Max Wareham & the National Bluegrass Team at Natalie’s Grandview, Columbus, Ohio, Aug. 20, 2025
Bluegrass is a team sport for Max Wareham.
The Peter Rowan Bluegrass Band banjo picker is on the road with his own National Bluegrass Team to support his Rowan-produced solo debut, DAGGOMIT! And on Aug. 20 on Charlie’s Stage in front of some 30 hard-listening music lovers inside Natalie’s Grandview, Wareham and company plopped old-timey music squarely in the present day.
With no amplifiers and an old-school mic at center stage to capture lead vocals and instrumental solos, Wareham, mandolinist and baritone singer Jean Baptiste Cardineau and guitarist and tenor Jack Holland made room for one another in moving about the small listening-room stage as bassist Wes Shuck held things down in back. And when the front line engaged in three-part harmonies on such numbers as the gospel-infused “The Wicked Path of Sin” and the hopeful joy of “Never Grow Old,” which ended the 65-minute performance, the show seemed a band performance as much as a solo gig.
The gregarious Cardineau underscored this feeling with his effusive stage presence, his prodigious riffing and featured spotlights on his own “Booze is the Glue that Keeps Us Together” - If we could be wasted all the time, we’d be in love forever, is the kicker in this deceptively sad song - and the standard “Orange Blossom Special,” which burned the tracks as the temporary frontman kept his promise to “put a hurtin’ on this tiny little mandolin.”
With Wareham in charge, as he was for the majority of the set, the focus was on DAGGOMIT! And though the songs differed in concert owing to varied instrumentation from a new group of players, their vitality and spark remained intact as the quartet glided like stones skipping on a pond from the tender lovesickness of “Highway to Your Heart;” to the wordless intensity of “The Black & Gold,” a paean to the Boston Bruins borne of the COVID-19 pandemic; to the front-porch determination of the Wareham-Rowan co-write “Lonesome Blues, I’m Coming Home.”
The bandleader’s generosity and graciousness toward his bandmates notwithstanding - a trait almost certainly picked up from the collaborative-minded Rowan - this stop in Columbus, Ohio, was Wareham’s show. And with his comrades at his back, the one-time sideman stepped from the shadows to preview what should be a long solo career.
His first central Ohio appearance is therefore unlikely to be his last central Ohio appearance.
Guitarist Adam Schlenker, who’s also played with Rowan, and mandolinist Hayes Griffin opened with a duo set featuring harmonious vocals and lightning-fast licks on such covers as “Sittin’ on Top of the World,” “Kentucky Mandolin” and “The Last Thing on My Mind.”
Grade card: Max Wareham & the National Bluegrass Team at Natalie’s Grandview - 8/20/25 - B+