The High Hawks to kick off Hot Summer Nights concerts
Vail Valley Foundation/Courtesy photo
Last year’s opener for Hot Summer Nights, The High Hawks put on one of the best shows of the summer at The Amp in 2021 and will again take the stage to kick off Hot Summer Nights in 2022. With nearly 150 years of collective touring and playing between the members, The High Hawks first convened in 2019 by pulling together musicians from different bands.
Vince Herman (Leftover Salmon), Tim Carbone (Railroad Earth, Blue Sparks From Hell), Chat Staehly (Hard Working Americans), Adam Greuel (Horseshoe & Hand Grenades), Brian Adams (DeadPhish Orchestra), and Will Trask (Great American Taxi) make up The High Hawks, who perform high-energy shows with so many talented musicians on stage, and usually some more that jump in from time to time.
More than musicians, The High Hawks genuinely enjoy their time together — especially creating music on a stage. And the fun they have on stage emanates out to the crowd.
“Sometimes you meet somebody and you hit it off, and you feel like, ‘Man, I don’t want to just look at the cover, I want to read that book,” says guitarist Adam Greuel. “It’s a tight-knit music community in our Americana-bluegrass-jam band world. Over the years, we all kept bumping into one another and realizing there was a deep sense of fellowship and kindred spirit. The main impetus to form The High Hawks was really a curiosity about one another, both musically and personally. This band came out of a yearning to hang out.”
In 2019, they first convened at guitarist-singer Vince Herman’s house in the Rockies, with no clear road map for where they might go. They meshed so well that they released a 13-song album, led by the fiddle-infused opener “Singing a Mountain Song” acting as a kind of mission statement for the whole collection, with its self-referential line: “Soaring like a high hawk across this mountain top.”
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“We all came together at a time when we needed one another. I don’t know that we all knew that initially, but it slowly became apparent that the closeness that occurs from being in a band really ended up being good medicine for us all,” Greuel said. “We have a never-ending text message thread that keeps us all laughing and communicating and sharing songs and discussing trials and tribulations.”
