Americana duo Kate Lee and Forrest O’Connor of the GRAMMY Award-Winning Mark O’Connor Band will be performing a show at Eastman Theatre’s Kilbourn Hall on July 10.
Kate is a Webster Schroeder High School alumna (class of ’10) and one of the best fiddlers I have ever met. She attended Schroeder with my son, and they occasionally played together at musical events. She was an amazing talent those many years ago and has only gotten better.
Over the last three years, she and Forrest have earned national recognition as the lead singers and primary songwriters of the Mark O’Connor Band, which features O’Connor’s father, seven-time CMA Award-winning violinist Mark O’Connor. Lee and O’Connor wrote the majority of the band’s first album, Coming Home, which debuted at #1 on Billboard’s Top Bluegrass Albums Chart and won a GRAMMY Award in 2017. The group spent the past summer opening for the Zac Brown Band, including two appearances at Fenway Park.
Lee (vocals, violin) and O’Connor (vocals, guitar, and mandolin) began performing together in 2014 under the name Wisewater, whose EP, The Demonstration, reached #13 on the iTunes Singer-Songwriter chart.
O’Connor is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard and former Tennessee State Mandolin Champion, while Lee is a Belmont graduate and violinist who has frequently backed up stars ranging from John Legend and Kelly Clarkson to Keith Urban and Carrie Underwood at the CMA Awards shows.
For their upcoming show at Kilbourn Hall, Lee and O’Connor will be accompanied by Eastman School of Music graduate Geoff Saunders on bass, who has performed with Chick Corea, Gloria Estefan, and Bobby McFerrin, among others. They will also be joined by two-time national mandolin champion Isaac Eicher and Americana-Country vocalist Mallory Eagle.
The show is a double-bill with singer-songwriter Chris Wilson and begins at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $35 and can be purchased through eastmantheatre.org or by calling (585) 274-3000.
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