Tag: Banjo

The Small Glories Share Canadian Stories in Song

Posted on by Editor

When it’s mentioned that the word “ambassador” comes to mind when listening to the Small Glories’ new album, Cara Luft starts to cheer. Along with her singing partner JD Edwards, the Small Glories see themselves as Canadian storytellers, like troubadours going from town to town singing about the world around them.

Truly, the Manitoba-based folk duo’s latest, Assiniboine & The Red, gives special insight into their unique worldview with songs like “Alberta,” “Winnipeg,” and “Don’t Back Down.” Chatting by phone, Luft shared a few more stories with the Bluegrass Situation.

BGS: It’s been a few year since you’ve made a record. What was the vibe in the studio when you were making this one?

CL: It was interesting in that we got everybody back together again. The only thing that changed was our engineer — and he’s a friend of ours. We had the same producer (Neil Osborne) and the same rhythm section, which was great. We actually recorded it in Winnipeg, and it was nice to be in our hometown. You know what was so funny? It was April but it was freezing cold. It was one of those moments like, “Oh my God, we live in Canada.” It’s April 15 and it’s minus 15 degrees, which is ridiculous! It was freezing! So, I remember being very cold!

This is for the Bluegrass Situation, so we have to talk about the banjo.

We do! [Laughs]

Tell me what attracted you to the banjo in the first place.

I grew up in a folk-singing family. My parents were a professional folk duo and played music when they were younger, too. My dad is a wonderful clawhammer banjo player. He’s been playing for close to sixty years now. So I grew up listening to the banjo, never thinking that I’d actually want to play it, but I did love the sound of it. I think it was kind of inevitable that I would pick it up. And of course it’s not the three-finger bluegrass style, even though I love that style. I don’t really play that but I do love the sound of the banjo.

And I love writing with it. It’s such a different instrument than the guitar. I really was guitar-focused for most of my career. I picked up the banjo nine years ago and I found it really fascinating to change the way my right hand worked, because it’s a different movement than if you’re doing fingerstyle guitar. And just having that drone string, I find that it’s like no other instrument that I’ve ever attempted playing. It’s this beautiful string that just rings out. I found it a very interesting way to write. I write differently on the banjo than I do on the guitar, so it’s brought me into a wider perspective of songs to write, I would say.

How are the songs different that you’re writing on banjo?

I would say I’m writing more tune-based songs on the banjo. As a guitar play, I am a really strong rhythm player and I would do the odd lick here and there, you know, coming up with something, but I wasn’t really a lead player on guitar. I would do some fingerstyle stuff, in more of the realm of those folkie fingerstyle guys like Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, but not really tune-based. The banjo is definitely much more tune-based for me. I write melodies on the banjo, where I never really wrote melodies on guitar before. I would sing a melody but I wouldn’t necessarily play a melody, so it’s been really beautiful to explore this melodic writing on a banjo.

I read an interview about how you loved the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken as a kid. I was curious how that might have impacted your music.

Yeah! For me, growing up in a folk-singing family, there was music all the time in the house, whether it was listening to vinyl or listening to my parents rehearse, or listening to people play house concerts, or musicians who were traveling through town and rehearsing in our living room. So I was steeped in acoustic music from a very, very young age, whether it was live or recorded.

I remember listening to Will the Circle Be Unbroken, with the Carter Family and all these phenomenal people. There’s a track on there, “Soldier’s Joy,” with two banjo players, and one is playing clawhammer and one is playing three-finger, and to this day it’s still one of my favorite songs to listen to. I think it’s just the beauty of acoustic music and the history of acoustic music, whether it’s bluegrass or folk – and to me, the lines are a little blurred there. But that album in particular, I remember listening to it all through high school and even into my early 20s.

When I listen to “Don’t Back Down,” I can hear a sense of strength in there. What was on your mind when you wrote that song?

I wrote that with Bruce Guthro, who’s a great singer-songwriter, but he’s also lead singer of a group called Runrig, a great Scottish band, even though he’s from Canada. We wrote that as part of a collaboration where we were given the theme of writing around “home,” or what we would consider calling “home.” Bruce is from Cape Breton Island, which is in Nova Scotia, way out in the Maritime Provinces. It’s known for its musical history, but it’s also known for communities that are dying because either mining has stopped or fishing has stopped. So these people would be moving away from their communities, trying to find homes and work in other locations.

I was talking to him about being from the Canadian prairies, where there are quite a few areas in Saskatchewan that are full of ghost towns, where people have uprooted and moved to cities like Calgary or Edmonton, or Fort McMurray where the oil sands are. We were comparing notes about these communities that are dying, and what is it like for those who decide to stay? They don’t want to give up on all the things that hit them, right? They stick around during the dust bowl or when the fires come, when work has dried up and people are trying to find a way to make a living. So we thought, “Let’s write a song to honor those people who have decided to make it work in their home communities.”

Speaking of home, your song “Winnipeg” is such a love letter to your hometown. I noticed as that song progresses, there is another voice that comes in. Can you tell me more about that?

Yes, we have two guest vocalists on that track. Winnipeg has a huge indigenous population and a huge Métis population, which is a combination of people who have come from both an indigenous and a French background, and we also have a large French population, and then the English, and then everything else under the sun is in there, too.

We felt that in order to really honor our adopted hometown of Winnipeg, we needed to involve the French and the First Nations people in the song. We have a wonderful singer and songwriter who is Métis and she ended up writing a French portion to the song and doing a call-and-response with us on the track. And we invited a First Nations chanter and drummer to come and sing at the end of the song. We felt it wrapped up this beautiful multicultural community that we have in Winnipeg.

To me, “Sing” captures the spirit of this record. It lets people know about you and what you stand for. Is that important for you to share your own experiences with an audience?

Yes, I think it is. I think we’ve been more aware of bringing stories from other places that we’ve been, too, so it’s a combination of our experiences and also other people’s experiences. And with this record being released on an American label, we feel very privileged to be able to share about Canada with our American neighbors. It’s a very Canadian-focused album, with a strong sense of location. We want to bring stories about the people in Canada, and what things are like for us, and share that with the States, and Europe, and Australia, and the markets we get to go to.

It’s so great when people hear a song like “Winnipeg,” like, the people who come up to us in England and say, “Wow, I never thought I’d want to go to Winnipeg!” It cracks us up. We’re happy that we live in Winnipeg and we’re lucky that we live in Canada. We feel very privileged to live in Canada and we want to share some of the love, and some of the stories, of who we are and where we’re from.

Photo credit: Stefanie Atkinson

Gena Britt, “Big Country”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Given her expansive resume and deep list of awards nominations and accolades, you might expect banjoist and singer Gena Britt’s personality to be a bit more bold and brash. On stage next to her longtime friends in the Grammy Award-nominated outfit Sister Sadie she ranks as one of the quieter members — which is not so much a reflection of shyness as it is a testament to the entertaining gregariousness of her bandmates. That is, until Britt bears down on the five string and commences the peeling-off-of-faces. She has a patently unyielding right hand on the banjo, matched perfectly by the percussive, explosive, innovative fingerings of her left. Her personality comes through without apology and without giving her audience so much as a second to catch their breath, which of course must be continually (and understandably) knocked out of them by her picking.

Though she does step up to the mic with Sister Sadie to sing with some regularity — in fact, she was nominated for SPGBMA’s Female Vocalist of the Year Award in the early 2000s — she makes her pristine vocals the unabashed centerpiece of her brand new solo project, Chronicle. One of the album’s only two instrumentals is the rip-roaring traditional number, “Big Country” — this track definitely supplies bang for your tune buck. Immediately, listeners are reminded of that punchy right hand. Britt utilizes split seconds of space expertly, emphasizing downbeats and coordinated accents with her backing band without devolving into any of the overbearing tropes of “mash.”

Each of the track’s masterful musicians — Jason Barie (fiddle), Dustin Benson (guitar), Darren Nicholson (mandolin), Josh Matheny (Dobro), and Zak McLamb (bass) — take turns showing off their prowess, but not without …what do you call it? Taste! This is a tune that is not shy or mild — because neither is Britt, when you actually take a minute to look and listen.

Julian Pinelli, “Simple Mountains”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

There’s an almost intangible subversion to fiddler Julian Pinelli’s debut album, Bent Creek, and an original tune included therein, “Simple Mountains.” The track begins with fiddle and banjo, but not in their age-old, familiar capacities. There’s a lyrical, pop-like sensibility to their duetted intro, painting a dreamy soundscape, a background for what’s to follow. The tightly-knit, free-flowing, jaunty tune calls back to the Appalachian Mountains from which Pinelli hails, but with the modern, neat, and tidy crispness of the string band scene of Boston, where he attended Berklee College of Music.

Though Pinelli and his band, Matthew Davis (banjo), Tristan Scroggins (mandolin), Sam Leslie (guitar), and Dan Klingsberg (bass), were well acquainted before the project, they were assembled expressly for these recordings, under the direction of the ever ethereal roots/folk savant Aoife O’Donovan. The group, especially on “Simple Mountains,” sounds impossibly in step with one another, tight and ever-listening. Their musicality and the authentic purity of the instruments — you’ll hear unexpected G-runs, an unyielding mando chop, and stunning double-stops — coupled with their impressive commitment to innovative, untrod musical ground elevates the entire set of songs above simple “vanity album” status. This is not a gratuitous, self-serving shredfest. It’s a surprisingly mature, impressively realized record that not only showcases exactly how the future of bluegrass-based, new acoustic-tinged music will play out, it shines a spotlight on a few of the exact pickers who will make that future happen. Hopefully not without a lightly subversive touch here and there.

Béla Fleck and the Flecktones Forge Their Own Path

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What’s on Béla Fleck’s mind?

Balloons.

Just the day before, his Nashville house was filled with them, as well as with a few dozen kids. It was the 6th birthday of the eldest of two children of the three-finger-style banjo maestro and his clawhammer-style counterpart, frequent recording and touring partner and wife Abigail Washburn.

But the days surrounding this have also had a party vibe. He’s been in rehearsals with his cohorts in the beloved jazz-and-way-beyond Flecktones, in preparation for a tour marking the band’s 30th birthday.

Working again with harmonica player/pianist Howard Levy, bassist Victor Wooten, and the singular electro-acoustic percussionist known as Futureman (a.k.a. Wooten’s brother Roy), digging deep into their group catalog of complex flights of fancy mixing daredevil chops, musical depth, and persistent whimsy has been a blast.

“They’re the same guys they were when I first met them,” he says, speaking from home. “Curious, interested, ever-expanding, ever-pulling me with them. There’s a very special bond we have together. I’m realizing it more and more as years go by, one of the great relationships in our lives, musically and personally.”

They’re even pulling out such rarely played and decidedly difficult gems as “Jekyll and Hyde (and Ted and Alice)” from the band’s second album, 1991’s Flight of the Cosmic Hippo. It’s challenging and exciting, enlivening the qualities that made this alchemical combo of characters special from the very start. Futureman, he says, is an “empath and enabler — musical enabler, brings consciousness underneath you.” Victor Wooten too. Levy is “the crazy ideas on top. He’s the brains of the outfit.”

Fleck’s role? “Somehow I thought I was the heart of it, limiting it but making it more understandable for the common man — I was the common man in the band, surrounded by these crazy guys.”

But with a moment to reflect on their collective history and achievements, he finds descriptions of the magic they work together to be elusive.

This is where the balloons come in.

“It has to have heart, has to have melodies, some harmonies,” says Fleck, who turns 61 in July. “Couldn’t just be a groove or a shred-fest. That’s the power of the band. The tunes are strong, good things to pour everyone’s musical power into. Like a balloon. It’s an empty piece of rubber. But these tunes I’d written, we filled them up with Futureman and Victor and Howard — the balloons get real handsome. With the balloons at the party, it occurred to me that you fill them up and they become joyful. That’s what this music is.”

They’ll be sharing that joy on the road now, including two shows of particular import. This 30th anniversary tour began with a big “Friends and Family” kickoff May 30 at Red Rocks near Denver, the friends and family here including Washburn, saxophonist Jeff Coffin, Dobro genius Jerry Douglas, and the Colorado Symphony. And on June 8 they will be taking a cherished headlining slot at the Hollywood Bowl’s vaunted Playboy Jazz Festival.

The Playboy slot is, to Fleck, a particularly meaningful recognition.

“It’s one of the neat things to being around 30 years,” he says of that booking. “From the start I was begging to play it and they said, ‘Yeah, we’ll put you on at noon’ and we’d play once every four years or so. Now we’re in the headlining slot and we’re legacy artists.”

Sure, the Flecktones have had several albums go to the top of the jazz sales and airplay charts and they have won two Grammy Awards for contemporary jazz album, with Outbound in 2000 and The Hidden Lands in 2006. And last year the band was given the prestigious Miles Davis Award by the Montreal International Jazz Festival. And Fleck has found himself partnering regularly on recordings and tours with some of the greats of jazz, one in particular in an ongoing partnership. “I’m playing with Chick Corea, which is ridiculous, on a regular basis,” he marvels, having just returned home from a tour with the ceaselessly groundbreaking pianist.

But, while belated acceptance in the jazz world is frustrating, he understands. See, banjo is pretty much standard in any jazz band… in 1919. In 2019, not so much. Even after 30 years of forging a path for banjo in modern jazz, Fleck remains singular. Asked about others doing anything comparable today, he’s kinda stumped.

He cites New Orleans’ veteran Don Vappie, but he’s generally in the mode of traditions going back to those earliest years of jazz. There’s Matt Davis, a converted jazz pianist who’s on the faculty of the University of Michigan. And there are others who use some jazz chops and sensibilities while not strictly playing that style of music, notably Tony Trischka, Noam Pikelny, Alison Brown, and Pat Cloud.

“But yeah,” he says. “They’re rare.”

Not to mention that the Flecktones as a whole is anything but standard jazz, with a truly eccentric approach and reach into a lot of styles. The 3-CD Little Worlds set from 2003 showed a boundless range that felt to some at once excitingly delightful and confounding.

On the other hand, not fitting in any category is par for the course for Fleck. He’s made a career of it, holding the record for the most categories in which he has been nominated for Grammys, 16 total. The most recent win is a best folk album trophy in 2016 for Béla Fleck & Abigail Washburn.

He’s a charter member, he quips, of the “Modern American Attention Deficit Disorder Musicians.” There are really only two others he’d put in that association: Jerry Douglas (whose fusiony Jerry Douglas Band may be the only thing out there comparable to the Flecktones) and Chris Thile (who’s resumé runs from Nickel Creek to ongoing collaborations with classical cellist Yo-Yo Ma and jazz pianist Brad Mehldau).

There’s one side of his musical hexadecagon he’s underserved for a while now, though. Ironically, it’s the one that first brought him fame when he emerged as a precocious New York City musician in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

“On the bluegrass side, people go, ‘Whatever happened to Béla Fleck? He could have been a great bluegrass player.’” he says. “Someone told me he had heard that. That was when I was at the top of my game, selling out stadiums with the Flecktones on tour with the Dave Matthews Band.”

Well, it has been 20 years since his last true bluegrass album, the on-point-titled The Bluegrass Sessions. And the one before that, the breakthrough Drive, came in 1988, a year before the Flecktones genesis. Well, as it happens, Fleck has a new bluegrass album in the works with a cast of musicians including such longtime buddies as Douglas, mandolinist Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, bassist Mark Schatz and fiddler Stuart Duncan (all of whom were on the 1988 album) and a mix of fellow veteran stars (bassist Meyer, mandolinists David Grisman and Chris Thile) and relative newcomers (fiddlers Billy Contreras and Michael Cleveland, mandolinist Dominick Leslie, and guitarist Cody Kilby).

The timing? Just seemed right, he says.

“Now the years have gone by and I didn’t have a place for bluegrass to fit in,” he says. “But I had these tunes burning a hole in my pocket and thought I would really love to have a place for them. These sessions have been a knockout. These are hard tunes. And we’re having a blast. It’s as good as I’d hoped.”

The results will be out sometime next year. But first there’s this Flecktones balloon to float.

“One thing I will guarantee you is you will never hear anything else like it,” he says. “There is nothing else like the Flecktones in the world. I promise that. And I am very proud that were are that, and that we are back together.”

Tui, “Cookhouse Joe”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

“Old-time.” The moniker itself seemingly contains eons of musical cross-pollination, generations of aural tradition, lifetimes of carefully and purposefully — and haphazardly and accidentally — passing down the skills, stories, community, and tunes that make up the musical form. A new crop of old-time pickers has been slowly but surely emerging from the tight-knit, often insular (but almost never outright forbidding) ranks of the genre, with a continuing focus on the decades that have come before, but through a new lens. One of reclamation and representation, of mining stories and songs, one of painstakingly undoing the erasure that has prevailed over the history of any/all non-white, non-colonial, non-Christian, non-normative musics in this country.

Tui (pronounced TOO-EE), an old-time duo that includes fiddler Libby Weitnauer and multi-instrumentalist Jake Blount, perfectly epitomizes this new generation, this fiddle + banjo changing of the guard. In title and song roster their upcoming release, Pretty Little Mister, subverts the usual narratives of old-time — whether by turning the staple “Pretty Little Miss” on its gendered ear or by meticulously crediting and tracing back each track’s origins, often to fiddlers and pickers of color and other otherwise underrepresented folks of bygone eras.

“Cookhouse Joe,” the final tune on the album, was originally learned from a late-in-life recording of Kentucky fiddler Estill Bingham. And it’s okay that you might not recognize that name — that you probably will not is almost the entire point of the record. Tui has already done the work for their listeners, putting in the time to make sure that the old-time they create, for years past and the ages to come, tells the whole story of how and by whom this beautiful artistic tradition came to be. And on Pretty Little Mister it’s not only beautiful, it’s so much more.

LISTEN: Andy Thorn, “Thornado”

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Artist: Andy Thorn
Hometown: Boulder, Colorado
Song: “Thornado”
Album: Frontiers Like These
Release: June 21, 2019
Label: Thornpipe Music

In Their Words: “This tune came from exploring the key of A on banjo with no capo. Playing in A with no capo opens up a lot of different melodic possibilities on banjo and when I found the main riff I started basing a song around it. The tune really comes to life with the tasteful back and forth of Bobby Britt’s fiddle and Andrew Marlin’s mandolin. I love Jon Stickley’s creative use of open strings and harmonics on the jam. And Miles Andrews holds the whole thing together on his gut string bass. At just over six minutes it’s longer than your typical banjo tune, but if you give the whole track a chance it will take you on quite a ride. Enjoy ‘Thornado’!” — Andy Thorn

Photo credit: John Ryan Lockman (Show Love Media)

Joe Mullins & the Radio Ramblers Turn the Dial to Bluegrass Tradition

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For the record, Joe Mullins is a cornerstone of the modern bluegrass community. He’s chairman of the International Bluegrass Music Association, as well as a radio station owner and an award-winning musician. Plus he’s just an easy guy to talk to. During a visit with the Bluegrass Situation, Mullins traced his decades-long career, from teenage gigs to For the Record, his latest album with the Radio Ramblers, featuring Jason Barie on fiddle, Mike Terry on mandolin and vocals, Duane Sparks on guitar and vocals, and Randy Barnes on upright bass and vocals.

BGS: Did you go into these latest sessions with a certain sound or musical direction in mind?

Mullins: We had three or four new songs that we wanted to do, and wanted to make those our own. I try to make certain that when we combine rare tunes that we want to cover with new songs, that we get the perfect balance of a variety of vocal and instrumental arrangements. I don’t like the same ol’, same ol’. We’re fortunate in the band to have so much vocal versatility. There are three of us that can sing any part, plus a bass singer if we want to do a quartet number. So, I make certain there’s a good balance vocal arrangements, keys, tempos, subject matter… If you listen to all 12 songs in a row, I don’t want you to get bored and go to sleep.

That’s harder than it sounds.

It is! Especially when you combine original material with some rare tunes that you want to cover, and that you want your audience to hear. I always find a few of those. We’re called the Radio Ramblers because I have been on radio and on stage since ’82. I was 16 the first time I played a major bluegrass event as a banjo player, the same year I started in broadcasting. So I’ve got a real deep well to draw from, everything from old-time stuff to contemporary country, classic country, Americana music, and everything bluegrass. On this new album, we’re covering a Johnny Cash/Hank Jr. tune (“That Old Wheel”), and doing new songs, and something from a hundred years ago, out of a hymnbook. So there’s a little bit of everything.

I’ve heard you talk before about the bluegrass history in Southwestern Ohio, and you made a reference to Sonny Osborne and J.D. Crowe as being mentors to you. What was that relationship like?

My dad was a broadcaster and a good bluegrass fiddle player. He was in and out of bands. He sat in with the Osborne Brothers a bunch when I was a kid. He sat in with J.D. Crowe when Doyle Lawson and J.D. had the Kentucky Mountain Boys going. He was on a ton of recording sessions in the ‘60s and ‘70s with a variety of bands. In Southwestern Ohio, the Cincinnati/Dayton region, it’s just thick with bluegrass history. Everybody from Flatt & Scruggs to the Stanley Brothers — they all recorded in this area at one time or another. Larry Sparks started here and grew up here.

The Osborne Brothers started here. Their parents had left Kentucky to get a job in Dayton, Ohio, when they were boys. Bobby and Sonny started their career right here in the same neighborhood where the Radio Ramblers started. They started in the late ‘40s, early ‘50s, and we started in the early 2000s. Matter of fact, Bobby started singing on the radio in Middletown, Ohio, in 1949 — the same station my dad started working at in 1964, and the same station I started working at in 1983. So there’s just a lot of connection there.

The Osborne Brothers and J.D. Crowe and Ralph Stanley and Don Reno — all these first-generation bluegrass leaders were all family friends. They were in and out of the house when I was a kid. My mom fixed breakfast or supper for everybody I just mentioned, multiple times. Dad sat in with them and played on Larry Sparks’ first record, and played on all kinds of recordings in the area. I saw these guys growing up a lot.

So when I decided to attempt the five-string banjo, I had seen J.D. Crowe and Sonny Osborne and Ralph Stanley in their prime, multiple times, and had all the recordings already in my bedroom. Then, when it came to me pretty naturally, and I had the opportunity to play and perform and record as a young guy, if I was having a struggle with something, I always had access to J.D. Crowe or Sonny Osborne or Don Reno or Ralph Stanley. “How do you do this?” “How do you that?” I got to see them often and I got some one-on-one time with all of them.

Did that strike you as amazing at the time? Or was it later in life that you realized how incredible that was?

Later in life I realized I am the most blessed guy in the world. The most fortunate cat, you know? To be 15 or 16 years old, trying to learn how to play banjo, and have access to these guys always – and get to be encouraged by them, and sing by them… Sonny especially, he would lecture about all kinds of stuff besides banjo playing. “Make sure you go to college! Quit smokin’!” That’s just who he is. We still talk often and I play one of his banjos on this record. He’s had custom banjos built and designed for many years and I’ve had one of them for the last six years.

I wanted to ask about your dad and touring with the Traditional Grass. Was he easy to travel with?

Not always. [Laughs] I often look back on the Traditional Grass – we had it going on in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. We had a ball! We were on the road all the time and back then it was just wide open. Us, the Del McCoury Band, the Bluegrass Cardinals, the Lost & Found Band — and the first generation guys were still out there. We saw the Osborne Brothers, Ralph Stanley, and Jim & Jesse all the time.

I was real young and I look back on it now a ton, because Dad was my age then. He still was a pretty hard-charger. All the other guys in the band were young and it didn’t matter how late the show was, or how long the party went on, he hung in there with us. [Laughs] He wasn’t really hard to get along with. He just got tired and cantankerous sooner than all of us young cats did, I guess. But he didn’t worry about details. He worried the most about playing great music and having a good time.

In the ‘90s, you were pretty visible with Longview, too.

Very fortunate. Worked out great. Traditional Grass toured like crazy in the early ‘90s. We burned it up from ’89 to about ’95. I about burned myself out and burned myself up, just living hard on the road. I was very fortunate to have an opportunity to buy a local radio station here in this wonderfully historic bluegrass neighborhood in Southwestern Ohio.

The Longview thing was already in the works before I came off the road with the Traditional Grass. We started conversations around ’94. I was on the road with that band through the summer of ’95 and launched my first radio station as an owner in the summer of ’95. And Longview recorded first in December of ’95, so by the time the album came out, there was a good buzz with it and it was an immediate success. And we had to go out and tour part-time.

So I had just enough time to get my radio business started and established without a heavy tour schedule. And then I had this wonderful, high-profile gig as a special event recording band that also got to tour and play everything from MerleFest to Wintergrass, from Telluride to Myrtle Beach. We played everywhere as a special event band in the late ‘90s and it kept me from falling off the radar.

If you look back on the late ‘70s when you were developing, to now, where you’re thriving in a lot of different areas, so many things have changed in bluegrass. But what would you say has been a consistent thread from those days until now?

You’ve still got to be able to play in time and sing in tune. [Laughs] I don’t care how young or old you are! Some of the consistent threads are that there’s nothing to hide behind in bluegrass music. You still have to be able to cut the gig. You still have to be able to bring it. I’m still on stage every night with five guys who have to know exactly how to manhandle their instrument, and vocally, it’s all out there.

The simplicity of that part of it — for my band and the sound we look for — it hasn’t changed. It hasn’t changed from the original formula that Monroe and the Stanleys and the Osbornes and all of ‘em have put on stage since the ‘40s and the ‘50s. It’s still got to be players that are masters at the craft. It’s still a combination of art, entertainment, and blood, sweat and tears. That’s bluegrass.

Photo credit: Amanda Martin Photography

From Banjo to Opera, Rhiannon Giddens Brings History to the Stage

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An interview with Rhiannon Giddens these days feels like a game show lightning round. Since winning the Steve Martin Banjo Prize in 2016 and a stunning $625,000 MacArthur Fellowship in 2017, the songwriter, singer, and instrumentalist has widened her scope and let a range of fine and folk arts projects flood into her idea-driven world. When we caught up with her in Nashville, for example, she was in rehearsals for Lucy Negro Redux, a multi-layered original ballet about Shakespeare, his purported black mistress and issues of identity and otherness. Working with poetry by Caroline Randall Williams, she composed the music with one of her latest collaborators, jazz pianist and world percussionist Francesco Turrisi. They’ve made a duo album set for release this year.

Here, Giddens speaks about her broader artistic scope and her attention on how women of color negotiate the past and present.

How different is your creative life now versus five years ago?

Oh my god. It’s like: “Who was that person?” I don’t even know. I am so grateful for that time. I was transitioning from the Carolina Chocolate Drops to my solo career. But it’s definitely become more of a creative life. I still am very much an interpreter. I’m very interested in giving old songs new life and putting them through a lens of today and I think there are a lot of things that are left on the shelf that need to be aired. But I definitely have found over the years that I’m finding more and more of my creative life to be in writing and collaborating. I’m very rarely going to sit in a room and write stuff. It’s like I write things and then I want to work with somebody and develop them or have a reason to do it.

So my collaborative opportunities have really grown since I left the band because it’s a lot easier to do things as your own person. There are all these things you have to think about when you’re in a band that I don’t have to think about any more. And it’s really allowed me to focus on the woman side of things, which is hard to do when you’re in a band full of boys, you know? Now I feel I can focus a bit more on what I’m finding is very important and front and center for me, which are women’s issues and women of color, in particular. Dealing with the history of what we’ve had to go through in this country and in other places, and what does that mean? And creating platforms for other women of color to have their voices heard, in my limited capacity.

You have background in opera, which may be the most collaborative of all the fine arts, with all its component parts. And you’ve started doing Aria Code, an opera podcast. What’s that about?

I was approached by Metropolitan Opera to be guest on this podcast and it just turned into becoming the host. And that’s been really fun. The wonderful producer Marrin Lazyan, she’s put it all together and I’m there to provide context and if there’s stuff that jibes particularly well with what I know like Otello, the Verdi opera, I can bring in my expertise on blackface and things like that. It’s been great.

And I’m going to be in my first production next year as a mature artist. I’m doing Porgy & Bess with the Greensboro Opera. It’s to open up the new arts center in Greensboro. So it’s kind of part of my involvement in my hometown. And also an opportunity to sing Bess, which I’ve never been able to do. So opera’s come back into my world in kind of unexpected ways. I’m writing an opera. I sing with orchestras on a regular basis. So it’s been really wonderful to see that come back into my life because it is something that I love so much and that I have spent a lot of my years doing. So we’ll see where it goes. I don’t know!

You produced the album Songs of Our Native Daughters, which brings you together with Amythyst Kiah, Allison Russell, and Leyla McCalla. What motivated this and how do you put these women into context?

It was an amazing opportunity. I was already working on this idea of early American musical history and speaking to it through the music of the banjo and the music of minstrelsy for Smithsonian Folkways. So it took this little turn and became a record with these really strong women of color. With my co-producer Dirk Powell, we were talking about who we wanted to be on this project, and that’s where we ended up. I was like, “Oh, this is where it needs to go.” From then on it took this slightly different path down to really talking about the woman of color’s experience in America and having a platform to respond to that in an artistic way.

And to each of the women who came in, I said, look, bring your banjo. And let’s talk about what it means to be a woman of color here and what it means to have ancestors who’ve gone through what they’ve gone through. It was an amazing experience to watch them feel like they had this space to write about these things that maybe they’ve touched on, but to have days to focus on these themes and these ideas. It was a beautiful collaborative thing. I’ve worked with each of them in various ways so I just knew it was going to work. And it worked better than I could have ever really dreamed. It went places I’d never have considered. That’s why you pick people and then you let the project do what it does instead of going, “It’s not exactly what I envisioned.” Well, usually because it’s better! So leave it alone and let it do what it’s going to do.

In this respect, do you see yourself as a mentor, or as a leader in this widening and overdue effort to infuse folk and roots music with more voices?

I’m always looking for ways to facilitate. People in these positions, like the folks putting on the Cambridge Folk Festival or at Smithsonian Folkways, they’re looking to me, and I’m like, “Hey these people, because they’re awesome.” And if that’s how I can use whatever little power I have in the world, that’s what I want to use it for. I’ve got my own career and it’s very important to me, but that’s also very important to me–creating the community of people that are doing this.

Because that was the strength of the Carolina Chocolate Drops. We were a band and we had each other. In a time where, even less than now, people were like, “Black people on banjos? What?”, we had each other and I know what that community can mean as an artist. It really gives you strength. And that was my idea with Our Native Daughters and with anything I’m (doing). Amythyst has opened for me. Leyla was part of the Chocolate Drops. JT and Ally (Birds of Chicago) — I’ve definitely championed them. I think that’s what we need to do for each other. If I’m in a position where somebody who has power asks me, I’m going to spread that around. Because I think that’s what you’re supposed to do.

They tell writers that it’s better to show than to tell. And it strikes me that roots music is moving from a phase of ‘telling’ about inclusion to a phase of showing. Is that fair to say?

I think so. I’m definitely moving that way in my own life. There was a lot of talking with the Chocolate Drops because you had to educate people. But there was also a lot of just doing. We found the balance; we’re going to contextualize this, but then we’re just going to play it. Because the facts are the facts and we’re not in a position to shame you about not knowing this. We didn’t know this. But I definitely found that over time, I’m tired. I just want to play and sing.

And the next record of mine is not a project. It’s not a mission. It’s coming out in May (I think) and Francesco and I did that together. It’s really all the worlds that I’ve been talking about and being in all together. I just want somebody to put it on and listen to it, and they don’t know anything about me, and they come away – I want them to love the record but I also want them to feel this aspect of nobody owns any sounds. Nobody owns any experiences in humanity. We’re taking all the sounds you heard in the ballet and the notion that humans have been moving since the beginning, and we’ve been affecting each other since the beginning.

So a religious trance drum from Iran works perfectly well with an Appalachian a cappella ballad. Because they’re representing universal human truths. It would be really nice for people to just experience that through sound and through the experience of the songs. And of course we’ll talk about it. But I’m kind of moving toward showing and inhabiting all the work that’s come up until now and living in that and taking that to where it needs to go.

Craig Havighurst covers music for WMOT Roots Radio. Hear the interview.

Rhiannon Giddens, “Following the North Star”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Rhiannon Giddens is not only our Artist of the Month, she’s roots music’s renaissance woman. She’s an outspoken activist, a MacArthur Genius grant winner, a veritable music historian, and opera-oriented podcast host who has scored and staged a ballet, acted on a major television series, given her fair share of keynote addresses, and has helmed more than one supergroup. Somehow that list only begins to scratch the surface of Giddens’ contributions to our roots music communities. Who knows what other incredible ideas will come from her mind, her pen, and her banjo in the months and years to come.

Here’s the thing. In the flurry of credits Giddens’ bio will inevitably spit at you it’s easy to forget what might be the most important line item in her IMDb or Wikipedia profiles: she’s a damn fine picker. “Following the North Star,” an amuse-bouche of an instrumental from her 2017 release, Freedom Highway, is an excellent reminder of that fact. The bouncing, clawhammer banjo is stark against just percussion and bones, a percussive folk instrument played by hand, similar to playing the spoons. It’s a shockingly simple, but never simplistic production. Each note drips with Giddens’ understated virtuosity. Her understanding of the music’s past, present, and future is translated effortlessly by buttery fretless banjo, which retains every ounce of its haunting, melancholy potential in defiance of the tune’s forward-leaning tempo.

‘Tis sweet to be reminded that, no matter where her creative compass may take her, she’ll always have the chops — she’ll always be a killer banjo player. And, from this banjo player’s perspective, that’s what’s most important anyway!!

Rhiannon Giddens Prepares for ‘Lucy Negro Redux’ Ballet Premiere

Posted on by Editor

Rhiannon Giddens will reach a new milestone in her ever-diversifying career as the Nashville Ballet hosts a world premiere of Lucy Negro Redux on Friday, February 8. According to press materials, the production explores the mysterious love life of William Shakespeare through the perspective of the “Dark Lady” for whom many of his famed sonnets were written.

Giddens collaborated with jazz musician Francesco Turrisi on the score. The narrative is based on a book by Caroline Randall Williams, a Nashville-based poet who also contributes spoken word during the performance. Paul Vasterling serves as Artistic Director.

In the video below, Giddens explains, “I said yes to the ballet because it’s a really interesting story and it fits very neatly with my mission of highlighting interesting and overlooked possible connections in history, and this is a very, very intriguing one.”

She adds, “I just hope audiences will take away that you can do things in a lot of different ways. And there are so many different ways to collaborate and there are so many different ways to make a statement. I think this ballet, this collaboration, has a really great opportunity to do that – to show audiences that ballet can be this, as well as Swan Lake and some of the other things that you see. In my world, that banjos and folk music can be partnered with really a high-art dance form and it works. So, it’s like, hopefully we bring the two sides together to see each other and go, ‘Hey, you’re not that different from me actually.'”

Photo of Francesco Turrisi and Rhiannon Giddens by Karen Cox