Monday, March 30, 2009

Grammy award-winning banjo player Alison Brown and her Quartet will perform at 8 p.m. on Friday, April 17 in Kenan Auditorium as part of the UNCW Arts in Action Performance Series. The Alison Brown Quartet (banjo, piano, bass and drums) offers up an astonishingly original instrumental sound that blends jazz, bluegrass, Latin and folk music, pushing the banjo out of its familiar Appalachian settings and into new musical territory. This performance replaces the concert originally scheduled with Brazilian singer CéU for this same date.

"Like James Taylor's voice or B.B. King's guitar, Alison Brown's banjo is an instrument possessed of a unique sonic signature and an inescapable beauty," says Billboard.

Alison Brown began her music career at a young age, playing banjo in several southern California bands alongside fiddler Stuart Duncan as a teenager. After graduating from high school, bluegrass took a backseat while Brown attended Harvard University, earned an MBA from UCLA, and worked as an investment banker.

After taking a hiatus to return to composing and recording music, Brown assembled the material for her solo debut. While it heralded a new voice on the banjo, Simple Pleasures, also owed much to the California-based jazz/bluegrass hybrid sound pioneered by mandolinist David Grisman, who produced the album. Simple Pleasures earned a Grammy nomination, and Brown went on to make a total of five records for Vanguard as a bandleader and composer. Her most recent CD, Stolen Moments, features guest artists Sam Bush, John Doyle, Stuart Duncan, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and others and her Grammy-winning Fair Weather won Best Country Instrumental Performance in 2000.

After several tours with Alison Krauss and Michelle Shocked, Brown put her business skills to work, founding Compass Records. The internationally recognized Compass Records Group oversees more than 600 releases from the Compass Records, Green Linnet and Mulligan Records catalogs and has been called by Billboard Magazine "one of the greatest independent labels of the last decade."

Brown tours internationally with the Alison Brown Quartet and currently serves as an adjunct professor at Vanderbilt University`s Blair School of Music. She has been a guest speaker at Harvard Business School, Dartmouth`s Amos Tuck School, and the University of Colorado Boulder, and has been featured on CBS` Sunday Morning, National Public Radio`s All Things Considered and Weekend Edition and BET`s Jazz Central.

BOX OFFICE AND TICKET INFORMATION
Tickets to the performance are $6 for UNCW students; $8 for non-UNCW students; $16 for senior citizens and UNCW employees; and $20 for the general public. Group discount available. Call Kenan Box Office at 910.962.3500 or 800.732.3643 outside the Wilmington area or visit www.uncw.edu/presents. Box office hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Friday and one hour prior to the event.

About the Arts in Action Performance Series
Sponsored by UNCW Presents, the Arts in Action Performance Series seeks to culturally enrich, educate and entertain both students and the general public through the presentation of diverse programs featuring professional, high-quality performing artists. For more information, please visit www.uncw.edu/presents.

Media Contact: Shannon Hooker, 910.962.7600