The Tennessee blueglass fusion band played at Starr's Cave and Donnellson's American Legion over the weekend.
Not even Old Man Winter at his crankiest could keep southeast Iowa banjo fans home this weekend when a quartet of Tennessee jazz-grass boys pulled full houses this weekend.
Circus No. 9 is the freshest thing out of Nashville since Johnny Cash.
Yeah, we still like Brooks and Dunn and Keith Urban and the rest of those old guys, but the Circus kids are creating genuinely new music, and for that, we're grateful.
Circus No. 9 performed a mini southeast Iowa circuit beginning Thursday at Cafe Paradiso in Fairfield, continuing Friday at Starr's Cave Nature Center in Burlington and wrapping up at Music Under the Water Tower in the Donnellson American Legion hall.
A bar, a loft gorged with stuffed animals and a backroad potluck room: What a perfect way to welcome someone to Iowa.
In the stuffed animal chamber — we're not talking about the patrons here — the band opened with a mandolin-themed instrumental running on rails not forged of standard chord changes.
Thomas Cassell is the 2016 Rockygrass mandolin champion and it was easy to see why: Not only does Cassell trip lightly through his parts and solos, he keeps the band tight with his rhythmic playing.
Cassell is 19 years old, "almost twenty."
"Here's the backbeat, boys," his fingers sang. Cassell is why Circus needs no drummer — as long as you include the other half of the rhythm section, bassist Vince Ilagan.
Guitarist Jed Clark couldn't make this tour — a hot date in Hendersonville, maybe? — but he wasn't missed: replacement six-picker Ben Garnett was no boat anchor bystander; indeed, his energy and solos were a big part of both shows being special events at the Cave and Tower.
Then there's Matthew Davis on five-string. He's the 2016 National Banjo Champion and 2017 Rockygrass Banjo Champion.
Davis is 18 Earth years old, but almost 80 in terms of musical talent. He was born and raised on the planet BelaFleck in the Bluejazz constellation.
Davis started out on piano when he was five, and that training shows in his picking work. This is no back porch twanger doing the "Deliverance" theme.
Circus No. 9 are the Country Joe and the Fish of their generation, soaring over new ground but, like the Fish, never losing touch with the people who come to see them swimming out of the mainstream.
"Does anybody out here like Merle Haggard?" Davis teased the Cave Crowd before launching "The Bottle Let Me Down."
Gazing upward during his solos, Davis looked a bit like a young Kevin Costner searching for the meaning of life, maybe, or a late arrival from O'Hare or a college student trying to remember an algebra algorithm during a final exam.
And Davis was always smiling.
He smiled as he slid into another Haggard song, "Closing Time," singing, "This old smoke-filled bar ain't something I'm used to" and the crowd howled at the very thought of it.
A trip through "Highland" from Davis's CD "New World" — the only one on the merch table; Circus No. 9 has yet to release an album, but they have one in the works. On "Highland," Davis danced up and down his fretboard, always searching the sky for inspiration, or perhaps that elusive lost chord.
This band made sweet music, John Hartford-nuanced, melodic, wistful.
Garnett introed a post-Vaudeville, pre-Roaring Twenties chestnut, "After You're Gone," saying, "Here's a song from 1910 or '20 — you guys know it."
The audience grayheads nodded and grinned in understanding. Garnett and Ilagan slid into the offstage shadows while Davis and Cassell worked their way through a beautifully complex Davis duet, "St. Luke."
One last full-band tour de force and the night was done; the stuffed swan sailed silently overhead.
Maybe that's what Davis was smiling at.
Next up for the Cave-Tower duo arrives Feb. 2: Award-winning Switchback returns. Brian FitzGerald and Martin McCormack weld traditional Celtic and original Americana into their distinct Irish Midwestern sound.