country; along with blues, soul and reggae.

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