Ryan McKasson and Colin Cotter are now officially called Old Growth Graveyard and you can find us here
Longtime partners in crime, Ryan McKasson and Colin Cotter find themselves in the thick of a creative collaboration spanning many years, bands, gigs, productions, late nights, tours, missed flights, fiddle camps, adventures, time away, and journeys home. Since the two met over 20 years ago at Alasdair Fraser's Valley of the Moon Scottish Fiddling School (where they are both now faculty members), they have traveled all over the country making music together and sharing that creative spark.
Ryan didn’t waste any time taking to the fiddle after picking it up at the age of four, becoming the youngest ever winner of the National Scottish Fiddling Championship in 1996 and receiving a Merit Scholarship for Viola Performance from the University of Southern California the following year. Such accolades are hard to outclass, however Ryan’s playing has only matured with time, as The Boston Globe noted “The bow drives across the strings, thick and throaty, creating a pulsing sound that feels more of muscle than tendon...a compositional sophistication that is cinematic, transporting, and tantalizingly modern.”
In 2004 Ryan and his sister, Cali, formed a band, The McKassons, that eventually included Ryan’s wife, Brooke, and her brother, Matt Jerrell. The McKassons released two critically acclaimed albums, Tall Tales (2004) and Tripping Maggie (2006). Since 2002 he has also been fiddler for a renowned contra dance band, The Syncopaths, and has spent years as a member of a baroque/celtic/fusion combo, Ensemble Galilei, with whom he helped co-write and co-produce First Person: Seeing America with them, a collaboration between Ensemble Galilei and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In 2014, McKasson, Cotter, and bagpiper Elias Alexander, formed the innovative, boundary-pushing indie-Celtic band, MAC. The trio explored the peripheries of the Celtic music landscape in the USA, eventually culminating in the release of a self-produced record, “Perfectly Manufactured Reality” in 2018.
In addition to his work with Ryan and MAC, Cotter has toured internationally as a guitarist, fiddler, and singer-songwriter in numerous other ensembles and as a solo artist. Colin is a songwriter, folk singer, multi-instrumentalist, recording artist, and creative-at-large who began fiddling at the age of four as a student of his family’s tradition in Finnish fiddle music. A few years into his life as a fiddler, he dove into the world of Scottish and Irish traditional music, setting his path on a collision course with McKasson’s. He is a self-taught guitarist who blends a wide range of influences to craft a unique rhythmic style that he brings to collaborations with artists from across the musical spectrum.
When McKasson and Cotter are on stage together, you hear decades of friendship, collaboration, immersion in music, and shared passion for free expression form a foundation from which playful, evocative, unpredictable songs and tunes take flight.