02-12 Jarosz_GP 1/30/14 3:27 PM Page 1 Sponsored by Prudential Investment Management Wednesday Evening, February 12, 2014, at 8:30 Sarah Jarosz & The Milk Carton Kids Sarah Jarosz , Octave Mandolin, Mandolin, Banjo, Guitar, and Vocals (Lincoln Center debut) with Jeremy Kittel, Violin ; Nathaniel Smith, Cello ; and Paul Kowert, Bass The Milk Carton Kids (Lincoln Center debut) Kenneth Pattengale , Guitar and Vocals Joey Ryan , Guitar and Vocals This evening’s program is approximately 75 minutes long and will be performed without intermission. Major support for Lincoln Center’s American Songbook is provided by Fisher Brothers, In Memory of Richard L. Fisher; and Amy & Joseph Perella. Wine generously donated by William Hill Estate Winery, Official Wine of Lincoln Center. This performance is made possible in part by the Josie Robertson Fund for Lincoln Center. The Allen Room Please make certain your cellular phone, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall pager, or watch alarm is switched off. 02-12 Jarosz_GP 1/30/14 3:27 PM Page 2 Lincoln Center Additional support for Lincoln Center’s American Upcoming American Songbook Events Songbook is provided by The Brown Foundation, Inc., in The Allen Room : of Houston, The DuBose and Dorothy Heyward Memorial Fund, The Shubert Foundation, Jill and Thursday Evening, February 13, at 8:30 Irwin Cohen, The G & A Foundation, Inc., Great The Songs of Henry Krieger Performers Circle, Chairman’s Council, and Friends with Erin Davie, Charity Dawson, Darius de Haas, of Lincoln Center. Joshua Henry, Matthew Hydzik, Rebecca Luker, Emily Padgett, Alice Ripley, Keala Settle, & Endowment support is provided by Bank of America. Lillias White Public support is provided by the New York State Friday Evening, February 14, at 8:30 Council on the Arts. Beth Orton Artist catering is provided by Zabar’s and Saturday Evening, February 15, at 7:30 and 9:30 Zabars.com. Jonathan Groff MetLife is the National Sponsor of Lincoln Center. Wednesday Evening, February 19, at 8:30 Marty Stuart & Connie Smith Movado is an Official Sponsor of Lincoln Center. Thursday Evening, February 20, at 7:30 and 9:30 United Airlines is the Official Airline of Lincoln Portraits of Joni: Jessica Molaskey Sings Center. Joni Mitchell WABC-TV is the Official Broadcast Partner of Friday Evening, February 21, at 8:30 Lincoln Center. Aoife O’Donovan William Hill Estate Winery is the Official Wine of Saturday Evening, February 22, at 8:30 Lincoln Center. Ann Harada Wednesday Evening, March 5, at 8:30 Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music: The 1920s Thursday Evening, March 6, at 8:30 Deer Tick (limited availability) Friday Evening, March 7, at 7:30 and 9:30 Jim Caruso’s Cast Party Goes to the Movies with Billy Stritch, featuring Marilyn Maye, Jane Monheit, Christina Bianco, & Jeffry Denman The Allen Room is located in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall. For tickets, call (212) 721-6500 or visit AmericanSongbook.org. Call the Lincoln Center Info Request Line at (212) 875-5766 or visit AmericanSongbook.org for complete program information. Join the conversation: #LCSongbook We would like to remind you that the sound of coughing and rustling paper might distract the performers and your fellow audience members. In consideration of the performing artists and members of the audience, those who must leave before the end of the performance are asked to do so between pieces. The taking of photographs and the use of recording equipment are not allowed in the building. 02-12 Jarosz_GP 1/30/14 3:27 PM Page 3 Lincoln Center Notes on the Program by Michael Hill Built Up by the Bones: Sarah Jarosz’s New American Roots Music Multi-instrumentalist, singer, and songwriter Sarah Jarosz signed with respected indepen - dent label Sugar Hill when she was just 16, a mere six years ago. But as National Public Radio has put it, the versatile star “seemed to emerge fully formed.” Indeed, when the Austin native released her debut disc Song Up in Her Head in 2009, the just-turned-18- year-old garnered her first Grammy nomination, Best Country Instrumental Performance, for the song “Mansinneedof.” With the release of her third and most ambitious studio effort, Build Me Up from Bones , Jarosz is back on the Grammy nominees list, with nods for Best Folk Album and Best American Roots Song for the self-penned title track. Jarosz is a prodigious musician, who first picked up the mandolin at the age of ten; she also mastered the clawhammer banjo and the guitar. She recounted to Texas Monthly how she went, around that time, to see Nickel Creek in concert and waited after the show to get an autograph from another former child prodigy, mandolinist Chris Thile, who left her with the scribbled words, “Let’s jam sometime.” He wasn’t kidding: Thile has not only performed with Jarosz on stage, but has guest-starred on all three of her discs, along with such country, folk, and bluegrass luminaries as singers Shawn Colvin, Aoife O’Donovan, and Vince Gill; guitarists Jerry Douglas and Darrell Scott; violinist Stuart Duncan; banjo player Béla Fleck; and various members of the Punch Brothers. (The Punch Brothers backed Jarosz on a genre-expanding rendition of Radiohead’s “The Tourist” for her 2011 sophomore disc, Follow Me Down .) Though her youthful career was off to an auspicious start, Jarosz chose to set aside the life of a full-time touring musician to enroll at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, performing on weekends and on school breaks, and recording as her studies allowed. This was an unconventional path for a budding star, but one that has enriched her songwriting, along with her worldview, as the preternaturally sophisticated Build Me Up from Bones so often proves. Says Jarosz, “I feel like I’ve grown as a person, espe - cially in these last few years. I latched onto music as a child and it became my main way of expressing myself. But through college I got into other creative outlets: art, painting, and poetry. It helped me to come back to music in a deeper way, to follow deeper trails and meanings and feelings.” Reviewing Build Me Up from Bones , the New York Times noted, “Ms. Jarosz is expand - ing her beloved Americana roots in both sound and message. Her lyrics have a mystical streak, projecting love and loneliness across the landscape and the sky. And the string- band heritage matters to her, but so does what she can convey, here and now with her chosen instruments and modern technology, about ‘the way I feel inside.’” The daringly pared-down arrangements of her latest work especially suit the trio format in which Jarosz prefers to work in the studio, with fiddler Alex Hargreaves and cellist Nathaniel Smith. Her cover of Bob Dylan’s “Simple Twist of Fate” features no more than her echo - ing voice and the plucking of a cello, yet Jarosz brings this bittersweet tale to fresh, deeply emotive, cinematically vivid life. She also jazzily reinterprets eccentric folkie Joanna Newsom’s “The Book of Right-On.” 02-12 Jarosz_GP 1/30/14 3:27 PM Page 4 Lincoln Center For critics, fellow musicians, and fans, Sarah Jarosz is now a decidedly established pres - ence on the contemporary roots music scene and beyond. For Jarosz herself, however, it seems like the adventure is just beginning. With Build Me Up from Bones , she says, “I wanted to create a rollercoaster of different sounds, emotions, and feelings, and not one even line…. It feels true to me: unique and new.” Hear Them Loud: The Milk Carton Kids As Joey Ryan, one half of the Milk Carton Kids, tells it, the acoustic guitar-based pair owes its existence to a dead dog—more to the point, to the memoir left behind by an especially thoughtful and forgiving canine, recently struck by a car, that Kenneth Pattengale had con - jured up in a plaintive tune he’d written. As Ryan told the audience of A Prairie Home Companion , he’d first heard “Memoirs of an Owned Dog” at one of Pattengale’s shows in Los Angeles and knew that he had to introduce himself to this singer-songwriter, whom he instantly perceived as a kindred spirit. Though both Pattengale and Ryan had pursued solo careers, touring and releasing several albums independently, they quickly nurtured an almost fraternal connection as harmonizing singers and composers. The pair started out with some front-porch jamming in their Eagle Rock neighborhood of L.A., then decided to re-record their individual songs as a duo in order to “bury” their solo personas for a 2011 disc called Retrospect that they released for free via their website. New co-written songs came soon after that, as Ryan told No Depression . Their first disc as the Milk Carton Kids “was the result of excited and fevered discovery of each other’s processes, and of being at the beginning of something we felt was important.” The resulting Prologue (2011), like Retrospect , was offered as a free download, a gesture both magnanimous and practical: the duo was assiduously building a community across the country via its easily accessible recorded music and a packed touring schedule. Impressed critics soon followed the fans. After the duo appeared at the 2012 edition of South by Southwest, Time cited them as one of a dozen new acts, from a lineup of thou - sands, to watch that year. The New York Times agreed, praising their “sweetly dazzling variation on close-harmony vocals, part Simon and Garfunkel and part Everly Brothers, with occasional acoustic prestidigitation.” The Milk Carton Kids play vintage guitars—for Pattengale, the flat-picking prestidigitator, a 1954 Martin 0-15 guitar; for Ryan, a 1951 Gibson J45—and their tailored suit-and-tie wardrobe recalls folk groups from decades past (though the look would feel just as au courant right now on the streets of Silver Lake or in many parts of Brooklyn).