Event

EVIE LADIN & KEITH TERRY

Innovative musicians/dancers with a quirky neo-traditional soul, the California-based duo throw down original folk songs and deep interpretations of old songs, coupled with the kinetic thrill of percussive dance.

The polyrhythmic heat of Ladin's clawhammer banjo, resonant voice, real stories, and rhythmic step-dancing have earned her a growing audience via appearances on A Prairie Home Companion, at Lincoln Center, and at the world's premiere folk and bluegrass festivals. Known as a driving force behind San Francisco's Stairwell Sisters, Ladin's solo album debut Float Downstream, was quickly followed by Evie Ladin Band, which won Americana Album of the Year by the Independent Music Awards Vox Pop Vote.

Trained as a jazz drummer, Keith Terry brings tonal percussion to stand-up bass, is a renowned percussionist/rhythm dancer, the founder of the International Body Music Festival, and a collaborator with a host of inventive performers from Bobby McFerrin, Tex Williams and Robin Williams, to Turtle Island Quartet, Charles Honi Coles and Bill Irwin. The Wall Street Journal said that watching "Mr. Terry in action is like visiting an anatomical carnival, where hands, feet, fingers, engage in a musical ballet."

Ladin started playing banjo at the age of eight, clogging since five, and is fluid in these traditional Appalachian arts, even as she brings an urban edge and contemporary vision to her stories and songs. After creating an African Studies In Dance major at Brown University, she studied dance in Eastern Nigeria on a Fulbright Fellowship. Ladin found in her African studies a parallel to the old-time folk culture, where music and dance are an integral part of social communication. That experience continues to inform her work with the roots of American music & dance.

The duo's festival appearances have included Scotland's Celtic Connections, San Francisco's Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, the Appalachian Stringband Festival, and many others.