San Fermin: City Winery 2015
San Fermin at City Winery (photo by Helena Petersen)
Orchestral pop is nothing new, but a classically trained composer writing an entire album’s worth of material, then creating a band to realize his vision? That is something entirely different.
San Fermin’s 2013 stunning self-titled debut first existed as sheet music. It was a song-cycle composed by Ellis Ludwig-Leone, who was then a recent Yale Conservatory grad, with a simple goal of recruiting singers and musicians to record them. But fate had other plans, and the recording put San Fermin on a fast track to becoming a solid touring band, opening for bands like The National, St. Vincent, and The Head and The Heart.
As the band gelled, new, boundary-pushing songs were born of its evolution. The resulting sophomore effort is titled Jackrabbit, and as the Brooklyn-based octet proved in this FUV Live performance, it is a documentation of the new horizons that Leone was given to explore and run with.
[recorded: 4/19/15]
