Morgan O’Kane
Restoration Roadhouse is an indoor/outdoor party with local craft beer and a food truck.
Morgan O’Kane plays the banjo as if his life depended on it, (as it has on many occasions) with an intensity that evokes a redeeming kind of sadness that will resonate with anyone ready to give it the space. Songs of heart break, hard traveling, and the love of friends, songs about the on going war humans wage against themselves and the earth. Originally from Virginia Morgan fell in love with playing music while living in nyc as a means to channel and express long years of travel and loss, fine tuning his unique style on the streets and subways. Ezekiel Healy (the bogs) joined Morgan whilst making his first album 9 lives in 2009, bringing his unique style of slide guitar to accompany and enrich the one man band sound. Healy, also from Virginia, self taught with a history of street performing, plays a national slide guitar more akin to Indian ragas then to blues, but with no less soul, adding an other world quality to the already out of this world sound of O’kane’s banjo, howling, and drum. Currently Morgan O’Kane performs most often solo or with Ezekiel Healy, and on occasion with Mississippi fiddler Ferd Moyes ( hackensaw boys, Ferd band) who has accompanied him from the beginning, recording on all three albums. The trio have toured extensively around the world over the past decade, at times joined by J.R. Hankins on flugelhorn, Liam Crill on spoons, Hayden Cummings on bass, and Leyla McCalla on cello.
The music is “to bluegrass and old timey what punk was to rock in the late seventies” (Ian Spafford / www.stirrings.org.uk) Deeply steeped in old traditions, O’Kane treats the banjo differently than you’ve heard it before and brings a punk sensibility to his music.