Local jazz group becoming a popular draw for music lovers

IDAHO FALLS — If you’ve been out and about in Idaho Falls recently, there’s a good chance you’ve heard The Dewdroppers.

The group has become a popular draw in the local music scene and is constantly gaining new fans. The word has spread, and now the band is also playing gigs in surrounding states like Utah and Montana.

Singer Katie Engstrom and guitarist Freddie Gildersleeve said the band has blossomed from a hobby into a side gig that keeps them pretty busy.

It all started about a number of years ago thanks to a meeting through the Eastern Idaho Jazz Society.

“I moved to Idaho Falls about five years ago,” Engstrom told EastIdahoNews.com. “When I got here, as a jazz lover, I thought, ‘I want to go out and support (local jazz musicians).’ I found out (EIJS) has these open-mic jazz jams. I said, ‘I’m gonna brave it. I haven’t sung for a while.’ But I got up there, and I sang.”

“I was in the house band,” Gildersleeve added. “I heard her sing, and I was like, ‘What?! Holy Passoli!’ She sang her song and skedaddled, so I didn’t get to track her down that day. Quite a while went by, almost a year before I saw her again, and then I was like, ‘Hold on. I gotta get your phone number here.’”

The musical chemistry between Engstrom and Gildersleeve developed easily, and the group’s sound came together quickly.

“I think we had maybe one rehearsal before we actually booked a gig,” Engstrom said. “If you’re a jazz musician, you already know a lot of these tunes from ‘The Great American Songbook.’ So we said, ‘We’ve already got an hour to two hours that we could play through,’ so we booked a gig and just started playing.”

It snowballed from there. The band landed a regular gig on Sundays at The Blackrock in Idaho Falls. That led to gigs at other local venues and music festivals and other locations across the region. They’ve even begun playing weddings.

Depending on the gig, you might see a different lineup.

“You’ll see us in different formations,” Engstrom said. “We started in the very beginning as a duo act, just guitar and voice. Then we brought Alex Holloway into it, and he’s been our main bass player for the last three years. Then we’ll ask other people. We’ll have the three of us, and we’ll have horn players join us. For smaller venues, we might go back to a duo. We enjoy having people join us but also having the ability to pull back a little bit.”

One reason the band is enjoying so many opportunities to play is that there’s a community of local music aficionados whose hunger for jazz is going underserved.

“I think the greatest thing about Idaho Falls is the INL,” Gildersleeve said. “You have all these people who have PhDs, who are from all over the world, and they come here, and they’re looking for culture. A good friend of ours is from New York City. He’s a huge jazz fan, so he was like, ‘Jazz? In Idaho Falls? Yes! Love it!’”

The band is also great for providing a background soundtrack, as they aren’t a highly amplified, percussion-driven group. They can help create ambiance at a bar or restaurant without generating too much noise to talk over.

Another reason why The Dewdroppers are blowing up is that they put their jazzy spin on music from across multiple genres, including artists like Prince and Amy Winehouse.

“Even if you’re not into jazz, we do a lot of things that people know or have heard somewhere,” Engstrom said. “I think because it’s not typically what you hear, that even if you’re not a huge jazz buff, it works.”

The band’s success has Gildersleeve and Engstrom thinking about long-term plans.

“It’s happening,” Gildersleeve said. “It’s taking off, and my goal is to have (Engstrom) quit her day job so we can do this full-time. Let’s just get in the van and go.”

You can check out the mellow sounds of The Dewdroppers on Spotify. You can also visit the band on their website or Facebook page for gig dates and follow them on Instagram to keep up with them.