Founding member composer, arranger, producer, multi-Instrumentalist of Strings Attached, and father of two, Will Taylor grew in Austin during the 70's and 80's. Will Taylor's story begins, like so many Austin music stories, at the Armadillo World Headquarters -- the late great concert hall, beer garden and artists' haven that both nurtured and reflected the open-minded spirit of its patrons. Taylor was raised in Austin, and his parents loved music. So it only followed that young Will spent many nights at the Armadillo, listening to music, in the company of his parents. The Armadillo was all about inclusiveness, for it was the home of rock and country, ballet and jazz, folk, blues and the spoken word. There were no boundaries. Form didn't matter as much as passion. As a boy, Taylor wandered about in this landscape without thinking about it. As he came of age in the late 1980s, Taylor gravitated toward jazz and classical music -- a world void of lyrics -- even though his parents had always been aficionados of singer-songwriters such as Townes Van Zandt. He mastered the viola, toured with the Turtle Island String Quartet and eventually put together a string jazz ensemble in Austin. His compositions were adventurous, creative . . . and well outside the lines of the mainstream.   Read more here. . .

Stirring the Soul with Strings by Brad Bucholtz

Imagine what might happen, suggests Taylor, if we took Austin's most popular singer-songwriters -- Abra Moore, or Jimmy LaFave, or Patrice Pike, or Ray Wylie Hubbard -- and let them perform, live, in a church? Then imagine if you paired those artists with acoustic "chamber" instruments -- cello, violin, viola, trumpet and hand drums -- and wrote new arrangements, adding dashes of jazz and classical music, that revealed new facets of their most beautiful or familiar songs?Imagine what might happen if you dared to blur all these boundaries between pop music and jazz, between rock music and classical music, between the musical realm and the lyrical realm, between the honky-tonk and the church, and in the spirit of art and fun and experimentation, you reached out for something . . . transcendent? Imagine.

Will Taylor and his acoustic ensemble stage this dream at St. David's Episcopal Church once a month.

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"The singers, all apparently inspired by the setting, gave extra thoughtful, extra intense efforts. If this album has a theme, it is celebration of the human spirit and the joy of musicians getting together to participate in an uplifting performance. Truly a feel-good album for a most worthy cause. Collaborations is a stirring, memorable work." MT, Sing Out Magazine.

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