By St. Cecilia Music Center
St. Cecilia Music Center will bring husband and wife duo Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn to Royce Auditorium on Friday, Feb. 23. as part of the center’s Acoustic Café Series. This will be the duo’s first appearance together in Grand Rapids.
Tickets are still available.
Fleck and Washburn have been called “the king and queen of the banjo.” On stage, they will perform pieces from their 2016 Grammy-winning self-titled debut album, as well as their new record, Echo in the Valley.
Fleck is a 15-time Grammy Award winner who has taken the instrument across multiple genres, and Washburn is a singer-songwriter and clawhammer banjo player who re-radicalized it by combining it with Far East culture and sounds.
Echo in the Valley is the follow up to Fleck and Washburn’s acclaimed, self-titled debut that earned the 2016 Grammy for Best Folk Album. “This time around, the mission was to take our double banjo combination of three finger and clawhammer styles to the next level and find things to do together that we had not done before,” says Fleck. “We’re expressing different emotions through past techniques and going to deeper places.”
The Acoustic Café Series, in partnership with the syndicated radio show of the same name, will round out the season with the band Asleep at the Wheel on April 12, as well as singer/songwriter, banjo and fiddler Rhiannon Giddens on May 17.
Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn tickets are $45 and $50 and can be purchased by calling St. Cecilia Music Center at 616-459-2224 or visiting the box office at 24 Ransom Ave. NE. Tickets can also be purchased online at www.scmc-online.org. A post-concert party with a cash bar will be offered to all ticket-holders.
