Michael Franti is a globally recognized musician, activist and award-winning filmmaker revered for his high-energy live shows, inspiring music, worldwide philanthropic efforts and the power of optimism. Throughout his multi-decade career, Franti has earned three Billboard No. 1’s with triumphantly hopeful hits “Sound of Sunshine,” “Say Hey (I Love You)” and “I Got You,” as well as six Top 30 Hot AC singles, 10 Top 25 AAA Singles and three Billboard Top 5 Rock Albums. Spearhead’s Follow Your Heart was released in June 2022 and debuted at No. 2 on the iTunes Pop Chart behind Harry Styles. Praised by American Songwriter as “an energizing batch of songs that spotlight the common threads that connect us,” Franti & Spearhead’s 13th studio album Big Big Love is available everywhere now, featuring 17 tracks cowritten by Franti, reflecting his tenacity, inclusiveness, and optimism.
Franti & Spearhead will embark on the Togetherness Tour in 2024, bringing their dynamic and invigorating shows to Soulrockers across North America, including a return to the iconic Red Rocks Amphitheatre. With 60+ dates through the summer, the Togetherness Tour will kick off on April 6th in Fort Lauderdale at Tortuga Festival.
The Bay-Area native resides in Bali when he is not on tour and owns Soulshine Bali, a 32-room top-rated boutique hotel located in Ubud, Bali that focuses on joy through wellness and music, offering unique retreat opportunities and accommodations, along with special events and celebrations. Franti continues to foster community both on and off stage with a wish granting non-profit, Do It For The Love, which brings those with life threatening illnesses, veterans, and children with severe challenges to concerts worldwide, fulfilling over 3,500 wishes and touching the lives of over 15,000 people to date.
Megan Burtt is a performing songwriter. She has played music on almost every continent, summited Mt. Kilimanjaro and survived a gluten free diet for a decade now. She and Oprah share the same enneagram number. She wishes she’d learned music in a Southern Gospel church and dreams of becoming an olive farmer in Spain. And, you never know, life is a long time.. and longing is a great source of inspiration. Megan is working on her latest full-length record with singles set to release in fall 2023. She is a member of the all red-head Americana band Gingerbomb (eat your heart out). Megan is the winner of the Kerrville, Rocky Mountain Folks Fest Songwriter and Denver Westword Songwriting Competitions and a finalist in the Mountain New Song, Telluride Bluegrass, Great American Song Contest and Songwriter Serenade Songwriting Competitions.
The Patti Fiasco
Jet-fueled by powerhouse front woman Alysia Kraft, The Patti Fiasco rides the edge of emotional extreme, delivering a brash yet fiercely soulful brand of rock and roll with a heavy dose of rockabilly, blues, and ballad. At times raw and volatile, and at others, sweet and lilting, the band fuses a hard-rock swagger with the two-step of its Wyoming roots. It’s the attitude of Joan Jett with a Steve Earle twang, the soul and slide of Bonnie Raitt, Black-Keys-style dirty blues-rock, and the lyric edginess of Shovels and Rope.
In 2017, the band won a nationwide contest sponsored by Live Nation and Bon Jovi’s management to open for the rock icon at The Pepsi Center before a sell-out crowd in March of 2018. Alysia Kraft’s unrelenting energy, inspired songwriting, and vocals “as pure and clean as they are powerful” (Westword) earned her The Colorado Sound 2023 Award for most Outstanding Live Performer. The dobro, handmade and electrified—literally—by band member and 2007 RockyGrass dobro competition winner Ansel Foxley, builds the band’s signature blend of rock, country, and Americana. Lead guitarist Dee Tyler’s riffs range from gritty and driving to pensive and melodic, and his backing vocals add warmth to Kraft’s pointed lyrics. In March of 2022, celebrating ten years together as a band, The Patti Fiasco performed with the Cheyenne Symphony Orchestra at the Historic Lincoln Theatre.
Reinvigorated by a new rhythm section and a “best yet” collection of new songs, The Patti Fiasco is set to release their first new music since 2016 beginning in Spring of 2024. Their 2016 release, “Saved By Rock and Roll” was SCENE MAGAZINE’S Album of the Year. Their 2013 release, “Small Town Lights,” has garnered multiple accolades, including Wyoming Public Radio’s Best Regional Album award, FoCoMA’s Best Album award, and high positioning on the Colorado charts. It finished in the top 10 most-played Colorado records of 2013. The single of the same name received national radio play and was featured in the film “Whensday.” “Nobody’s Girl,” from the band’s self-titled 2011 debut, was that year’s top-spun single in Colorado.
Legendary artist Graham Nash, as a founding member of both the Hollies and Crosby, Stills and Nash, is a two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee who has seen rock history unfold at some of its seminal moments – from the launch of the British Invasion (that’s him on-screen in 1967, eyewitness to the Beatles global broadcast performance of “All You Need Is Love” from Abbey Road studios) to the birth of the Laurel Canyon movement a year later. An extraordinary Grammy Award® winning renaissance artist – and self-described “simple man” – Nash was inducted twice into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, for his work with CSN and his work as a solo artist, beginning with two landmark albums, Songs For Beginners and Wild Tales.
Towering above virtually everything that Graham Nash has accomplished in his long and multi-faceted career, stands the litany of songs that he has written and introduced to the soundtrack of our lives for nearly six decades. Nash’s remarkable body of work began with his contributions to the Hollies opus from 1964 to ’68, including “Stop Stop Stop,” “On A Carousel,” “Carrie Anne,” “King Midas In Reverse,” and “Jennifer Eccles,” and continues all the way to Now (2023), his most recent solo album.
The original classic union of Crosby, Stills & Nash (& Young) lasted but twenty months. Yet their songs are lightning rods embedded in our DNA, starting with Nash’s “Marrakesh Express,” “Pre-Road Downs” and “Lady Of the Island,” from the first Crosby, Stills & Nash LP (1969). On CSNY’s Déjà Vu (1970), Nash’s iconic “Teach Your Children” and “Our House” (for Joni Mitchell) beseeched us to hold love tightly, to fend off the madness that was on its way.
Nash’s career as a solo artist took flight in 1971, with the two aforementioned albums further showcasing the depths of his abilities as a singer and songwriter: his solo debut Songs For Beginners (with “Chicago/We Can Change the World” and “Military Madness”), and Wild Tales released in 1974 (with “Prison Song,” “Oh! Camil,” and “You’ll Never Be the Same”).
The most resilient, long-lived and productive partnership to emerge from the CSNY camp was launched (before Nash’s Wild Tales) with the eponymously titled Graham Nash/David Crosby (1972), bookended by Nash’s “Southbound Train” as the opening track and “Immigration Man” as the closer. The duo contributed further to the soundtrack of the ’70s on their back-to-back Lps, Wind On the Water (1975) and Whistling Down the Wire (1976).
Nash’s passionate voice continues to be heard in support of peace, and social and environmental justice. The No Nukes/Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) concerts he organized with Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt in 1979 remain seminal benefit events.
In September 2013, Nash released his long-awaited autobiography Wild Tales, which landed him on the New York Times Best Sellers list. In recognition for his contributions as a musician and philanthropist, Nash was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Queen Elizabeth. While continually building his musical legacy, Nash is also an internationally renowned photographer and visual artist whose work has been shown in galleries and museums worldwide. A collection of his photos is featured in the book A Life in Focus: The Photography of Graham Nash which was released in November 2021 by Insight Editions.
The first time banjo legend Béla Fleck, tabla master Zakir Hussain, and double bass virtuoso Edgar Meyer got together to make an album, it was to write, not to play.
When Fleck and Meyer were looking for a third partner for a triple concerto they had been commissioned to write to mark the opening of Nashville’s Schermerhorn Symphony Center, they thought of Hussain, who was quite interested in orchestral writing. “We thought we could learn a whole lot from this guy!” says Béla. The result was The Melody of Rhythm (2009), recorded with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin.
It wasn’t until the three began touring to promote the album that the trio’s true potential became apparent. Although each had a base in a different musical realm — bluegrass for Fleck, Indian classical music for Hussain, and Western classical music for Meyer — they shared a gift for improvisation as well as an ability to reach across musical genres as casually as neighbors might chat over a backyard fence.” When we are performing on stage, in composing mode or creating mode, we are basically having a conversation,” says Hussain. “So the music emerges as we speak.”
Hence As We Speak, an album that not only showcases the group’s breathtaking abilities as instrumentalists, but underscores the wide range of musical influences at their command. Across a dozen tracks, the group glides easily between the cerebral complexity of Indian rhythm and the gut-level groove of a funky bass line, sounding equally at home with the rigors of raga.
Adding to that magic is Rakesh Chaurasia, who plays bansuri, an Indian bamboo flute. When the trio was touring India, Hussain — who knew Rakesh through his uncle, Indian flute legend Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia — invited the younger flautist to sit in, and the chemistry was immediately apparent. “I think we wanted to see if we could do something a little more organic with just a small group,” says Meyer. “And to have somebody who plays as beautifully as Rakesh join us really opened it up to a more lyrical and melodic situation.”
“What I think is good about this quartet is that everybody has to stretch in the direction of the other people,” adds Fleck. “To me, a collaboration where nobody changes is not a collaboration. It’s a mashup. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But I like a collaboration where I have to learn a bunch of new things from the other people. And in this case, I’m learning like crazy.”
Béla Fleck
Few musicians in any category seem as uncategorizable as Béla Fleck. After initially making his mark with the progressive bluegrass group New Grass Revival, Fleck proceeded to take his instrument, as New York Times critic Jon Pareles noted, “to some very unlikely places.” He formed the Flecktones, a groundbreaking group whose repertoire ranged from fusion to Bach; the group celebrates its 46th anniversary this year. In addition, he has played jazz with Chick Corea, American roots with his partner, banjoist Abigail Washburn, written concertos for banjo and orchestra, and created a documentary film and album, Throw Down Your Heart, that examined the banjo’s African roots. Along the way, he has won 16 Grammys across 10 categories.
Zakir Hussain
The pre-eminent classical tabla virtuoso of our time, Zakir Hussain is appreciated as one of the world’s most esteemed and influential musicians, one whose mastery of his percussion instrument has taken it to a new level, transcending cultures and national borders. A child prodigy, accompanying India’s greatest musicians and dancers from his early years, and touring internationally while still in his teens, Zakir has been at the helm of many genre-defying collaborations including Shakti, Remember Shakti, Masters of Percussion, Diga, Tabla Beat Science, CrossCurrents, Sangam and Grammy-award winners Planet Drum and Global Drum Project. A revered composer and educator, Zakir is the recipient of countless honors, most recently the 2022 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy, the 2022 Aga Khan Music Award for Lifetime Achievement, and in January, 2023, the title of Padma Vibhushan, India’s second highest civilian award.
Edgar Meyer
Aptly described by The New Yorker as “the most remarkable virtuoso in the relatively un-chronicled history of his instrument,” double bassist and composer Edgar Meyer is at home in a broad spectrum of musical styles. A MacArthur Fellow and Avery Fisher Prize winner, he is eminently at home within classical music, both performing traditional works and also his significant catalog of original solo, chamber, and orchestral pieces. His 30-year relationship with Yo-Yo Ma has yielded seven recordings together, and his upcoming projects include a duo recording with jazz bassist Christian McBride and a recording of all four of his concertos with the Knights and the Scottish Ensemble, produced by Chis Thile.
Rakesh Chaurasia
Like Zakir Hussain, Rakesh Chaurasia comes from Indian classical music royalty. His uncle, Pandit Hariprasad Chaursia, is widely considered the greatest bansuri player in India, and Rakesh — who started playing at age five — is deemed his most brilliant student. Not only has he mastered the techniques of Indian classical music, he has developed additional techniques allowing him to venture into other styles of playing, particularly with his crossover band Rakesh and Friends. A composer as well as flautist, he has written and performed on numerous Indian movie soundtracks, and in 2007 was awarded the Indian Music Academy Award.
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