Over the past decade, Tatiana Hargreaves has been on the forefront of an up and coming generation of old time, bluegrass and new acoustic musicians. Growing up in the West Coast fiddle contest and fiddle camp scenes in the 2000s, Hargreaves got swept into the emerging generation of acoustic musicians with her brother Alex Hargreaves (Billy Strings), Brittany Haas (Punch Brothers), Sarah Jarosz (I’m With Her), Dominick Leslie (Molly Tuttle), and many others. From placing first at the Clifftop Appalachian Fiddle Contest in 2009, to her bluegrass fiddling on Laurie Lewis’ GRAMMY-nominated album The Hazel And Alice Sessions, Hargreaves shows a musical fluency that flows between old time and bluegrass worlds with ease. She has toured with musicians such as Gillian Welch, Dave Rawlings, Jerry Douglas and the Transatlantic Sessions, Laurie Lewis, Darol Anger, Michael Daves, Bruce Molsky and Jake Blount. After studying ethnomusicology at Hampshire College, she moved to Durham, North Carolina in 2017 to work with bluegrass and old-time music legend Alice Gerrard. Since 2018 Hargreaves has primarily recorded and performed in a banjo-fiddle duo with Allison de Groot and with her four-piece old-time band Hard Drive. Hargreaves teaches bluegrass fiddle and improvisation at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill where she also received a Masters degree in Library Science and worked in the Southern Folklife Collection for three years. She is currently working on an album of the music of fiddler Tex Logan.
Tatiana’s duo with Allison de Groot has been described as a “can’t-miss pair in 2019,” by Paste Magazine, and their rendition of Alice Gerrard’s song “Beaufort County Jail” was included in Rolling Stone Country’s “10 Best Country and Americana Songs to Hear.” Their album on Free Dirt Records is a powerful opening statement and “dives deep into the old-time style and comes up with something wonderfully fresh” (Vinyl District). De Groot & Hargreaves create a sound that is adventurous, masterful, and original, as they expand on the eccentricities of old songs, while never losing sight of what makes them endure. The duo not only showcases impressive musicianship, but reflects on which voices we seek to hear as we explore the expansive, diverse canon of American roots music. Their self-titled album released in 2019 was nominated for IBMA Liner Notes of the Year.
Tatiana’s band “Hard Drive” features Sonya Badigian, Aaron Tacke and Nokosee Fields and incorporates a combination of old-time, bluegrass and Texas fiddle repertoire. From brother duets to raging fiddle tunes, Hard Drive brings a sense of deep intuition and silliness to the world that encompasses old-time, country, and bluegrass. The Bluegrass Situation described the band as “a delightful subversion of our expectations of what traditional bluegrass is supposed to be.”
