Entertainment Highlights: Pomfret Native Finds Niche in Acoustic Bands - Valley News
At the brink of adolescence, Tristan Henderson scoffed at the very idea of playing a musical instrument. “After (older brother) Gareth got a guitar, our mother asked me if I wanted to play, too,” the Pomfret native recalled this week. Why sit inside and play a guitar. Now in his late 20s, Tristan Henderson is playing guitar, mandolin, bouzouki, bass, banjo, bodhran, harmonica and jaw harp, as well as drumming with his feet and singing, with three Vermont-based folk and traditional bands and as a session musician. And … loving it. “I’ve managed to stay on people’s minds,” Henderson said during the run-up to playing with the Pete’s Posse trio at this weekend’s Peacham Acoustic Music Festival in the Northeast Kingdom, just up the road from Wells River. How useful, Pete’s Posse co-founder Pete Sutherland, the multi-instrumentalist with decades as a mainstay of Vermont music, noticed in 2010 during a barn dance at which they were both playing in Essex, Vt. , not long after Henderson moved to the... Next thing Henderson knew, he and Sutherland were finding common musical ground with fiddler-mandolinist-songwriter Oliver Scanlon, a former member of the Vermont Youth Orchestra who played for a time with middle-school friends in a band called... “It wasn’t supposed to be a band until about two or 2½ years ago, we decided to make something of it,” Henderson said. Including, last fall, an 11,000-mile tour of the perimeter of the United States in a Buick LeSabre wagon, playing 48 dates at house parties, contradances and. Source: www.vnews.com
