What is the experience of being in transit? Separated from your home but not yet at your destination, you are neither here nor there, confined with strangers in an intimate environment for a predetermined amount of time. Uncomfortable, yet somehow free. To travel is to be bound with these strangers by faith—faith in the vessel which carries you, faith in the people who operate it, and ultimately, faith in the strangers waiting at your destination.

In 2015, Bobby Previte was awarded the Greenfield Prize in Music at the Hermitage Artist Retreat to create a new work. RHAPSODY is the result.

RHAPSODY is an evening-length, acoustic song cycle dealing with the experience of being “in transit.”  Beginning from the point of view of a passenger sitting comfortably in an airplane, RHAPSODY twists, turns, and migrates until arriving in the dead of night on an unfamiliar shore.

This powerhouse band consists of Jen Shyu, voice and er hu fiddle; Zeena Parkins, harp; John Medeski, piano; Nels Cline, acoustic guitars; Fabian Rucker, alto saxophone; and Previte on trap drums, autoharp, harmonica, and percussion.

This ensemble of found objects, of musicians thrown together and forging new relationships in this instrumentation of chance, mirrors the experience of movement, of migration, of who you may find yourself next to, of venturing into the unknown because you cannot stay where you are.