Doors open at 7 - Music at 7:30 - $25 advance tickets - $30 at the door
This is a seated, listening room style show - All ages - General admission
We’re overjoyed to bring Phil Cook to The Alluvion stage for this special performance and can’t wait for our audience to experience his new remarkable solo piano music on our house grand piano.
“Phil Cook is a lighting bolt. He is a teacher and captor of music. He carries it within him at all times. No one has taught me more about music in my life than him. He is one of the great performers of our age ...as time passes more and more people will find that out. I'm excited every time someone gets to discover Phil’s genius—a thing I've had the good fortune of knowing all my life.”
—Justin Vernon, Bon Iver
Appalachia Borealis—a deeply poignant and personal set of 11 piano meditations, built with the emotional range of a full and open existence—is, at least so far, the culmination of Cook’s career and life. Inspired by those windowsill improvisations, these compositions reflect not only the turmoil and sadness of a fraught time for Cook but also the hope, light, and joy of looking for the other side.
PHIL COOK
You already know Phil Cook, at least if you’ve listened to any of the most essential folk-rock, indie rock, or even gospel records of the last decade. The spirited piano solo on Hiss Golden Messenger’s “Day O Day,” the incisive melody of Bon Iver’s “AUTAC,” the mesmerizing elegance of the keys on Hurray for the Riff Raff’s “Life on Earth”—yes, those are all Phil Cook, a beloved collaborator capable of transforming an entire song with a pretty lick here, a sharp line there. The War on Drugs, The Blind Boys of Alabama, Ani DiFranco, Nathaniel Rateliff, Frazey Ford, the Indigo Girls: Cook’s partnerships in just the last dozen years shape their own best-of.
But now, Phil Cook has returned to his first musical love: solo piano. It is, after all, the instrument of his upbringing and now the most direct line between his fathoms-deep sensitivity and the ears of his audience. On the new release, All These Years, Cook’s playing—a chronicle of gorgeous and emotionally expansive meditations—reorients expectations of solo piano composition and improvisation. Indeed, that exquisite album is just the start for a player approaching the grand old instrument from the perhaps unlikely foundation of American folk music.
ABOUT PHIL’S NEW ALBUM: APPALACHIA BOREALIS
In the Fall of 2022, Phil Cook suddenly found himself living alone in a small home at the edge of field and forest in North Carolina’s Piedmont. For most of Cook’s four decades, he had resided near the hearts of the midsized Southern cities and Wisconsin towns he had called home, near the groan of traffic and hubbub of coffee shops. Such close quarters helped make the gregarious Cook a prolific collaborator, from cofounding his own Megafaun to working with The Blind Boys of Alabama, Bon Iver, Hiss Golden Messenger, and endless others.
But Cook’s closest neighbor now was a trailhead, his own alleyway into the woods of Orange County. So he went and listened, enraptured first by the stillness and then by the manifold birds. He began leaving his windowsill slightly cracked each night, so that the dawn chorus greeted him each morning. A zealous collector of voice memos, Cook began recording these tangled bird songs. He slowly joined them. With the sun finally high, Cook would listen to the day’s recordings and improvise in real time on the instrument that remains the first and most steadfast love of his musical life, the piano.
Appalachia Borealis—a deeply poignant and personal set of 11 piano meditations, built with the emotional range of a full and open existence—is, at least so far, the culmination of Cook’s career and life. Inspired by those windowsill improvisations, these compositions reflect not only the turmoil and sadness of a fraught time for Cook but also the hope, light, and joy of looking for the other side. You can sometimes still hear the birds whose tune and time helped to inspire so many of these songs; they seem to call out playfully during “Thrush Song” and extend their reciprocal greeting during (but what else?) “Dawn Birds.” Even when they’re not within earshot, their essence remains: that is, to rise and meet the day best you can, no matter how uncertain and strange the moment may seem.
When Cook left that cabin after a year, he moved into a home of his own in Durham, with plenty of space for his two boys to play and for something he’d never actually owned—a proper piano. Over the next several months, Cook spent untold hours with his Yamaha U3, drilling down on these pieces. During lessons with the Southern gospel great Chuckey Robinson, the pianist had challenged Cook to sustain fewer notes, to stop clouding and crowding his melodies by using the instrument’s pedals as crutches. His music suddenly had more clarity, with the sounds and the feelings they ferried given more room to function. This idea drifted into his burgeoning interpretation of “I Made a Lover’s Prayer,” a tangle of blessed unease from Gillian Welch’s 2003 album, Soul Journey. Cook dug into the danger and delight written into the words and the melody, into the idea that we twist our bodies into knots trying to understand what is best for our hearts.
To read the full album story and bio in depth, click here.
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