Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer & Chris Thile Reunite Grammy Award-Winning Group For Not Our First Goat Rodeo

Sony Music Masterworks announces the long-awaited follow-up to the GRAMMY Award-winning The Goat Rodeo Sessions, with Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile.  The new album — Not Our First Goat Rodeo — will be released May 1 and is available now to preorder.  Making its debut alongside the album preorder is its lead offering, "Scarcely Cricket," which the group pairs with a live performance video — watch here.  Following the album's May release, the group will set out on a coast-to-coast U.S. tour beginning in August, followed by a second set of performances in October. 

WATCH VIDEO FOR "SCARCELY CRICKET" 
YOUTUBE: https://youtu.be/U2JkD27gAQY  

Both sets of Goat Rodeo sessions combine the talents of the four solo artists, each a Grammy Award-winning talent in his own right, to create a singular sound that's part composed, part improvised, and uniquely American. The music is so complex to pull off that the group likens it to a goat rodeo — an aviation term for a situation in which 100 things need to go right to avoid disaster. Both the first album and the new recording also feature the voice and artistry of singer-songwriter and fellow Grammy Award-winner Aoife O'Donovan, who rejoins the group as a guest on Not Our First Goat Rodeo.

The new release builds on 2011's genre-defying The Goat Rodeo Sessions, which debuted at No. 1 on Billboard's Classical, Classical Crossover, and Bluegrass charts and remained at No. 1 for 11 weeks on the Bluegrass chart. Marking Yo-Yo Ma's highest debut on the Billboard Top 200 albums chart, the release went on to break into the chart's top 20 albums, where it peaked at No. 18.  NPR's World Cafe called the album, which received GRAMMY Awards for Best Folk Album and Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical, "organic yet composed in a way that only four deeply talented, in-tune musicians could make it," with traces of, "Appalachia[n], Chinese, classical, Celtic, and jazz influences. If there was ever an album — or an unlikely band — that embodies the word 'eclectic,' this is it."

The Los Angeles Times has described the collaboration as "unlikely musicians on unlikely instruments … part blues, part bluegrass and a smidgen of Bach." The four musicians come from diverse backgrounds: Yo-Yo Ma (cello), a classical cellist known for his cross-genre collaborations and deep belief in culture's essential role in society; Stuart Duncan (fiddle, banjo), a multi-instrument bluegrass virtuoso who has played with artists from Dolly Parton to George Strait; Edgar Meyer (bass), a double bassist and composer who has written for musicians from Béla Fleck and Zakir Hussain to Emanuel Ax and Hilary Hahn; and Chris Thile (mandolin, fiddle, guitar, vocals), the mandolinist wunderkind who fronts bands such as Nickel Creek and Punch Brothers and hosts public radio's Live from Here. Their traditions and experiences intersect in this collaboration to create a compelling sound that is at once global and American, a shared voice that speaks to the moment in which we live.