Music of the Mountains: Where to go and what to see this week featuring Brett Kretzer and Scott Slay

Send us Fan MailLISTEN: Brett Kretzer grew up in Maryland and lived in a few East Coast states before moving to Colorado.He’s been playing music since he was six when his mother forced him to take piano lessons. While he gave up after about a year, he decided at the age of nine that he wanted to learn the guitar. When his brother became interested in playing the guitar as well (thanks to his interest in Kretzer’s lessons), Kretzer learned the drums so that the two could play together. They both started various bands in middle and high school, transitioning from rock to more hardcore music like punk and finally to metal.After college, Kretzer also fell into the world of bluegrass. He started learning the mandolin when he was about 21, and he’s been playing bluegrass ever since.He remembers Led Zeppelin as the first band that had a major influence on him, as well as The Beatles and bluegrass influences such as Del McCoury, Hot Rize, and The Punch Brothers.He loves it when the crowd is attentive and invested in the music, as everyone involved can forget about everything but the music for a little bit. Recently, he’s loved arranging public-domain bluegrass songs more than writing them from scratch, and he also teaches mandolin and some guitar.Scott Slay has also been performing for a large chunk of his life. Starting from the age of eight, he learned and played bluegrass music in bands with his father, Tracy. Because he lived in a Navy town, musicians came and went constantly, so the lineup of his father’s band changed consistently as well.He says that many factors contributed to his ultimate success, including always learning new songs (or even old songs in new ways), primarily learning them by ear and feel (sometimes because he was so tired in the evenings he would play he could barely keep his eyes open). He is also inspired to travel by the musicians he met along the way.Slay says that through this process and constant dedication to the craft of music, he learned bluegrass like someone would learn their home language. He loves collaborating through composing, arranging, or interpreting various bluegrass pieces, and he constantly adds something new to his musical repertoire to keep himself interested. Currently, he plays with the bluegrass band SLAY, and in 2019, he released the album The Rail under his name, collaborating with various other bluegrass peers.You can see Kretzer and Slay perform at Eldora, 2861 Eldora Ski Road in Nederland, as part of the Fireside in Timbers Lodge series, on Saturday, February 10, 2024, at 1 p.m.Our theme song is courtesy of singer-songwriter Brittney Wagner. Stream her record Better off Dead here. Support the showThank you for listening to The Mountain-Ear Podcast, featuring news and culture from peak to peak! Additional pages are linked below.If you want to be involved in the podcast or paper, contact:Barbara Hardt, our editor-in-chief, at [email protected] Hickman, multimedia producer, at [email protected] Lammers, podcast host, at [email protected] inquiries: [email protected] to our website for all of the latest news. Subscribe to The Mountain-Ear in print and online.Submit local events to promote them in the paper and on our website.Find us on Facebook @mtnear and Instagram @mtn.earListen and watch on YouTube today.Share this podcast by scrolling to the bottom of our website home page or by heading to our main hub on Buzzsprout.Thank you for listening!