When putting a band together, one of the most important factors to consider is chemistry. Perhaps even more important than talent, chemistry is something that cannot be forced; it’s naturally there or it isn’t. So in 2018 when five musicians who each wear two hats: Max Kabat – guitar player and currently a Realtor in the Boulder/Denver Metro area, James Armington – banjo player and an account manager for an endurance event registration company and father to two girls, Zach Smith – bass player and an account executive with Boulder based company Nite Ize and also a father to 3 year old son, Colleen Heine – fiddle player and a graphic designer/art director with a Masters Degree in Design Management from the Savannah College of Art & Design and a mother to a 3 year old son, and Justin Konrad – dobro player and attorney / partner at a law firm in Boulder practicing business and entertainment law and father to a 10 year old daughter, decided to come together to form the bluegrass band Bowregard, they knew they had the talent, but would their styles and harmonies morph into one universal unit? Any doubt was gone almost immediately, for within a year they won not one but two prestigious bluegrass competitions.
We caught up with the five friends and bandmates to discuss their individual journeys leading to the band’s success, their debut album Arrows, and what’s to come.
CN: For our readers who may not be familiar with you, can you tell us a little bit about yourselves?
B: Bowregard is a five-piece bluegrass band from the Boulder area in the Front Range of Colorado. We are Max Kabat (guitar), James Armington (Banjo), Zach Smith (Bass), Colleen Heine (fiddle), and Justin Konrad (dobro). Bowregard has become known for our tight three part vocal harmonies, our skill as instrumentalists, and our incredibly energetic live shows. The band formed in 2018, and within a year, won the 2019 Telluride Bluegrass Festival Band Competition, which launched us on the national music scene, enabling us to pursue playing much bigger stages and festivals. We recently released our debut record, “Arrows,” with Nick Forster (of the classic bluegrass band Hot Rize) producing.
CN: With everything that’s going on in the world in regards to COVID-19, we hope everyone in your circle is safe and healthy. How are you all holding up?
B: We’ve all stayed healthy so far, which is the biggest factor of course. In terms of our career as a band, though, the pandemic has hit us hard. This summer was supposed to have been our breakout summer of festivals – with the Telluride win under our belt in 2019, we found ourselves receiving offers to be a part of some fantastic festivals from Florida to Oregon for 2020. We really looked forward to getting in front of all of these amazing crowds and meeting the bands and fans that could help us grow our reach and expand our audience. We had festivals booked almost every weekend through the summer, starting in May (thanks in large part to our booking agent, Chandler Holt of HiFi Artists). Of course, none of that is happening now. It’s disappointing, but we recognize that the music industry has been hit hard across the board. Adapting has been key, and we take comfort in knowing that when we are able to get back in the saddle, fans will be there to receive us.
CN: How were each of you introduced to music? When did you realize that you wanted to pursue it as a career?
Max: My father used to play me to sleep on his classical guitar. “Hey Jude” was the one I remember most. That, and laying on the wooden floor of our NYC apartment with big AKG headphones over my little ears as my dad spun record after record, compiling my favorites on “Max’s Blues Tapes Vol _” I gave “concerts” for my family on my harmonica as early as age 4. At age 7, I picked up the guitar and never looked back. I have been playing and writing ever since. I toured the country with rock group, Jet Edison. I had heard bluegrass music as far back as my early teens, but it was the Telluride Bluegrass Festival that pulled me in. I’ve learned more about my instrument, and myself through Bluegrass than I ever would have expected.
Colleen: I went to a St. Louis city preschool and kindergarten which was staffed entirely by Italian nuns. We had required nap time every day, and I LOATHED taking naps. There was one way you could get excused from nap time, and that was if you took piano lessons during that time with Sister Felicetta (who had a reputation among the kids for being kinda scary). I’d do pretty much anything to get out of nap, so I got signed up for piano lessons… and ended up continuing with them for 8 years (despite Sr. Felicetta’s frequent hand-slapping). Fast forward to college in Lawrence, KS, I fell in with a crowd of porch-pickers who took me to my first bluegrass festival (Winfield), where I had a revelatory experience (“this is where I BELONG!”), and decided to pick up the fiddle. I was immediately obsessed, and before I knew it, I was making major life decisions based on music.
Justin: I took piano lessons starting at 5 years old and hated them. At age 11 I convinced my parents to buy me a cheap guitar, and suddenly I was practicing for hours a day after school. Once I joined my first rock band in middle school, I knew this was something I wanted to be doing with my life. In college I discovered jazz music, which led to a deep obsession (I hosted a radio show that played avante garde jazz and played in experimental jazz and hip-hop groups, as well as a theatrical funk band). I didn’t discover bluegrass until my 30s, when I attended my first Telluride Bluegrass Festival. After seeing Bela Fleck and Jerry Douglas, I was hooked and decided I needed to learn the dobro.
James: I grew up around music a bit. My mom comes from a family of singers, which is not uncommon for an Irish family. Lots of kids, they all sing like angels. So I grew up with my Mom singing in the house and hearing my grandparents sing show tunes in perfect harmony while making dinner. My uncle was the guitar player in that family and he’s actually the reason I ever decided to learn to play an instrument. My Dad’s side is from Alabama, so naturally he and my grandfather were both banjo players. Those two men are the reason I play banjo today and I actually have both of their banjos here at my house (my Dad’s is the one I play on stage) Music coming to my life has been like watching a snowball roll down a mountain at you. You see this thing called music slowly rolling downhill at you and getting bigger and bigger and bigger until it just engulfs you and you become part of that gigantic snowball crashing towards the rest of the world . . . that’s how I got introduced to music? I think that makes sense.
Zach: I grew up around a lot of music, as my father has been a radio DJ his entire life (starting at age 14). With piano lessons front the time I was in second grade to chorale and jazz band starting in middle school, I played saxophone for a while before transitioning over to electric bass and then quickly moving onto the upright for orchestra. After some burnout with music through formal college study I stepped away from it for a time only to return with an increased passion through the discovery of music festivals, specifically the old Springfest and Magnoliafests of the Spirit of Suwannee music park in Live Oak, FL. I spent 8 years gigging almost every weekend and going out on smaller tours with my old Americana-rock band,out of Savannah, before moving to Colorado. My very first Rockygrass was only in 2017 after moving here, and my first visit ever to Telluride was for the big competition WIN last year.
CN: Which musicians, country or not, have influenced you both personally and as an artist?
Justin: My biggest influences are probably jazz guitarist Bill Frisell and dobroist Jerry Douglas. They both have such strong, recognizable sounds, and focus on their tone and time as much as they do the notes they play. They’re also both fully capable of shredding a million notes per minute but instead choose to find the hidden melodies and harmonies, which to me is what music is all about.
James: Easily easily Flatt and Scruggs. That’s who my Dad and Grandpa always talked about when I was growing up and once I heard Earl Scruggs play Foggy Mountain Breakdown, I knew that’s who I wanted to play like and how a banjo should be played. On top of Earl, a banjo player out of Virginia named Jason Davis has been a massive influence on me. His playing with Junior Sisk, Adam Steffey and now Dan Tyminski is out of this world. The drive, timing and taste is through the roof. For me, it’s Earl and Jason Davis, no doubt.
Zach: John Hartford blew the world open to me as such an insatiable musician, quirky songwriter, and unforgettable performer. His depth of knowledge in the music with ability to create so prolifically still amazes me. I’m also a sucker for the storytellers, John Prine, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Todd Snyder, Townes Van Zandt & Steve Earl
CN: How did you all meet?
B: Max Kabat (Guitar) and James Armington (Banjo) were playing in a few different bands and trio’s around Boulder together, starting around 2017. They first met Zach Smith (Bass) and Colleen Heine (Fiddle) at a bluegrass jam just after they had moved to town from Savannah, GA. The musical connection was evident, and they started playing small shows around Boulder shortly after, including a weekly Sunday brunch residency that allowed the band to play consistently and develop their unique sound. The band entered the 2018 Ullrgrass Band Contest and took home the win. Winning that contest was validation that this band had something special, and it gave us confidence to step up and start playing more and bigger stages.
For the rest of 2018 and early 2019, we worked on honing our sound, writing new material and playing around the front range of Colorado as much as possible. At that point we decided the next step was to enter the 2019 Telluride Bluegrass Festival band competition, which has been a launching pad for major bluegrass and Americana bands like Greensky Bluegrass, The Lil Smokies, The Chicks (formerly the Dixie Chicks), Trout Steak Revival, etc. Right before this contest, Justin Konrad, the 2016 Rockygrass Dobro Champion, joined the band playing dobro (resophonic guitar).
We were incredibly honored to win the 2019 Telluride Bluegrass Band Competition, competing with many other amazing bands from all over the country. After winning Telluride, we launched into a whirlwind of playing festivals and headlining gigs, as well as support for national touring acts like Sam Bush and Town Mountain. We went into the studio with producer Nick Forster (of the classic bluegrass band Hot Rize, and host of the eTown radio show) and emerged with our debut album, Arrows. We’re very proud of Arrows and feel that it captures our sound as a relatively young band with lots of energy, ready to burst out onto the national and international stage.
CN: What did winning each of those contests mean to you and to win them back to back within a year of the band’s creation?
B: Both of these contests were hugely influential in determining the direction of the band. The Ullrgrass contest came just a few months after the band had formed, and winning it gave us confidence that we had something special that was worth putting time and energy into.
The Telluride contest was, of course, a life-changing event. It’s arguably the most prestigious band competition in the bluegrass world, and has launched the careers of many national and international artists. Winning Telluride turned the band from a hobby into something more serious, and gave us the opportunity to start playing much bigger stages in front of many more people. But it also meant new pressures – with people actually listening, we knew we needed to work hard to make the most of the opportunity. Releasing our debut album has been a huge relief, as we are all proud of the performances and songs and feel it does justice to the sound that enabled us to win these contests.
CN: In winning the 2019 Telluride Bluegrass band contest, you earned a spot in this year’s lineup. However due to COVID-19 the event has been canceled but you were able to perform online.
B: With Telluride 2020 cancelled, we’re thrilled that we were able to perform online at Planet Bluegrass ranch in Lyons (the mainstage of the RockyGrass festival) instead this year. We still fully intend to play on the mainstage at Telluride 2021, assuming that things have gotten under control with the current pandemic situation.
CN: The release of ‘Arrows’ on July 1st was exciting not only because it was your debut album, but because your fans came through in full force to help make the album a reality.
B: The story of “Arrows” release is tied up with the current pandemic. By March 2020 we had completed most of our initial tracking, but to pay for the record we had been planning to launch a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign at the beginning of March, and had hired a consultant, commissioned videos, and spent a lot of time and effort getting ready. (These days, with record labels not generally funding albums for emerging artists, it’s up to bands to fund our own records, and Kickstarter has emerged as the way most bands do this.) Then the pandemic hit, and we felt like it was just the wrong time to go out and ask people for money – we all know so many folks that have lost their jobs entirely and were (and still are) facing a very uncertain future. In light of that, we decided to put the Kickstarter and the album on the shelf for a couple of months and see how things went. In the end, though, we saw that things weren’t likely to open up much anytime in the near future, and we needed to get this album out into the world before it became stale. So, we decided to go ahead with the Kickstarter campaign, and reduced our expectations. What’s amazing is that, with all this going on, we actually blew past our fundraising goal almost immediately – it took only 4 days to raise the $25,000 we were initially asking for, and by the end of the 30-day campaign, we had raised almost $42,000. So many folks we talked to said they were thrilled to support it because it gave them something positive to root for, and because new music is in short supply right now. We feel incredibly lucky to have this kind of support, and it’s enabled us to pay those who helped us make and promote the record and keep some money moving through the music production economy in Colorado. (You can still view our Kickstarter video at www.helpthebows.com; it’s a nice little snapshot of the band.)
Right in the middle of our campaign the George Floyd murder happened and the Black Lives Matter movement came to the forefront and we again felt like it was a weird time to be fundraising for a record. So, towards the end of our campaign, we offered that anyone who donated to a BLM nonprofit could tell us and we’d treat them as a supporter of our record, including giving them a Bowregard merch package. It felt right to try to steer some of the tremendous goodwill we felt towards a cause we wholeheartedly support. We don’t have any way to know whether this raised much money for BLM (we didn’t ask people to tell us what they contributed), but hopefully it was able to make a little bit of difference or raise awareness for some great organizations.
Now that the album is out, we’ve been playing a few livestream events and safe physically distant gigs to help spread the word (and because we’re itching to get back onstage!). One fantastic event was at Planet Bluegrass in Lyons – they held a Solstice Celebration livestream on June 20 featuring us, Bonnie Paine & Friends, and Yonder Mountain String Band streaming live from the Rockygrass mainstage (as well as a pre-recorded set from Sam Bush), with the small audience all well distanced from each other and everyone wearing masks (other than while playing). That was a huge thrill to get to play that stage where we’ve seen so many of our heroes play, and it was actually on the same day we would’ve been playing at Telluride if things had worked out differently. (Planet Bluegrass has posted the video to their Facebook page, so you can still stream the event if you’d like to check it out.)
CN: Your most recent single “High on the Mountain” was released in June and it features a revival of Ola Belle Reed’s classic. Can you share how you went about reworking the song? What was your inspiration to do so?
Max: We are huge Hot Rize fans, and this song had always been a part of our set. One day James (banjo) and I were sitting on my back patio playing some tunes. We had been playing around with re-harmonization of a few different tunes, and this just kind of fell out! I played the chord progression, and James came in with the harmony and the banjo part; we both looked at each other and said “Well, that’s something!” I just came across the recording from that day, and you can feel our excitement when we hit those chords for the first time.
CN: When it comes to songwriting as a bluegrass band, it seems to be more like orchestrating as each instrument and vocal has their own piece of the puzzle. Can you take us through your songwriting process?
B: We have all played with different groups before, and having that experience allows us to be pretty dynamic in the ways we approach writing our music. Max brought a lot of the early material to the group, but in arranging these to be Bowregard songs we each put individual fingerprints on our music. We encourage each other to write, sing, contribute and try new things. Depending on who’s singing or leading the song, we’ve found we can have a diverse range of voices that are all distinctly still Bowregard.
CN: What was the first concert you ever attended?
Justin: Def Leppard in 1988 (hey, it was the 1980s!) The lights were incredible, and it was deafeningly loud. I was hooked.
Max: To go the opposite direction, Yo Yo Ma & The NY Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall
Colleen: When I was maybe 10 years old, my friend’s dad took us to see Rosanne Cash. I didn’t know who she was at the time, but I remember being enthralled by the big concert experience.
James: I’m not kidding ,.. it was 98 degrees … the boy band. Thanks mom <3.
Zach: Blues Traveler
CN: If you could describe yourselves in one word – individually and as a group – what would it be and why?
Max: Hungry
Justin: Restless. We are never satisfied with what we’ve done, we’re always looking at the next horizon, the next big gig, the next song. It keeps things fresh and interesting.
Colleen: Vigorous. People always comment about the band’s energy on stage, and I think we also have a deliberate drive and intensity to our music and our shows.
Zach: Intention
CN: With the pandemic still preventing most live shows, where can fans catch you? Are you doing any live streams?
B: We’re doing a few local shows in Colorado, where they are being conscientious about distancing and mask requirements to keep everyone safe. We will be doing a livestream with BandsInTown on August 5, and another livestream for the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) as part of their virtual IBMA Bluegrass Live Street Fest on October 2-3.
CN: What’s next on the horizon for you?
B: It’s of course hard to say – no one knows what the next year will hold for live music (or anything else). We’re continuing to write and learn new music now, and looking forward to the time when we can get back out onstage in front of happy, dancing audiences.
For more information on Bowregard, visit their website bowregard.com and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.