Geo Trio to perform at Revival Brewing wine tasting

By ROB DUGUAY
Posted 12/5/19

Providence instrumental shredders Geo Trio, which includes Cranston native Matthew Knippel on bass, will be supplying musical accompaniment to go along with the libations.

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Geo Trio to perform at Revival Brewing wine tasting

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When you think of a brewery, wine is probably the last thing that comes to mind.

Having a wine tasting at a brewery might confuse some people despite the obvious relationship between wine and beer. Then again, it’s always good to change things up once in a while.

At Revival Brewing Company, located at 505 Atwood Ave. in Cranston, there’s going to be an assortment of wines to indulge in while getting into the holiday spirit on Wednesday, Dec. 11, starting at 7 p.m.

Providence instrumental shredders Geo Trio, which includes Cranston native Matthew Knippel on bass, will be supplying musical accompaniment to go along with the libations.

Ahead of the event, I had a talk with Geo Trio guitarist George Leonard about taking nearly a decade to put out a record, interesting gigs, teaching music and where folks can see the band on a monthly basis.

ROB DUGUAY: You come from a jazz background, and Geo Trio has more of a rock and progressive foundation. What made you want to pursue this kind of project?

GEORGE LEONARD: I wrote a bunch of music for my senior project at Berklee [College of Music] in Boston, and it was the first time I tried writing original material. I was always tinkering around with it, and then some country stuff got into the mix because I started listening to a lot of that stuff after college. Austin Andrews, who plays drums, and I were working at a music store together in 2010 and we started jamming, which gradually evolved into a band. Then it took another nine or 10 years to write an album (laughs).

RD: Outside of playing music, you also teach it. What can be the most difficult thing about teaching a student a song or a technique?

GL: You’ve got to inspire them. That’s the hard part, because they can only grasp so much without the needed motivation. You have to teach them the right kind of music that reaches them somehow. It’s different for every student when it comes to figuring out what that is.
RD: You guys have also been the backing band for live karaoke nights along with performing music from “The Big Lebowski.” With the former, how spontaneous can it get when it comes to people requesting songs? With the latter, who came up with the idea for a “Lebowski” themed set?

GL: With the karaoke, it actually is very spontaneous (laughs). We’ve been doing it at Patrick’s Pub in Providence and we’ve had groups of people come up and want to sing various songs. One time we actually had a group of guys come up and want to sing an old Irish song that we didn’t know. We ended up looking up the chords on our phones and taking an educated guess on how it went. That can get pretty wild.

The “Big Lebowski” thing was an idea that we came up with after practice one day. We’ve always been huge fans of the movie, so it started off as a sort of trivia night where we had prizes. Then we started learning more and more songs, and then we realized that T-Bone Burnett put together the soundtrack. They did such a good job getting so many different kinds of styles together and once we realized that we had the personnel to do that, we realized that we had a whole three-set night of music that’s unique and features a lot of different people and whatnot.

RD: The upcoming show at Revival is a wine tasting – so what’s your favorite kind of wine?

GL: The RedVolution Bota Box, by far. I don’t know anything about wine other than that.

RD: Sounds classy. Does the Geo Trio have any plans for next year? Are there any new songs in the works?

GL: We have a lot of new material and we are almost ready to get back into the studio to record something. I hopefully have my fingers crossed when it comes to another release. We also have this monthly gig at Nick-A-Nee’s in Providence where we have special guests take part and it’s kind of like our workshop for new material. That happens on the first Sunday of every month at 4 p.m.

To learn more about Geo Trio, visit geotrioband.com. To learn more about Revival Brewing and the upcoming wine tasting, visit revivalbrewing.com.

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