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Robert Randolph and the Family Band
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Robert Randolph and the Family Band
Robert Randolph and the Family Band are ready to change your life, just as music changed that of this group's dynamic leader. Raised in a firestorm of faith and danger, dividing his time between battles in the streets and safety in the arms of his music, Robert Randolph found his way up from darkness with help from a most unusual source: the pedal steel guitar. That's right -- those same slippery strings that weep and whine behind cowboy crooners and hula dancers. But in Randolph's world, which centers on the unique "sacred steel" tradition within the House of God Church, the pedal steel is a different animal, a source of ferocious, passionate sound. And in Randolph's young hands, it's a weapon, used to slash at darkness and rip away the shades that hide sunlight from our lives. What Randolph has done isn't just about taking the spirit of the church into the wider world, though that's part of the picture. It's more than a story of beating heavy odds, of watching friends die or disappear while trying to find your own way out. Certainly it's more than an odd twist of fate how an urban New Jersey artist finding his voice through an instrument seldom seen outside of Nashville studios or Southern honky-tonks. The buzz has actually been on for a while. Randolph began winning attention some three years ago, after being invited to join in on sessions for The Word, an adventurous marriage of gospel and "downtown" traditions with John Medeski and the North Mississippi Allstars. Interest picked up as he released Live At The Wetlands on his own Dare label, perhaps the most incendiary concert album of the year, recorded on the fabled venue's closing night with the Family Band that he formed with two of his cousins and fellow House of God musicians, bassist Danyel Morgan and drummer Marcus Randolph, and noted session keyboardist John Ginty.