4 | JULY 23 - 29, 2021 | WORCESTERMAGAZINE.COM
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Jam-band favorites Leon Trout coming to Electric Haze Robert Duguay Special to Worcester Magazine USA TODAY NETWORK
For anyone who enjoys scintillating guitar riff s and improvised progressions, then Boston’s Leon Trout is exactly the new band you've been looking for. Lead vocalist and guitarist Aaron Cram, guitarist and backing vocalist Jimmy Geikie, bassist Sam Slotnick and drummer Roger Dumaine have been ripping up the jam scene in New England and beyond for the past few years, but they’re not your typical jam band. They have a wide range of infl uences — from metal to funk to reggae — that they incorporate into an original sound. On July 23, folks will get to see what these guys are all about when they take the stage at Electric Haze located on 23 Millbury St. in Worcester. Northboro rock 'n' roll act Way Up South will be opening things up at 8 p.m. “It started back in college when I was going to Keene State in Keene, New Hampshire,” Dumaine says on the origins of the band. “We started playing house parties on the weekends and Sam and I are kind of the only original members of the band. We’ve had multiple changes throughout the past seven years or so, and Sam and I have known each other since back in college when he was going to Franklin Pierce in Rindge, New Hampshire. After we graduated we said to ourselves, ‘Hey, let's keep doing this’ and we moved down to Boston back in 2015 in pursuit of playing music. We went through multiple diff erent guitarists, and Aaron is good friends with Sam from going to Franklin Pierce together so that’s how we got him into the band, and through friends
The band Leon Trout will perform at Electric Haze. PROMOTIONAL IMAGE
of friends we met Jimmy a couple of years ago and fi t perfectly for what we were looking for in our sound.” The band’s most recent album is a live record titled, "Trout Tapes Vol. 1," that came out last April and was recorded at The Acoustic in Bridgeport, Connecticut. They plan on having it be the fi rst installment of a live album series that’ll be recorded at diff erent venues. “Before we started playing a show at The Acoustic, the sound guy down there told us that he could get a recording of us through his board and do some mixing to get it to be album quality, and we were totally down for it,” Dumaine says of the making of the live album. “That’s when we came up with the name ‘Trout Tapes’ so we
can continue putting out live albums and more volumes. It’s not a generic name but it’s easy to remember and we don’t have to worry about what we’re going to name every live album we put out. It’s kind of inspired by 'Dick’s Picks Volume 1' from the Grateful Dead, in the sense that it’s easily expandable and we’re able to continue it.” After the show at Electric Haze, Leon Trout will be hosting its own music festival called TroutStock. It’ll be happening at the Magic Forest Farm in the New York hamlet of Coeymans Hollow on Aug. 7 and 8 with acts such as Bella’s Bartok, The Stupid Robots, The Cosmic Factory, The Quins and The Trichomes taking part, among others. “We’ve been in the festival
circuit for four or fi ve years now and we’ve always kind jokingly said that we should throw our own festival and organize it,” Dumaine said. “This year we fi gured, with everyone coming back from the COVID-19 pandemic, that people are just craving for live music and they need it in their lives so we decided to do it. Things started coming together really quickly in an unbelievable way. We had a couple ups and downs when it came to establishing a location but the Magic Forest Farm is a bigger upgrade than what we originally had. It’s a larger stage and it’s a beautiful venue located at a private organic farm on top of a mountain near the Hudson River Valley. The stage overlooks the valley and the sun sets directly in the dis-
tance, we’re going to have vendors of all diff erent sorts ranging from jewelry, clothing and all that type of stuff .” “We’ll also have food vendors,” he adds. “It’s going to be a full festival set up with music all day on Saturday and half the day on Sunday. We fi gured that we’d start small and then work our way up from there. We want to keep it a small, local festival vibe, we don’t want to blow it up as a huge festival. But next year we’ll have more days, more bands and more music. It’s going to be a lot of fun.” To pre-order tickets or for more information, visit Electric Haze’s website at thehaze.com/ electric. For more info on Leon Trout and TroutStock, visit leontroutmusic.com.
