Friday 6 December see’s Canadian roots powerhouse duo The Small Glories performing at Torr Vale Mill in New Mills as part of a world tour.
The Small Glories are Cara Luft & JD Edwards, a musical tour-de-force partnership planted on the Canadian Prairies with a stage banter striking a unique balance between slapstick and sermon, these veteran singer-songwriters have a way of making time disappear, rooms shrink, and audiences feel as they are right there on the stage with the band.
Writing the songs, living the songs, performing the songs. It’s not uncommon for listeners to find themselves laughing, dancing, crying, or caught up in a good ol’ fashioned sing-along. “We’re folk singers, we try to write stuff that people can relate to,” says Edwards, whose looming stage presence and penetrating eyes find him the yin to Luft’s petite, snort-laughing yang.
The
material of a Small Glories concert is welcoming in terms of subject, folk-pop
melody and instrumentation – songs of love, loss, and environment, delivered
with soaring, interwoven vocals on various combinations of stomping clawhammer
banjo, guitar and harmonica. However, a Small Glories performance is really
about what happens in-between the songs. “The feedback we get from a lot of
audiences is that it’s not just about the music for them,” Luft says. “It’s the
whole package.”
On record, The Small Glories take the musical synergy honed from hundreds of
shows together, and expand it into a new soundscape amplified by pounding drums
and other textural embellishments which only reinforce the magic of Luft and
Edwards’ innate chemistry — a chemistry labelled the “Lennon-McCartney
syndrome,” by Americana
UK, writing, “Some things just work together… to witness a
performance by The Small Glories is a rare opportunity to experience that
indefinable quality that creates perfection.”
One of only 5 UK dates in the UK leg of their tour for their album release Assiniboine & the Red” which came out in June on Compass/Red House Records.
The Small Glories are supported by the wonderfully talented Fosbrooks who perform traditional British music to accompany their unique step dance routines
Add to this the recently renovated atmospheric venue that is Torr Vale Mill (sited on the banks of the thundering River Goyt in the Torrs Riverside Park opposite the famous Millennium Walkway) then you have all the ingredients for a fantastic night of music in a town that is leading the way in live music !
Tickets are available online or in person from High Street Books and Records in New Mills.