Trio of Prize-Winning Pickers Come to Westchester Bluegrass Club

By Brian Kluepfel

Tony Furtado and Matt Flinner are Americana multi-instrumentalists who’ve moved in the same circle for more than three decades.

Both are two-time winners of the elite Walnut Valley National Flat-Picking Championships in Winfield, Kan. (with Furtado on banjo and Flinner on banjo and mandolin). They seemed destined to collaborate.

Kicking off with an aggregation called Sugarbeat in the ‘90’s, their partnership continues to this day, although they live on opposite sides of the country – Furtado in Portland, Ore. and Flinner in Vermont.

On May 18 at the Westchester Bluegrass Club in Purdys, the duo will be augmented by another champion. Luke Price, a generation younger than Furtado and Flinner, also lives in Portland (by way of Boise and the Berklee School of Music), and has won the National Oldtime Fiddlers’ Contest in Weiser, Idaho for five of the past 10 years.

The trio’s combined musical resume is a rich gumbo of Americana: Flinner has ventured into the jam-band scene, playing with Phish’s Trey Anastasio as well as subbing briefly with Leftover Salmon. Furtado had toured with Gregg Allman and David Lindley, while records like “American Gypsy” signaled a detour from banjo into bad-ass lap steel guitar. Price dips his fiddling fingers into soul-pop in a collaboration with his wife, Rachel, called Love, DEAN and has guested with famed country artist Lee Ann Womack. He also teaches fiddle at Portland’s Lewis & Clark College.

The combo of roots-music superstars is another gift to the local music scene courtesy of Mike Burns, who’s run the Westchester Bluegrass Club from an austere 1940’s-era clubhouse on Lake Purdys for the past 17 years.

“I first ran into Tony Furtado 30 years ago at the Hudson Valley Bluegrass Association,” said Burns, a retired carpenter who’s lived on the lake since 1981.

Burns is himself a well-seasoned singer/songwriter/road musician who recorded with Ricky Skaggs’ Kentucky Thunder and toured with his own North Country Band. Tiring of the road, he began producing shows at St. Luke’s Church in Somers with the late banjoist Ben Freed, featuring some of the bluegrass genre’s “heavy hitters,” including Bill Keith, the Gibson Brothers, the Kruger Brothers and Blue Highway, before shifting the scene to Lake Purdys.

Burns is jazzed about Saturday’s show.

“Matt Flinner is a monster banjo and mandolin player, and then you’ve got national champion Luke Price,” he said.

Burns noticed that Furtado was on an East Coast swing and said to himself “I gotta get these guys.” (The Purdys venue often acts as a convenient gas money-maker for bands touring the Eastern seaboard, and Burns can usually fill the house, even on weeknights.)

The wood-paneled clubhouse echoes the bluegrass which, like the building, originated in the 1940s – old-time music highlighted by tight harmonies, insistent, chopping rhythms and frenetic fretboard runs. And it’s a somewhat small, tight-knit community, bringing their own food, drinks and an array of instruments for the pre-show jam and open mic. While the sheet cupcakes with phosphorescent yellow icing tempt many, for most the attention is on stage; it’s all blazing licks and salsa chips.

“The jams offer a chance for people to come in and play, just like the open mic,” Burns said. “The guys from the headline band usually join in, which gives a chance for younger players to hang with someone who’s really good. Everybody gets a shot at playing something.”

And the host gets his moment in the sun.

“I always get to do my one or two songs, which completes the circle for me,” Burns said.

“I like the connection with the audience in these places,” said banjoist Greg Cahill of Special Consensus, a renown international touring band for four decades. “Some bands who do the festivals don’t like these smaller venues, but I feel like you can really reach people at a gut level.”

Tom Griffith, from Huntington, L.I., who opened a recent show said, “It’s so nice to be out in relative country. It just made the whole experience feel more relaxed somehow. I really appreciated how everybody was there to listen and how they were so engaged and supportive. As a spectator, I thought the sound was remarkably good. It’s like the Westchester Bluegrass Club is this little oasis that’s doing its part to keep live music live.”

The Westchester Bluegrass Club is located at 33 Lake Way in Purdys. Saturday’s program begins with an open jam at 6:30 p.m. and an open mic at 7:15 p.m. followed by the Tony Furtado Trio at 8 p.m. Admission is $30. For more information, visit www.westchesterbluegrassclub.com.