Tag: ari hest

Frank Solivan Finds Room for All Kinds of Bluegrass

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Frank Solivan has steadily built a foundation in bluegrass, from going to festivals as a kid, touring in acoustic bands while living in Alaska, and playing fiddle in the US Navy Band’s bluegrass ensemble. For nearly 10 years he’s fronted Frank Solivan & Dirty Kitchen, an IBMA award-winning group that embraces its eclectic influences. A few days before releasing the new album, If You Can’t Stand the Heat, Solivan traced his journey with the Bluegrass Situation.

BGS: Let’s start with “Crave.” I feel like it captures everything that you’re about – the melody, the picking, and the big singing voice. Did you think it sets the tone for this new album?

Solivan: Yeah, a little bit. Right from the beginning, I had an idea for long, sustaining notes, and this chordal thing, and the words started coming together. Becky Buller and I started writing that song… gosh, it’s been a while now. We took some artistic arrangement liberties in the studio and came up with what’s there. I almost feel like I painted myself in a corner because it is a tough song to sing, and it takes a lot of vocal energy, that’s for sure.

You do build up to a big note. While you’re singing that song, do you think, “Oh no, here it comes…”

You know, if I’m in good voice, I’m not terribly worried about it. There’s a lot of arrangement stuff that goes on in there too, keeping it together. Singing well while you’re playing an arrangement like that – I’m really the only person I have to worry about. Everybody else is great. It’s fun, though, and it’s a challenge.

I was having some trouble with my hands over the last decade or so, my left hand especially, and it was getting progressively worse up until we were recording this record. I never considered myself a great singer or whatever, but I really wanted to focus on the singing on this record, because I thought maybe I won’t be able to play as well as I want to later.

Then I had carpal tunnel release surgery on my hand and it turned out great. I went to a top-class surgeon and my hand is fine now. But, you know, as a musician you worry about that, thinking maybe I should just focus on singing well on this record and keep my playing within my limitations, and not reach out too far. I was able to focus and find a singing voice. I’m constantly trying to become a better singer and I think maybe this record helped with that a little bit, too.

On your albums, you often go for honest, confessional lyrics, and I don’t hear that a lot in bluegrass. Do you think you have that more “sensitive songwriter” side to your music?

Oh, I’m just a big teddy bear. [Laughs] My songwriting comes from inspiration in life, for sure. But I didn’t write every song on this record. I wrote “Crave” with Becky, then there’s a song that closes the record called “Be Sure” that was based on an experience of mine, and some other experiences of others around me at the time, when I was 19 or 20 years old. And it’s finally seeing the light of day and got recorded.

But the formula is having songs that I can relate to – either songs that I’ve written or written with somebody, or from a family member or a band member. My cousin Megan McCormick wrote two songs on there – “My Own Way” and “Shiver.” Our banjo player Mike Munford composed the banjo tune on there. Also, friends write songs, like Sarah Siskind. She wrote the song “Set in Stone” with Ari Hest. That’s the formula for us — keeping it kind of close.

How did you wind up living in Washington DC?

Back when I was 18, I graduated from high school and moved from Central Valley, California, to Alaska. I drove my pickup truck up there. I was with my mom, and also I was invited to play music up there with Ginger Boatwright. She was doing a tour that first summer with Doug Dillard – she was the singer and guitar player for the Doug Dillard Band. I thought, “OK, I’m going to hang out and play it by ear.” We had a little bit of family up there, so we stayed with them. My mom got a job and then I went off and moved all around Alaska.

Long story short is, I loved it and stayed. I worked all kinds of jobs, from explosives, to a perforating service, to driving trucks and delivery vehicles, to driving a school bus and being a substitute school teacher, to construction… whatever I could do that would allow me to go hunting and fishing and play music. I played with a lot of bands and went to the University of Alaska in Anchorage and studied violin performance. And then heard of an audition for the US Navy Band in Washington DC, for the country band and bluegrass band, and when they had an opening, they offered me the job.

The next thing you know I’m going to boot camp, doing about a million push-ups. Anyway, Leah — who is my wife now but was my girlfriend at the time — and I moved to the DC area in 2003 and I reported for duty. We got locked in here and I did six years with the Navy Band. I decided at the five-year mark that I needed to get out and I gave them my notice. I needed to get out and make music. It was a good job and I was proud to serve, but for me, I needed to be an artist. I needed to make music, not just play music.

Growing up, who were some of the people who encouraged you?

Well, we’d have these huge family gatherings and we’d end up doing big meals, and the next thing you know, everybody’s pulling out instruments and everybody’s encouraging other. I had a cousin Ty that passed away last year — Charles Tyson Smith – and I’ve recorded a number of songs that either he’s written or that we wrote together. He was somebody I looked up to in my family as a musician, writer, and singer.

And of course my parents would take me to concerts and music festivals. I remember when I was pretty young, going to see Ray Charles, Tower of Power, Stevie Wonder, The Judds, Merle Haggard, whoever it might be. I had all these opportunities to see these greats and we’d go to music festivals as well – bluegrass festivals and old-time fiddle contests and jam sessions. That’s what I grew up doing. Now of course I realize what a gift it was.

When I was in high school, I heard about this band who was looking for a fiddle player. My mom took me to the audition and I got the job. She took me to a number of these gigs and helped me buy the gear I needed for it. I played with a number of bands in high school, but they weren’t high school bands. They were regional bands that would open up for big names and big concerts, and play big clubs and dancehalls. Luckily I carried myself a little older than I was, which was great, because if they knew I was 16, 17, or 18 years old, I probably wouldn’t have been allowed to go into these places!

Being exposed to so many different kinds of music, do you think that shaped the way you hear songs or seek out songs?

Yeah, I think it’s a more open-minded approach for sure. People are always trying to categorize — “So, what kind of music do you play?” A graphic artist friend of mine and I came up with a shirt design, and we sold out of ‘em pretty quick, but it was basically an umbrella, and on the umbrella, it said, “ALLGRASS, Frank Solivan & Dirty Kitchen.” Then underneath it, like raining coming down inside the umbrella, it had words like Appalachian, mashgrass, newgrass, bluegrass, country, acoustic, and all these different titles people think you need to categorize somebody. But the idea was, we try to pull from all of those things and beyond. But also to say, all of those styles are, shall we say, bluegrass.

I think people are really scared these days about losing traditional bluegrass music. But it’s kind of like everything – if it’s really good, which it is, and authentic and organic and beautiful and done well, then it’s not going anywhere. It will stand the test of time. And the beauty about all those traditional bluegrass people like Bill Monroe, or moving on into the Osborne Brothers and Jim & Jesse, all those guys were innovating. They were trying to get it to a larger audience, and to me, that’s the tradition of bluegrass – to constantly have it evolve for people right now.

Photo credit: Courtney Jarrell Middleton

Judy Collins: Singing Through the Memories

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Judy Collins has a gift for determining what songs to record. Call it gut instinct, call it intuition, call it what you will, because she, herself, has difficulty articulating the feeling that strikes when she hears something she simply must sing. “I can’t tell you that because it’s a secret,” she says. “I don’t know the answer myself or I would tell you, but if I love it, I have to sing it. It’s that simple. But it’s really the only answer I know.”

Although recognizing songs she wants to sing might be analogous to a lightning flash, singing them often takes far longer. It isn’t a matter of hearing one and then rushing out to record it within days or even weeks. “Songs will sit around and sort of cook in my mind, or I’ll forget about them — but then I never totally forget about them, if I have some feeling about the fact that I should sing them. They hang around waiting to be paid attention to,” she says. Collins points to one song, in particular, that has haunted her ever since she first heard it many years ago: Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” Even though she very much wants to record it, she hasn’t figured out how. “I’ll do it someday,” she offers. “It’s a magnificent song. It’s a description of a thing that happened that’s awful and probably preventable, but it’s a very dramatic song and very moving. I don’t know: Maybe the motto is ‘Don’t get on ships that have holes on them.’” It’s a line that could apply to more than just boats. Upon hearing this, her mind immediately jumps to relationships. “That’s an interesting word,” she adds. “I didn’t think of relationships in terms of ships. I’ll have to think about that.” And it rings true: Don’t get on board a relationship with holes, whatever you consider “holes” to be in such a scenario.

The now 77-year-old Collins rose to fame on the strength of her voice, which she used to record covers of folk songs, Broadway hits, and more. But she’s no stranger to songwriting and, along with singer/songwriter Ari Hest, has co-written and recorded a new album, Silver Skies Blue. “I’m just crazy about him,” Collins laughs, letting a more playful side of herself emerge. It seems fair to say Hest feels the same. Both appear smitten with each other in the way creative counterparts often exude an excitement and respect for collaborations that grow and stretch and help one become all the better for it. “It’s one of those gifts that comes along and you think, ‘Mmm, this is really wonderful. I wonder where this came from?’” she ponders. The two first partnered when Collins invited him to take part in her 2015 duets album, Strangers Again, by recording his song by the same name. “The process of recording the song was easy, very fluid,” Hest recounts. “I think everything went as well as it could have and the result was that we just really wanted to do more together in the future. It spurred on the idea of writing together, which started only a couple of months later.”

The chemistry they manifested on “Strangers Again” exceeded how their voices paired together — a unique high and low combo that finds its most remarkable element in the way their beautiful timbres counter one another. There also seemed to be a natural and easy collaborative partnership ready for the plucking. The two began meeting in New York to work on what would become Silver Skies Blue. “We’d sit around, have some coffee, talk about our lives, and then have a writing session,” Collins says of their writing time. Hest saw an interesting challenge in their different music sensibilities, since he came from pop and she from folk. That stretched not just the act of their writing together, but writing beyond genres both felt most comfortable in. “For me, the idea of writing songs that were heavily based in verses and more about the story itself … this was a fine concept for me even. We tried to blend the two,” he says.

The result is a 12-track album spanning love songs, meditations on life, and loss, as well as the current state of the world. On “The Weight,” the up-tempo pace creates a foreboding feeling furthered by mournful guitar. “I will soak my soul / Let the river take control, let the river take control / I know it’s not too late / To let go of the weight, to let go of the weight,” Hest and Collins sing together on the chorus, her soprano adding color to his dense alto. That’s the real beauty in the album: The harmonies both singers have discovered in each other’s voices and the way they so agreeably merge into the same song space together. “I’ve sung with a lot of people in the past and, when you sing with somebody who has a similar voice to you, you can almost cancel each other out in a way,” Hest says. “Also, she sounds so angelic, it’s hard not to sound good with her.”

The songs Collins and Hest have written add to the large oeuvre of her work, which largely involves singing words and melodies someone else has penned. Through it all, she’s made each song her own. She says, “I think songs have a very strong life. It has little to do with the writer. The writer writes them and then maybe sings them, maybe not, but then they take on a life of their own and go around and meet other people. They have a whole existence, I think. You hear a song that you like, and you’ve heard 15 people recording it or singing it, then you know it’s always different. It always sounds like the singer who’s singing it. It will stand out in a different way for each performer.”

After all, songs for Collins carry an important message from the past that must be shared and shared often. In speaking about songs as memories, she touches upon whales. “I have this friend — he’s a whaling person,” she explains, “He says that the whales are singing for very specific reasons about memory: where to go, what to do, how things are going, if the planet is in good shape or not. They have to remember where they came from and who they were and who they are, and that’s what I think it is about music.” In the way that whales communicate through song, Collins draws a parallel to music’s purpose in the modern world. Of course, there are the less thoughtful hits that provide entertainment, but songs with real meaning — with real messages — resound throughout the ages. “The thing about music that I think is very powerful is, I think it’s a tool, a facilitator of memory,” Collins says. “I think that’s probably what it was supposed to be about always. 'Let’s remember where to go to get that incredibly good bison we shot a few weeks ago, and if we put it into a poem or a song or we draw it on the wall of the cave' … Somehow — but particularly in music — there is a memory that is reignited. The best part of us comes out when we listen and when we perform, as well.” She continues to sing because she wants to participate in the storytelling, in the memory sharing. “I think it’s true that we have to find some way back to that memory because the world around us tries to shatter it over and over again,” she says.

If her age suggests she’s slowing down, Collins doesn’t intend to stop anytime soon. Hest says, “One thing I really envy about Judy is she is constantly looking for new things to do, new kinds of songs to sing, new projects to get involved in. She has the energy of someone who’s younger than me, and it’s really cool to witness it.” She’s already working on a Stephen Sondheim album, something she’s wanted to do for years. Given her love for Broadway music, would she ever follow in Sara Bareilles’ footsteps and write the music for a musical? She pauses. People have asked her to perform in Broadway musicals, a potential strain on her voice given the number of performances required each week. But writing might be another thing. “Maybe there’s something in that idea. Maybe I should try to shape something that would be doable by other people. I will think about it. It’s a good idea,” she says. Whether she does or not, her work ethic promises listeners that she will continue finding songs or creating them in order to share those crucial memories connecting then and now.

Lede illustration by Cat Ferraz.