Early in this trailer, Sam Bush‘s spoken voice comes over a loudspeaker. It rang a special ping of good nostalgia. I hadn’t heard that voice since Holstein’s 35 years ago. In those days I, and my music-obsessed fanboy cohort, knew that whenever we heard Sam Bush’s cool guy stage voice, it was about to be followed by adventurous bluegrass rocked to perfection. This was the drug we had waited months for: Newgrass Revival live. They played maybe twice a year in Chicago at Holstein’s (then the best folk club north of Austin and east of The Troubadour) often with Jethro Burns, the patron saint of all cool guy mandolin players.
This documentary trailer contains no overstatement. Sam Bush was a visionary mandolin virtuoso, a genre-shaking phenomenon as a band leader, a force of nature when playing live, and an inspirer of greats all his life.
Here’s a nifty description of the film at AustralianBluegrass.com.
