The Mammals are Playing at Elderly Instruments

Saturday , January 24, 2004
12:00 pm
Location: Elderly Instruments
in-store performance (free)

Boston's NPR News Station WBUR identified the popular Woodstock, New York-based band as "a new-fashioned string band composed of Michael Merenda, Tao Rodriguez-Seeger [Pete's grandson], and Ruth Ungar [daughter of Jay, the 'Ashokan Farewell' fiddler...]."
Scott Alarik, a folk-music journalist with the Boston Globe [and author of DEEP COMMUNITY: Adventures in the Modern Folk Underground], described The Mammals' music as "wild, mirthful, and masterful." A year later the respected Globe correspondent
called them "a rascally trio" with an "irreverent hipness that makes this band so much fun." Alarik explained that The Mammals'slogan, thought up by Merenda, "perfectly captures what these rabble-rousers are up to: 'TRAD is RAD'."
Dirty Linen [April, 2002] further explained the band's slogan:
"A modern old-time string band may sound like an oxymoron, but that's a good capsule description of The Mammals, a fast-picking, slick-fiddling, modal-singing, multi-instrumental trio..." The review also shares band member Tao's own description of the band: "a contemporary traditional Neanderthal thrash band."
The Washington Post [September, 2002[ added its voice to the many reviewers who've enjoyed The Mammals' old-yet-new "tradition is radical" dichotomy. "The Mammals don't suffer from multiple genre syndrome, they celebrate it....Ruth Ungar [on fiddle and ukes], Michael Merenda [on various banjos], and Tao Rodriguez-
Seeger [on 6- and 12-string guitars] are acoustic traditionalists, to be sure, but the subversive sort."
The Mammals will also perform on Friday at 8 p.m., January 23, 2004, for the Ten Pound Fiddle Coffeehouse audience at the Unitarian Universalist Church in East Lansing, Michigan. Visit www.tenpoundfiddle.org for further information.

Check out recordings we carry featuring The Mammals