APLR Presents: **Joseph Decosimo Trio**

**with Sally Anne Morgan (full band) and Tall Tall Trees**

Thursday, September 11th, 2025

AyurPrana Listening Room - 312 Haywood Rd, Asheville, NC 28806

Doors 6PM || Show 7PM

**Joseph Decosimo**

Old-time and traditional music stay exciting for their contrasts. Exacting instrumentation honed through mentorships and late-night jams at fiddler’s conventions tangles with a community-sourced inventiveness that influences variants and new sounds. Joseph Decosimo is a master of this genre for this very reason, blending deep technique with an openness and curiosity that keep his music crackling with life. A “marvelous fiddler” (No Depression) and banjo player who braids “exultation and veneration” (INDY Week) into his music, on his third solo album Fiery Gizzard Decosimo gathers a close-knit ensemble of friends from his musical career to infuse his interpretations of fiddle and banjo pieces with a contagious communal joy.

As an artist working with traditional music from the South and Appalachia, Decosimo chooses songs based not only on historical significance and lineage but also his own sensory approach. For Fiery Gizzard, his ear was tuned to otherworldly tones and mystery, sourcing from field recordings such as Virginia fiddler Luther Davis’ hypnotic version of "Shady Grove" while amping up the music’s psychedelic potential. On the middle Tennessee banjo composition “Flowery Girls,” a VHS of bluesman Abner Jay inspired Decosimo to rig up a pickup inside a fretless banjo and play it through a tube amp to capture some of Jay’s edge and funkiness. But to round out the sound and keep it kinetic meant galvanizing a genre-eschewing crew to jam out– and not in a “spaced-out drooly” kind of way, he laughs, but as a sort of “responsive conversation.”

Decosimo has always been a community-minded artist. He began playing as a seventh grader in Tennessee, fostering relationships with older players at jams and in homes, a learning mode natural to his inquisitive nature and desire for musical connection. A folklorist by intuition, he later became one by profession, studying with old-time legend Clyde Davenport, teaching in East Tennessee State University’s renowned bluegrass program, and receiving his PhD at the University of North Carolina with a dissertation titled “Catching the ‘Wild Note’: Listening, Learning, and Connoisseurship in Old-Time Music.” In North Carolina, Decosimo kicked about in the verdant environment of Durham and Chapel Hill’s folk and indie scenes, collaborating with artists including Alice Gerrard, Hiss Golden Messenger, and Jake Xerxes Fussell. This community has influenced his own music, including his “sublime and strangely heartening” (Bandcamp Daily) 2022 release While You Were Slumbering and Beehive Cathedral, Decosimo’s 2024 “Appalachian mountain music treasury” (New Commute) trio album with Luke Richardson and Cleek Schrey for Dear Life Records.

Continuing on this path, Fiery Gizzard is home base for a loose outfit of mostly Tarheel-based musicians from within and beyond traditional music. Inspired by a tour with fiddler Stephanie Coleman (Nora Brown), guitarist Jay Hammond, and synth builder and multi-instrumentalist Matthew O’Connell, Decosimo assembled studiomates based on close friendships and comfort. Coleman, O’Connell, and Hammond contribute to Fiery Gizzard, along with bassist and producer Andy Stack (Helado Negro, Wye Oak), horn player Kelly Pratt (Beirut, David Byrne), Mipso and Fust’s Libby Rodenbough, Joseph O’Connell (Elephant Micah), and trad/experimental artist Cleek Schrey. Decosimo’s fiddle and banjo work is virtuosic, intricate and simple simultaneously, a testament to his many years of study. On some tracks, his playing or lovely, plain-hearted singing is the centerpiece, such as on his interpretations of Texan street preacher Washington Phillips' 1929 recording "I Had a Good Father and Mother" or the Eastern Kentucky fiddle barn-burner “Glory in the Meetinghouse,” famously played by Luther Strong for Alan Lomax. But there’s also a trusting open-door policy, like where Southern Appalachian tune “Ida Red” relaxes into Coleman’s sweet, confident fiddling and Hammond’s loping guitar.

As a bandleader, Decosimo’s confidence and enthusiasm for the music reveal the heart of traditional music and how it can come to life through community. Fiery Gizzard is Joseph Decosimo as a powerful champion of traditional music – a sponge who soaks up as much as he squeezes out, a responsive artist who makes his genre accessible, and a magnet who can bring musicians of all sorts into his orbit with his same passion.

**Sally Anne Morgan**

Sally Anne Morgan’s music is elevated by her deft musical skills and her remarkably expressive voice, that together create wholly new folk forms, familiar in their instrumentation yet distinctly her own. 'Carrying' tills the rich soil of Appalachian traditions and Sally’s rural North Carolina surroundings into warm, reflective songs about navigating challenges, as well as the most joyous and personal emotions surrounding Morgan’s own pregnancy and recent birth of her first child.

Morgan is a master craftsman and a true modern folk artist. The root of her songs share the roots of many great folk songs: “I find myself writing songs in praise of certain things in a very religious way but …more about holy compost than any other spiritual tradition I know of.” The songs born of these roots are entirely modern, expressive and wonderfully unique, a beautiful new voice advancing the folk form.

**Tall Tall Trees**

Tall Tall Trees is the musical id of songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Mike Savino, a pioneer in the realm of experimental, DIY banjo music. Accompanied by his trusty Banjotron 6500, a highly customized, electrified banjo and effects pedal setup, Savino has wowed audiences since the 2009 debut of his self-titled album with his eclectic and innovative blend of psychedelic folk, rock and world music. His work seems to actively evade comfortable definition, upon first listen one will recognize the tenderness of Cat Stevens, the melancholy introspection of Elliott Smith, the anthemic psychedelia of Pink Floyd, and a deep abiding respect for Earl Scruggs. Savino often performs solo, showcasing his fleet-footed loop pedal mastery, as well as alongside long-time collaborator and fellow innovator, Kishi Bashi. He has recently collaborated with fellow psych-banjo maestro JD Pinkus of the Butthole Surfers, releasing Ponder Machine, a psychedelic banjo opus on the Shimmy Disc label. Tall Tall Trees latest release and 5th LP, Stick to the Mystical I, featuring a collaboration with Josiah Wolf of the band Why? is out September 8th, 2023 on Joyful Noise Recordings.