Joseph Decosimo, Luke Richardson, Cleek Schrey
University Lutheran Church
3637 Chestnut St.
Philadelphia
Nov. 8, 2025
The fine folks at Bowerbird presented this past weekend an intimate night of stellar acoustic music, the players on tour en route to the Brooklyn Folk Festival. Joseph Decosimo (fiddle, banjo, voice), Luke Richardson (banjo, harmonica, voice), and Cleek Schrey (hardanger d’amore, pump organ) play music that is fundamentally rooted in old-time traditional fiddle and banjo tunes, derived from Appalachian sources. (Much of their repertoire, particularly toward the end of the set, comes from the late Clyde Davenport, a renowned fiddle and banjo player — and National Heritage Endowment recipient — hailing from Kentucky.) From tune to tune, the three longtime friends and collaborators switched instruments and roles, shifting around the stage and the room; at times, only one played as the others stopped and listened admiringly. Completely unamplified, they were free to roam about the space, feeling out the acoustics and sight lines in different spots, attuned to spontaneity’s tug.
The instruments themselves were special, some humble – a standard G harmonica, a junky banjo belonging to Decosimo beloved by the trio for its great sound – others unique and notable: another banjo made from a gourd, Schrey’s hardanger d’amore. The hardanger is a tiramisu of a fiddle: understrings throb sympathetically as the others push air. Its sound hits the ear in a distinct way, a ringing halo powdered around the fiddling. (As the trio’s 2024 album Beehive Cathedral title suggests that droning buzziness, so does Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh and Mick O’Brien’s 2011 album Deadly Buzz, which also features the hardanger; for an Irish take on this sort of flavor, I highly recommend it. I suspect that the pipes and reeds of trad Irish music, and the chordless nature of the tunes, may be a point of inspiration for the Beehive Cathedral approach.) Most of all, that pump organ filled the space with drone and bouncy action, an unusual and compelling way to accompany their reels and breakdowns.
During one particularly memorable song, Decosimo asked us to sing or hum the pitch D while he sang a ballad about a dog; the whole space swelled with the given note, like a lung, Decosimo’s friendly tenor gently sliding through at all. It was impossible to totally differentiate between the various voices in our group: the sound became a gorgeous sum, a pump organ made of life. (As an aside: I wonder if there’s a hyperphantasia of listening, a person who could hear precisely how many people are singing in a moment like this.) The instrumental tunes ran the gamut: driving backbeats from banjos frailed or up-picked, syncopated fiddling that played with time – “Drunken Hiccups” like Dilla Time, even – got the room grooving. Even a rare Appalachian jig made an appearance. If you’re unfamiliar with old-time music, these guys are among its foremost players, and in their hands the tunes are unobstructed streams of melodic variation and wit.
If traditional music is always evocative of historical time, whatever else it evokes is a matter of style. The music these three artists make together, to my ear, is hazy and phantasmagoric, like a double exposure of two scenes connected by unrealized dream logic; the chapel, with its high ceilings and gauzy pink light, enhanced that feeling tremendously. It’s similar to the way this music would sound far off in the distance, a little out of focus and unutterable, as though you were approaching mid-story, or like the feeling of a memory coming back to you, gradual and fuzzy, your mind sketching lines between stars. Decosimo, Richardson and Schrey are not interested in revival so much as renewal and reinterpretation; their performances are imbued not merely with music recalled, but music reimagined, capturing that initial first-blush feeling of learning a great old tune, fulfilling the promise of that feeling by taking you there with them, rephrasing what they heard, out of their heads and into the air between you.
