Winter Solstice Returns to The Paramount

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For Immediate Release

December 2, 2005

Back for another Paramount performance after last season's sold-out show, Winter Solstice is home for the holidays with an exciting new line-up of Windham Hill artists. Synonymous with the best of new age and pop instrumentals, Windham Hill's roster of post-modern sounds bridge world music, trip-hop, and dance, crossing many instrumental genres including folk, classical, and jazz in the unique fusion of new age music. The show on December 10 at 8 pm features violinist, fiddler, and composer Darol Anger; master of mandolin, guitar, and violin Mike Marshall; and the quiet guitar and vocals of Tuck & Patti.

Darol Anger is at home in a number of musical genres, some of which he helped to invent. With the jazz-oriented Turtle Island String Quartet, Anger developed and popularized new techniques for playing contemporary music styles on string instruments. The virtuosic "Chambergrass" groups The Darol Anger Fiddle Ensemble, Psychograss, and the long-lived Anger-Marshall Duo currently feature his compositions and arrangements. His Grammy-nomimated folk-jazz group Montreux was the original musical model for the New Adult Contemporary radio format. The David Grisman Quintet forged a new genre of acoustic string band music with Darol's "fertile inventiveness, surprising touches and technical mastery" (Boston Herald) often in the forefront.

Mike Marshall is one of the world's most accomplished and versatile acoustic musicians, with playing that is as imaginative and adventurous as it is technically thrilling. Able to swing gracefully from jazz to classical to bluegrass to Latin styles, he puts his stamp on everything he plays with an unusually potent blend of intellect and emotion, a combination of musical skill and instinct rare in the world of American vernacular instrumentalists. Marshall has performed and recorded with some of the top acoustic string instrumentalists in the world, including jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli, fiddle virtuoso Mark O'Connor, five-string banjo phenom Bela Fleck, bassist and MacArthur Fellowship winner Edgar Meyer, fiddle-and-mandolin player Sam Bush, and classical violinist Joshua Bell.

Through whispered ballads, playful swing, and a style that tempers simplicity with brisk flashes of virtuosity, Tuck & Patti have cast musical magic for years. The source of their distinct style, according to Tuck, is the decision he and Patti made years ago to pursue their art within limitations some would consider severe. "Because it's just the two of us, we're probably halfway crazy from getting so far into each detail," he admits. "And after you decide to do only what you can do with a live voice and a live guitar, without turning tone controls or adding effects, the next step is to pretend that each song we do is the only song in the world and treat it with that kind of respect. That has also supported Patti's compositional process: Each song becomes its own little universe."

Tickets to the December 10 Paramount concert are still available. Cost is $33, $30, and $27. Tickets are available through The Paramount's Box Office at 434.979.1333 or online. For more information about the artists, please visit www.darolanger.com, www.mikemarshall.net, and www.tuckandpatti.com.