PORT TOWNSEND — The Faux Paws, featuring Port Hadlock’s Chris Miller, will perform at The Palindrome at Eaglemont Cidery on Sunday.
The concert will be at 7:30 p.m. at 1893 S. Jacob Miller Road, Port Townsend.
Tickets are $20 each online at https://www. ticketstorm.com/e/27493/t/ or $25 at the door.
“From raging fiddle tunes to saxophone solos and unrequited love songs, the music of The Faux Paws would be hard to pin down with standard genre descriptions,” according to a press release form Rainshadow Concerts, which is presenting the music.
“The trio’s contagious groove and feel-good melting pot folk music has been honed over 10 years of playing together, and is the sound of three close friends (two of which happen to be brothers), who feel a musical kinship that transcends any stylistic limitations.”
The trio are releasing a debut album, “The Faux Paws.”
Brothers Andrew and Noah VanNorstrand grew up playing contra dance music with their musician mother in the band Great Bear, based in upstate New York.
They met Miller at a music camp in New York called Ashokan.
“I had never heard of contra dance music before,” said Miller, whose primary instrument is saxophone,” but as soon as we began casually jamming together, there was this incredible musical synergy.”
Miller, who moved to Port Hadlock in 2021, grew up in Florida. He was enamored with bluegrass and studied jazz before going on to play with Grammy-nominated cajun-country band The Revelers.
He also plays banjo, dobro and clarinet among other instruments.
“The most important part of my musical background is that it’s all about fitting in and complementing other music,” Miller said in a press release.
“How can I uplift the melody, how can I get different sounds out of whatever instrument I’m playing?”
The VanNorstrand brothers said the addition of Miller brought a welcome interruption of old habits, while simultaneously tying together the big-picture sounds that they were attempting to reach.
“Chris is somewhat of a musical chameleon, and he can play lots of different instruments. But what he plays is so right in a big-picture sense that it’s irrelevant what instrument he ends up picking,” Andrew said.
Since meeting in 2012, the trio have toured across North America several times, sometimes under the name The Faux Paws, sometimes as part of other larger ensembles, learning about each other’s different styles of music and melding them together, the press release said.
“I love super glossy pop music, and Chris is always pushing more of a jazz influence,” Noah said, “but we all have a strong background in dance music, so almost everything we do has rhythm and groove, and is based around hook and feel.”
Much of the music on their debut album revolves around traveling the country and experiencing new places: the Great Lakes, Winchester, Va., Montauk, Long Island, and Southport, N.C.
The opening track, Fourth Decade, showcases Noah’s fiddle playing, accompanied by both Miller and his brother on two banjos.
“It may have taken The Faux Paws 10 years to make their debut album, but those years have clearly not gone to waste,” the press release said.
