Emy Phelps’s lovely 2012 collection, Look up, Look Down, is a work of lush, ambient roots music in the service of Phelps’s affecting narrative songs. The record includes contributions from some players who know a thing or two about expanding the boundaries of traditional music. Phelps’s frequent collaborator Daryl Anger was, along with guitarist Tony Rice and the leader himself, one of the distinctive, virtuosic voices in mandolinist David Grisman’s quintet, a group whose “dawg music” fused bluegrass and traditional folk with jazz and serious compositional ambition, setting the stage both for the newgrass of Béla Fleck and the thriving quasi-classical folkish compositions of Edgar Meyer and Mark O’Connor.
Phelps, Anger and unspecified “friends” (always a promising vagueness when you run in the circles that these two do) appear at the Rosendale Café on Saturday, May 16 at 8 p.m. Tickets cost $20. The Rosendale Café is located at 434 Main Street in Rosendale. For more information, visit www.rosendalecafe.com or call (845) 658-9048.
Emy Phelps, Daryl Anger & Friends, Saturday, May 16, 8 p.m., $20, Rosendale Café, 434 Main Street, Rosendale; www.rosendalecafe.com.
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