The Appleseed Collective

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positioned in a row across the front of the stage at the Blind Pig, a woman leaned over to me and predicted, "These kids are going to tear it up." Tearing it up is not something that immediately comes to mind when referring to acoustic Americana-based music (the Appleseed Collective actually describes its music as "Americana folk jazz"), but moments later the band took the stage and proceeded, in fact, to tear it up.

The band formed just this past November, after a chance encounter between Brown and Smith led to an impromptu jam session in front of Cafe Ambrosia. Smith, who happened to have his fiddle handy, was looking for musicians to play with, as his previous band, Why I Oughta, had recently broken up, and Brown, who was able to scrounge up a guitar, was looking for a new musical direction after leaving the White Ravens. They immediately decided to form a band, and things came together quickly--Brown knew Russo from the White Ravens and was dating Tulip. They played their first gig less than a month later, on December 1. According to Smith, he'd been playing mostly gypsy jazz, and Brown is into New Orleans-influenced Dixieland, and so the Appleseed Collective's sound is basically a meshing of those two styles. Whatever the style, the music is fun and infectious, and the crowd at the Blind Pig couldn't help but move to it.