August Summer Concert Series: Big Lazy

Big Lazy founder, Stephen Ulrich, is the composer for the HBO series, Bored to Death, and the art forgery documentary, Art and Craft. He has scored numerous films, including: the documentary "Backroads" by Katija Esson and "Mao Want’s Beijing Taxi". The album, "Ulrich Ziegler", was noted the 2012 Album of the Year of New York Music Daily.
 

Big Lazy has flourished for over two decades in NYC’s downtown music scene . Simultaneously noir and pastoral, gothic, and modern; the trio conjures images from big sky country, to seedy back rooms with cinematic clarity. Containing a nod towards classic guitar instrumentals -- and a fiery performance style, their most recent album, Dear Trouble, captures the essence of their legendary live shows.

"With sparse instrumentation - electric guitar, acoustic bass and drums - the trio forges American music from archetypes in Blues, Jazz, Surf, and Rockabilly."               – The New Yorker

The guitar universe has been inundated with all things “retro” for the past decade, but the all-instrumental trio Big Lazy gives it a fresh spin. Old-school twang meets gritty Hollywood-soundtrack music here, with guitarist Stephen Ulrich offering a slow, drawling style and fat vintage tones.

Ulrich is a jazz-trained player, with side roots in blues, country, western, ’50s sci-fi, and early rock. While painting vivid soundscapes, as on the opener “Minor Problem”,  he also mixes reverby chords with sweet lap steel, conjuring up a seedy night in the tropics without using any words.

"Ultimately, Ulrich’s blend of mid-century Americana, cinematic sweep, and a dash of the experimental is exciting and refreshing. In fact, this is some of the most titillating guitar-manship we’ve heard in a while".
- Vintage Guitar Magazine

"[...] it's pretty damn rare that you actually hear anything truly original. Thank the gods then for Big Lazy, an all-instrumental Brooklyn trio who, while influenced by the past, are in no way beholden to it. Combining Rain Dogs -era Tom Waits, bottom-heavy Link Wray grind, and a certain rockabilly savoir, this guitar-bass-drum trio raises a compellingly inventive racket. Daring,
nourish music ideal for the soundtrack to the film you wish Quentin Tarantino would make".
- Creative Loafing Atlanta