Best band for your buck

Free music is hard to come by, and truly great free music is even harder. But Carbon Leaf always puts on a phenomenal show, and their free performance on Cross Street was no exception.

The show opened with local band Woodswork, followed by The Low Millions, a band out of Los Angeles. The Low Millions are racially diverse but otherwise unoriginal. Their sound has the same sweet vocals as John Mayer and the pop-rock edge typical of the mid-90's. They are releasing an album entitled Ex-Girlfriends on Tuesday.

In contrast, Carbon Leaf is totally original. As guitar and mandolin player Carter Gravatt said, "We're just trying to put out something new." Their combination of guitars, drums, double and electric bass, mandolin, pennywhistle and chimes makes them unique while allowing them to be grouped in alternative rock. Despite the alt-rock label, Carbon Leaf cannot be adequately compared to any other group of today. Gravatt joked that the group had "once been compared to the Dave Matthews Band without the horns, the fiddle and the African jazz influence. What does that leave? A white guy and a guitar?" Their new album Indian Summer leans more toward the popular rock genre, but Echo Echo is an excellent example of their creative prowess.

By 9:00 p.m. on Friday, E Cross Street in the Federal Hill neighborhood of Baltimore was heavily crowded. People came from as far away as the University of Virginia to hear Carbon Leaf play outdoors in the beautiful, cool night air. They opened the set with "What About Everything?" from their most recent album, followed by "Torn to Tattered" off of Echo Echo, to which they added an excellent bass solo. Carbon Leaf's Jordan Medas, who plays both electric and stand-up bass, is one of the best contemporary bass players, and the band does a superb job of including melodic bass lines in an era of punk-like rock, where the bass is denigrated and neglected.

The set continued for a solid 90 minutes and included an oddly off-beat rendition of their current single "A Life Less Ordinary," and an intriguing cover of the Beach Boys' "Sloop John B," dedicated to Baltimore, which blended into "Home" and an up-tempo version of "Desperation Song" with a tribute to "Peter and the Wolf." Although they mostly played songs off of Indian Summer, they did slip in a few hits from Echo Echo and their three other albums. The encore consisted of a heart-wrenching a capella hymn and a song that was mostly Gravatt going wild with a guitar solo.

Cross Street LIVE is a sporadic concert series open to all ages and always free.