Oliver the Crow will be playing Tractorgrease Thursday Jan 11th at 7pm. Tickets ar $12 and available during our business hours at 604 858 3814 or email tractorgrease@gmail.com to arrange tickets.
With a Master’s degree and a Juno award between them in recent years, it’s hard to call Nashville duo Oliver The Crow a “new band”. It just took awhile for cellist Kaitlyn Raitz and fiddler Ben Plotnick to find each other. Long-Island born Kaitlyn had been playing as a quasi-classical cellist, camouflaging with the best of them at McGill University, while secretly letting her hair down, playing fiddle tunes, country and pop songs with folk bands and writers. Ben had been running from gig to gig as a gun for hire in his hometown of Calgary, and his adopted town of Toronto, cycling through Americana songwriters, bluegrass bands, folk groups, country singers and even performing as a soloist with the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, before eventually finding a steadier home with 2017 Juno award winners The Fretless, and of course with Oliver the Crow.

Their first full-length record, which will present itself to the world in 2018, is a reflection on what a cello, fiddle and two voices can do, within the folk/new-acoustic worlds, but bound to nothing. The two feel as comfortable playing material written this year as material written in the 1920’s, and their writing seems to pay homage to both the past and the future.