Boulder, CO · bluegrass · jam

Leftover Salmon

2 upcoming festivals ↓

Colorado's original slamgrass band, three decades of bluegrass picking spliced with Cajun, zydeco and jam-band sprawl.

Leftover Salmon came together in Boulder in 1989, when members of the Left Hand String Band and the Salmon Heads combined for a New Year's Eve gig and kept going. Vince Herman on guitar and Drew Emmitt on mandolin and fiddle have anchored the group ever since, and Herman's coinage for the sound, polyethnic Cajun slamgrass, stuck as shorthand for what happens when string-band instruments get played with electric-band volume and length. Banjo player Mark Vann, a founding member, died of cancer in 2002.

Live, the band leans on long improvised passages, washboard and accordion turns, and a habit of dropping rock and country covers into the middle of a fiddle tune.

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