Skaggs-Hornsby and Leftover Salmon top Friday at TBF

By Donald Frazier

It was a night of star turns in Telluride as Ricky Skaggs, Bruce Hornsby, the omnipresent Sam Bush, and the tight ensemble of soloists in Leftover Salmon took the stage in a flurry of high virtuosity on every instrument in the bluegrass arsenal, from fiddle and dobro to banjo and mandolin.

Ricky Skaggs took it one step further, unveiling a new piano-based sound. And this is no honky-tonk percussive upright or an electronic keyboard, but the full-throated grand piano of Bruce Hornsby. The effect: layers of warmth and texture that imparted a jazzy sweep and structure to even the most familiar tunes. Add The Kentucky Thunder's ability to produce a roomful of sound with a handful of instruments, and the effect was the bluegrass version of a symphony.

As one of the legends of Telluride where it was born several years ago in the serendipitous combination of two undermanned bands, Leftover Salmon brought two of everything, with battling solos in fiddle, mandolin, and banjo. Technical and self-referential? Perhaps - but only if you expect introspection and revelation from these songs. In their hands, even the most familiar songs in the canon such as 'Shuckin' the Corn' became an enthusiastic demonstration of the form and its varieties that infected the audience with the artists' joy in playing.