Irish and Bluegrass Extravaganza:
Double-bill of driving traditional Irish tunes and heart-melting bluegrass songs
Friday June 8th, 8pm
$10-15
presale tickets
Dave Cory, Darcy Noonan & Richard Mandel Trio In their trio debut Dave Cory (tenor banjo), Darcy Noonan (fiddle) and Richard Mandel (guitar) will be sure to drop jaws with an evening of hard-driving Irish trad tunes and virtuosic string playing. The trio features some of the hottest Irish players in the Bay Area.
The Central Valley Boys are dedicated to delivering straight-ahead-hard-driving bluegrass music in homage to the great musicians of the Central Valley. From the Stanley Brothers to Buck Owens, the Central Valley Boys wear their love of traditional music on their red sleeves. But don’t let the suits fool you, these five bluegrass veterans mean business.
Dave Cory is an East Bay Area native, and currently resides in Oakland, California. He has been playing music for 17 years, most of those years spent playing Irish music, and most of that music played on banjo and guitar, with varying levels of distraction owed to classical, old time, fingerpicking, rock, etc. He has worked on numerous projects and albums, and has toured and supported many of the great names in Irish and traditional music all across the States, as well as in Ireland, Canada and Japan.
Darcy Noonan started her violin career at age 7 in Berkeley, California. She learned classical music and supplemented it with weekly Irish dance classes. Years later she put the two together and took up Irish fiddle. Darcy was lucky enough to have parents with an extensive Irish music library and had at her disposal many great artists to influence her including Liz Carroll, Tommy Peoples and John Carty among many others. After high school she travelled around Ireland and found a second home in Galway City where she honed her music style and got to meet and play with many of her childhood idols. Now Darcy spends most of her time in the San Francisco Bay Area, performing, teaching violin and experimenting with new styles of music.
Richard Mandel fell into the well of Irish music in the mid-‘90s and was soon driving to every session he could get into. Richard currently plays in the trio Three Mile Stone with mandolinist Marla Fibish and fiddler Erin Shrader. Three Mile Stone’s released their debut CD in 2010 to rave reviews. As a first-call accompanist, Richard has backed up legendary Irish performers including Paddy Keenan, Tommy Peoples, Tony DeMarco, Gerry O’Connor, and Andrew MacNamara. In addition to Three Mile Stone, Richard can be heard on Christa Burch’s “Love of the Land”, Radim Zenkl’s “Restless Joy”, and Tipsy House’s “Sets in the City.”
