Detour Bluegrass
Detour is a bluegrass band from Northern Lower Michigan. Detour combines original contemporary bluegrass sounds along with great traditional favorites. With tight focused harmonies, precision instrumentals, and creative melodies, Detour takes you down a unique bluegrass road.
The band’s talented line-up features the soaring lead vocals of Zak Bunce on string bass, the championship fiddling of Peter Knupfer, the soulful guitar of Scott Zylstra, the hard driving mandolin and superb song writing of Jeff Rose, and the stellar banjo playing of Kevin Gaugier. Detour has quickly become a standout bluegrass band — “a bluegrass joyride,” that the Lansing State Journal acclaims as “perhaps the best bluegrass band Michigan has yet produced.”
Detour has enjoyed three highly successful seasons receiving great critical acclaim at numerous concerts and festivals including Dunegrass, Wheatland, the Great Lakes Folk Festival, Virginia Public Television’s “Song of the Mountains” concert series, and Interlochen Center for the Arts, among many others.
We invite you to continue with us on the bluegrass road less traveled. Thanks for visiting!
Our latest album is now available, with great playing and singing from the whole crew! Visit our music page to hear a clip and click over to order it hot off the presses…
Detour: “The Road That Lies Ahead”
Well, the Detouristas have been really busy lately playing to packed houses in Lansing, Thompsonville, and near Manistee. Our concert at Elderly was a blast; we got to run through a number of tunes from our new CD and playing in a room filled with great instruments and enthusiastic musicians is always inspiring. Up at the Brown Town Hall near Manistee we held a CD party for local friends, and filled the place with happy listeners. The evening’s proceeds — some $500 and change — all went to the Community Table, and we had a great time playing and visiting with fans.
We invite you to join us and a parade of Michigan bluegrass bands at the Pickin’ on Cystic Fibrosis benefit at Dogwood Center in Fremont on Saturday April 4 — details in our gig calendar and at the concert website. Some of our favorite local musicians turn out for this event in a theater with great acoustics. The event is organized by our sound man, Jimmy Kittle, himself a fixture on the bluegrass scene in Michigan. We look forward to seeing you there!
…then come see us at Elderly Instruments (see our gig calendar for location and details), where we’re doing a set starting at 12.30 and will be around to sign CDs and do a shake & howdy. And speaking of that CD, we’re purty excited about it. For the cover and design we went back to the great Glenn Wolff, who did such wonderful and creative work for Radio Hill; we are really pleased with the results. And in this year of important transitions for our band, we are very proud that we were able again to capture on the same project the inspired playing of Mike Sumner before he headed to his new digs in Nashville, and the great Kevin Gaugier in his inaugural outing with us in the studio. Write and let us know what you think of the latest Detour!
The Detouristas packed their woolies and headed for Copper Country this weekend (Jan. 31) to play the Keweenaw Folk Festival at the historic Calumet Theater. What an incredible place — it opened in 1900 and became the region’s main attraction for opera, film, drama, and music at the height of the copper boom. The acoustics in the restored theater were tremendous, and we had a terrific evening playing for such an appreciative crowd. The trip also gave us the chance once again to sample our official cuisine — whitefish baskets — while immersing ourselves in Yooper history courtesy of our tour guide and pundit Scott, ably assisted by Zak, who seems to have a relative living around every corner.
Be sure to get on our mailing list to keep up with band doings! Looks like we’ll be at Elderly Instruments in March to promote our new CD, and the summer schedule is filling in.
After weeks of hard production work, our intrepid engineer and guitar player Scott got our CD off to the presses this week! We’re all pretty excited; we hope to see it in its jewel cases, ready for distribution and sale by the end of this month.
Can’t wait? Go to our music page and listen to a couple of tracks from it!
Neither a foot of new snow, nor sleet, nor dark of night kept the Detour gang and a few hundred happy pickers and listeners from crowding into the Radisson Hotel in Kalamazoo last weekend for the latest Cooper’s Glen Music Festival. This was our third outing at this terrific event sponsored by the Great Lakes Acoustic Music Association and other organizations in Kalamazoo, and we had a great time! Our ol’ pal Mike Sumner breezed in from Nashville with the Randy Kohrs Band to play a rollicking set and do some late-night jamming with the Detour boys. And good friend Joel Mabus did an impromptu set featuring the golden mandolin tones of our own Jeff Rose when headliner Jim Lauderdale was stranded in Chicago by a winter storm. Now we have to take special pains to keep Joel from luring Jeff away onto the road, the two of them sounded so good together!
We also were blown away by the incredible music of the Hot Club of Detroit and the Brothers Kalamazov of Kalamazoo. Kevin had warned us for weeks that the Brothers Kalamazov are a blazingly original bunch, working through a pile of acoustic and brass instruments on the stage and swapping them around with such ease that we lost track of who could play what. The Hot Club did the finest renditions of gypsy jazz I’ve ever heard since my Django/Stephane listening days too many years ago.
Many thanks to our fans for their kind words and avid support at our shows! And a big vote of gratitude to Kathy Nichols, Mark Sahlgren, and all of the GLAMA folks who put on this shindig! — Doc Fiddle
