Crescent and Frost

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2005

When one thinks of New York City, the thoughts of frenzied citizens, countless skyscrapers and a myriad of taxis come to mind. However, the city also has a thriving acoustic folk music scene in which band Crescent and Frost have found their niche. Fortunately, this well-kept secret from New York is about to be released in Kingston.

"We're definitely influenced by living in the city, it's hard not to be ... but at the same time, I feel like this group of people would have made the same music anywhere," says Dan Marcus, guitarist and composer for the New York City-based Crescent and Frost, which will be playing at The Grad Club tonight with songs from their sophomore album, Open Doors.

"We all gravitated [to New York City] because of ... all the great musicians and all that is going on there," Marcus said in an interview this week with the Journal. "We've built up a great audience, so the shows here are always great."

New York City is known for a very diverse music scene, and Kingston is about to get a taste of what the Lower East Side has known and loved for years.

In the world of music, homogenization inevitably comes with the success of many artists. While succumbing to this factor may improve a group's success, it often comes at the cost of their musical integrity. Crescent and Frost, however, have continued to thrive simply by being themselves and making music that comes from the heart. While the band combines elements of pop, folk and bluegrass, Marcus describes their sound more accurately as "Americana." The result of this eclectic combination is refreshingly unique, albeit somewhat difficult to pin a genre label to.

The group was started three years ago by Dan Marcus and Maryann Fennimore, who first met in Pittsburgh. Fennimore is the band's vocalist and lyricist, and delivers intimate lyrics that detail "love and all the problems that come along with it," according to Marcus. The quartet is completed by guitarist Rich Hinman and Canadian bassist Jason Mercer, all of whom met in separate ways but were ultimately drawn together by their passion for music. While creating a distinctly individual sound of their own, the band also draws a great deal of their inspiration from artists such as Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Alison Krauss.

The primary reason Crescent and Frost will be in Kingston this weekend is for the Ontario Council of Folk Festivals 19th Annual Conference, taking place now until Sunday. In addition to the concert showcase they will be presenting to the Council of Folk Festivals on Saturday night at the Beaver Suite, they will also be making their second appearance at The Grad Club tonight with The Lady Racers, before continuing with their tour promoting Open Doors.

Despite hailing from the Big Apple, the band has an affinity for Canada and enjoys an occasional break from the city that never sleeps.

"I like Canada because I spent a lot of my summers there at camp. Every time we go to Canada, we're just really warmly received and our music seems to make sense there," Marcus said. "It's also nice to get away from the city, since we're not necessarily big city people at heart."

Marcus also admitted the band has come a long way since their debut album, Pennsylvania.

"When we made our first record, we had only been playing together for a few months. The second record, [Open Doors] was made after we had time to find an identity and develop as a group."

The success of that identity was demonstrated recently when folk and bluegrass legend Bill Keith agreed to work with them and contribute to Open Doors.

"It was incredible. He is one of a kind and such an incredible musician," Marcus said. "To just have a chance to be around him was a total privilege ... he is a genius and he's been doing it for so long."

Nevertheless, the band has maintained a consistency in their sound and avoided the need for a drummer.

"It's difficult to find a drummer that doesn't want to play loud," joked Marcus. "We're just a quiet band and we can get it done without [a drummer]."

Drummer or no drummer, Crescent and Frost is definitely worth checking out tonight. - By Desmond Carter, Staff Writer; Queen's Journal - The Campus Newspaper of Queen's University

August 11th, 2005

New York's best kept roots secret no longer, Crescent and Frost (Saturday August 20 at 11 a.m., Nutshell Music stage) is a band on the move. The musical brainchild of guitarist Daniel Marcus and vocalist Maryanne Fennimore (whose songwriting rivals that of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings), Crescent and Frost has made quite an impression all across North America with its fresh, urban take on old time mountain music.

They are currently on the road along with six-string maverick Rich Hinman and bassist Jason Mercer behind a sophomore release, Open Doors, twang-tinged tunes of heartbreak and hope flecked with bluegrass, country, folk and pop.

"I know that sometimes people aren't quite sure what to call our music, but that's all right," says Marcus of the band's sweet, cosmopolitan sound. "We don't really feel any restraints, particularly with this new record. I think we grew considerably with respect to our songwriting this time around. We just wrote what we were feeling, and treated the songs how we saw fit." - Steve Baylin - Ottawa Xpress

July 21, 2005

They may play a strain of what's known as Americana, but Brooklyn alt-folk act Crescent and Frost has a surprising confession: they're Canucks at heart.

"Any show in Canada is the best. We love it and we want to be Canadians," declares singer Maryann Fennimore. "If it wasn't so cold, we would want to be there all the time."

And it isn't just our health care system that attracts Fennimore, 27, and guitarist Daniel Marcus, 30, the principal songwriters behind Crescent and Frost, which also includes musicians Jason Mercer (an actual Canadian who logged time in the Bourbon Tabernacle Choir before relocating to New York City) and Rich Hinman in its live lineup.

Marcus, who attended summer camp in Ontario while growing up, says he picked up many of his influences north of the border. "A lot of my development as a person is due to Canadians, so I love them to bits. And as far as music was concerned, I first started listening to Neil Young, and we both love Joni Mitchell," he notes. "So, in a way, our music is really Canadian music."

While Crescent and Frost's old-time-y sound - marked by Fennimore's sweet, twangy vocals and Marcus's strummy guitar - certainly owes a debt to the American folk and country music of yesteryear, their fresh approach to roots music puts them on par with such Canadians as Sarah Harmer, the Be Good Tanyas and Chris Brown and Kate Fenner (all of whom are friends).

Thanks to their acoustic bent and use of traditional instrumentation such as banjo and mandolin, Crescent and Frost (named after the Brooklyn streets Fennimore and Marcus used to live on) is often dubbed urban bluegrass, but the duo is having none of it.

"I really don't think you can call our music bluegrass," Marcus says. "Sure, there are elements of that music in what we do, but we don't like to be confined to a particular style or sound."

Sure enough, the band mixes elements of folk, country, jazz and pop on their new Open Doors album, recorded with co-producer/engineer Tom Durack (The B-52s) following their first release, Pennsylvania.

"Our first record was totally off the cuff, recorded in my friend's living room," Marcus explains. "Open Doors was planned out from beginning to end. We really took our time and tried to do everything the way we wanted it. So it was a totally different and challenging experience, but very rewarding. We're both very happy with it."

The wistful songs may sound rustic thanks to Marcus's melancholy melodies, but derive their appeal from a universal theme.

"Mainly heartbreak and sadness," laughs Fennimore. "I like to write songs about people who are absolutely crushed and then getting better. But they've all got a light at the end of the tunnel."

But what's Fennimore going to write about now that she's newly engaged?

"I might have to start hanging out with people in lousy relationships and grill them for material," she deadpans.

On stage, Fennimore's bubbly banter is just as entertaining as the music itself - you'd never know she was about to unleash a torrent of sweet sorrow. Her charming stage presence and the live quartet's stellar musicianship win over audiences not always used to the unplugged experience.

"We love it," Fennimore says of being an acoustic act. "It's sort of like the person at the crazy party who takes out a guitar, and everyone sort of winds up over by the guitar. It's magnetic and fiery in all its loveliness."

"Even though we're acoustic, we can rock," Marcus insists. "And we play with a lot of energy, so we keep the audience engaged during our live show."

Fennimore and Marcus schedule any touring around their day jobs. Luckily, both love what they do - Fennimore is a freelance illustrator and Marcus teaches music in the public school system. But come summertime, they're a popular draw on the festival circuit - including a sold-out gig at Hillside in Guelph this weekend (if you're not among the lucky ones with tickets, you can still check out the band at two other local dates), and the Ottawa Folk Festival in August.

After a harrowing stop in North Carolina recently (they'd driven eight hours to play an awful show, only to end up sleeping in a seemingly abandoned house strewn with garbage and getting stuck in traffic for hours on the way home), Fennimore and Marcus can't wait to get back to their true home and native land.

"If any Canadians want to adopt us, we're totally open to that," Fennimore says. "You have no idea how serious I am." - By Tabassum Siddiqui

Crescent and Frost pickin' into the future

July 21, 2005

When people think of Brooklyn, they think of Spike Lee, the Beastie Boys and the Dodgers. Associating the famed borough with bluegrass music is as unlikely as a game at Ebbets Field, but if Crescent and Frost have their way, it might just become the next hotbed of Americana music.

Some serious questions need to be answered first like what the hell is a young, hip duo doing playing bluegrass music in, of all places, Brooklyn?

"Well, I'm from Pittsburgh," Daniel Marcus offers coyly, as if that makes it all clear. "Maryann was born in Brooklyn but raised in Pittsburgh, and New York seemed like a good place to call home."

Maryann Fennimore is the lead singer-lyricist half of this dynamic duo, while Marcus picks away on the six-string and writes all the music. But I'm still looking for an answer to my first question.

"Well, Pittsburgh is a real classic rock town, so I was into Zeppelin and all that stuff growing up, which I still like. It was the folksy-acoustic Neil Young songs that got me into this type of music, although at the time I didn't listen to bluegrass, just rock guys playing in that style. I studied jazz in university and for a time thought that was the route I'd take, but after jamming with some people who were playing bluegrass, I was hooked."

After corralling Fennimore, a design school grad and freelance illustrator, the most unlikely of roots combos was born.

While they don't have the backwoods cred of players from, say, the Smoky Mountains, their city smarts have translated into one of the most sophisticated and contemporary bluegrass bands around. Fennimore has a keen sense of humour and writes about real life from the perspective of a real woman. So if you're looking for the traditional "my crops are dust, my hubby's drunk" banter, look elsewhere.

Maybe it's their affection for the singer/songwriter types like Joni Mitchell that makes it hard to pin them down as bluegrass artists. On their latest disc, Open Doors, there is a definite shift toward poppy, radio-friendly tunes that, with any luck, may find them eclipsing Alison Krauss and the Be Good Tanyas.

Yet when you realize that the album features legendary banjoist Bill "Brad" Keith, formerly in the trailblazing Bill Monroe group, it's clear Crescent and Frost are still years away from doing Dixie Chicks covers.

"I'm not one to worry about the genre thing, but there is a real need for people to categorize music, and I think we're called a bluegrass band for lack of a better word. For us, it's not a conscious decision to be bluegrass per se, it's just that it is what it is. You're a writer how about coming up with a name for it?"

Granted, "Americana," "traditional," "roots" and "old-time" all sound like something you were forced to learn about from some blue-haired bespectacled music theory teacher. How about "cosmo-country"?

On Open Doors, Bill "Brad" Keith makes a guest appearance on banjo. He played with Bill Monroe, who's not called "the father of bluegrass" for nothing. Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs cut their teeth with Monroe, who wrote the classic Blue Moon Of Kentucky, which made some guy called Presley pretty famous.

Monroe pioneered what we today call bluegrass by breaking away from traditional chord changes and experimenting with open tunings, somehow making it still sound familiar. That, in a nutshell, is what Crescent and Frost are doing, too.

"Wow, I never even thought about it that way," says Marcus, sounding as if he truly wished he had. "It was a real honour having him play with us, and he was such a sweet man. I actually met him in California and was lucky enough to get to spend a weekend with him, and when I contacted him for this album, he was more than happy to join in.

"He made us all feel at ease, and best of all, he played for scale!" - By BRENT RAYNOR - Now Magazine

Crescent and Frost
Opening Doors
By Justin Hopper
June 2, 2005

New York acoustic project Crescent and Frost started out as perhaps more coffeehouse experiment than band - singer Maryann Fennimore and guitarist Daniel Marcus exploring their joint love of modern singer-songwriters and hills-old bluegrass. But since the release of full-length debut Pennsylvania, C&F has solidified itself as a band proper, with, like, electric guitars and everything. It's a transition that was apparent on PA, but which has arrived on Open Doors - a sophomore disc that's half truly inspired songwriting and arranging, half gambit for major triple-A radio success, and all heartbreak-tinged sweetness and light.

There's still the old nods and instrumental fervor: "Leaving Wins My Heart" is one of the best new bluegrass songs for ages, and given fewer chords, "Katie" could almost be "nouveau old-time." But there's also a new attraction to triple-A songwriterism, like on the title track's World Café bounce. The disc's guest list provides a clue to the multidirectional outlook Crescent and Frost has taken: Young Austin singer-songwriter Ana Egge, cultish Australian expat producer Kerryn Tolhurst and legendary Bill Monroe banjoist Bill "Brad" Keith all get hauled in.

But for the most part, Crescent and Frost stick to what they know best: Fennimore's picture-perfect voice, Marcus's softly intricate and articulate acoustic guitar playing, and the subtly complex lyrical and musical compositions of the two together. And that's where Open Doors comes up with its best songs, such as the melancholy "Carpenter's Boat" and "Somebody Somewhere," a beautiful and unique illustration of the flipside of the standard out-on-the-road- and-missing-you song (which we all know is really the I-just-shagged-a-groupie-and-feel-minor-league-guilt song). It's just the kind of anti-music-biz rant one would expect from C&F - poignant, elegant and buoyant even in its own defeat. - Pittsburgh City Paper

Crescent and Frost's Sweet Songcraft
by Pamela Murray Winters

The Washington Post
Wednesday, August 11, 2004; Page C09


"She should just talk," said one audience member between fits of laughter at Maryann Fennimore of the group Crescent and Frost.

The four-piece combo -- Americana, as broad and idiosyncratic as the continent -- played a short but sweet set at Iota on Monday, its charming songs punctuated by Fennimore's stream-of-consciousness babble. Fennimore suggested a new terror-threat level: periwinkle. She gave a "shout-out" to the great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who died last week. She told of having an auto mechanic as a cat sitter. And she plugged the group's maiden CD, "Pennsylvania": "You can give presents to people early for the holidays. You might not even like them by Christmas." - The Washington Post