Drew Emmitt Comes Home to the High Country for a Free Wednesday

The Sunset Concert Series saves one of its best cards for Wednesday, Aug 12, and it's a Colorado one: the Drew Emmitt Band plays Sunset Plaza, free, 6 to 8 p.m. For a state that treats bluegrass as something close to a native language, this is a homecoming.

Emmitt is a genuine architect of the sound people mean when they say "Colorado bluegrass." As co-founder — with Vince Herman — of Leftover Salmon, he spent three decades helping invent the loose, jammy, genre-mangling "slamgrass" that turned a Boulder bar band into a Rocky Mountain institution and put a whole generation of jam-adjacent string bands on the map. A mandolin and fiddle player of real pedigree, he's a Colorado Bluegrass Music Society Hall of Honor inductee, and he still lives the life he sings about, based over in Crested Butte on the other side of these same mountains.

The catalog earns the reputation. Leftover Salmon's most recent studio outing, Brand New Good Old Days, arrived in 2021 on Compass Records, the latest chapter in a discography that stretches back to the early '90s; Emmitt's own solo work, including Freedom Ride, showcases the more traditionally rooted, fiddle-forward side he doesn't always get to stretch out on with Salmon. The Drew Emmitt Band is where those threads meet — old-time bones, jam-band lungs.

Dropping him into a free Mountain Village plaza on a Wednesday is the kind of programming that makes the Sunset Series worth defending. This is an artist who could headline a paid festival slot — who has, many times — playing for families on blankets with the gondola humming behind the stage. The series turns 25 this year, and bookings like this are why: it treats free as a mandate for quality, not an excuse for filler.

Here's the "why it matters," and it's specific to this scene. Telluride's June bluegrass festival is world-famous, but it's a June event — out of the summer's back half entirely. Getting a Colorado bluegrass founder onto a Telluride-area stage in August, for free, keeps that tradition circulating through the whole season instead of packing it into one sold-out weekend. It's the root system doing its job.

Bring the kids, bring a blanket, get to Sunset Plaza by 5:30, and let a Hall-of-Honor mandolin player remind you why this state fell for bluegrass in the first place. Then ride the gondola down with the sun still on the peaks. Some encores you can't book — you just have to be standing there.

Sources: Sunset Concert Series 2026 Lineup; Drew Emmitt talks Leftover Salmon and Brand New Good Old Days | Bluegrass Today; Drew Emmitt | Colorado Bluegrass Music Society