Acutely expressive, profoundly innovative, and ceaselessly gripping, Scroggins & Rose are masters of sonic storytelling. The project consists of Alisa Rose (violin) and Tristan Scroggins (mandolin), both virtuosic talents with a sprawling list of credits each in their own right. While Scroggins primarily forays in the bluegrass sphere and Rose spent her musical upbringing largely studying classical music, the two alchemize a blend of genres to achieve their distinct style.
The duo’s third collection, Speranza, relays a moving dialogue between fiddle and mandolin, drawing upon a diverse range of musical influences to weave together a thoughtful assortment of colors and textures. Initial ideas for the project began back in the quarantine days of 2020, and Speranza – which consists of six immersive instrumentals, a dynamic assortment of original and familiar tunes – now arrives nearly five years later in a moment where its intonations of hope feel just as crucial.
BGS had the pleasure of sitting down with Scroggins & Rose to discuss their origins, influences, and the percolation of their most recent release.
Congratulations on the album release! To start us off, could you talk about how the two of you came into playing together?
Alisa Rose: We both taught at NimbleFingers, which is a camp in British Columbia.
Tristan Scroggins: It’s a bluegrass week of workshops that has been going on for a couple decades. I always describe it on stage as “sleepaway camp for adults who want to learn how to play the banjo and drink.”
AR: There’s a really nice feel at that camp. Tristan was in a band with his dad at the time, so I did some shows with them there. Then one night, I remember the two of us improvising by a picnic table and we just had a really nice musical chemistry where we follow each other’s ideas around. Immediately it felt like, “Oh, this is a good musical fit.”
TS: At that time I was playing with my dad in Jeff Scroggins & Colorado, and we were touring full-time. So I just ended up in California a lot and I would tack on extra time to come hang out with Alisa. And we started writing music and playing shows. I live in Nashville now, so these days it’s more of a deliberate effort when I come out to collaborate.
At this point you’ve been able to flesh out that musical chemistry over the course of three collections. What would you say unites your musicality or differentiates it?
AR: I think when we improvise, it’s playful and creative and experimental – we’re not afraid to leave what may be reasonable behind, and sometimes that takes us to good places, and sometimes we fall on our faces. We also have a similar sense of rhythm and how we respond to it. It allows us to improvise freely because we feel rhythm in the same way. So that’s where we unify, but we have really different musical backgrounds.
Could you tell me more about that?
AR: Sure. Growing up I played a little bit of fiddle, but mostly I grew up in the classical world. I was a Suzuki kid, so I learned by ear initially, which I think has allowed me to play a lot of different music, but I was learning primarily classical violin growing up. Tristan grew up very much in the bluegrass world, and I’ve studied bluegrass and I’ve played in bluegrass bands, but I still have a different sense of melody and expressiveness. I think a lot about how to make music really expressive emotionally and I play with timings – those two things are less common in the bluegrass world.
TS: I think it’s been really valuable for me, generally musically and especially in the context of this project, to be exposed to those different ways of thinking about playing. I grew up playing with my dad, and in mandolin contests just learning how to play bluegrass, which does instigate this question of, is bluegrass expressive or not? I think it is sort of, but it’s so different from how classical music is expressive or how jazz is expressive. I’ve had to work a lot on navigating that challenge, because for me, I didn’t go to school at all for music. So much of how I play is very instinctual and this project often has me figuring out how to adapt those instincts in order to have more options, especially since there’s just two of us. We have to really be on the same page a lot of the time and work together to fill in spaces or leave holes where we want them to be – they have to line up, and it’s really obvious if they don’t.
Speranza does an excellent job at combining those classical and bluegrass sensibilities to achieve expression while still leaning into roots-like melodies. Can you tell me about the impetus behind your latest release? What drove you to create this third collection?
AR: So our first collection, Grana, was very improvised and we were a new duo. Basically we set out to make a demo – we wanted to record, like, three tunes and get some gigs. We got an Airbnb, rented some recording equipment, had our awesome engineer friend set it up for us, and we just hit record over and over for a weekend. By the end it seemed like it was an album, so that’s how that one came to be. Very improvised, very sort of exploratory. There were like 1000 takes of everything. Well, not actually 1000 because we didn’t have that long, but there was definitely a sort of trial and error of figuring out what we wanted to create.
And then for the second album, Curios, we worked out everything. We rearranged everything and really sought to emphasize the strength of melodies. A lot of that album was about making the melodies come out. To me, it’s also an exploration of different sound colors. We worked with Wes Corbett on that one and he helped bring that out in that album. We really tried to shape each tune into a little story, so they’re more composed. Some have solo sections, but they’re more like little pieces and arches – I mean, I would call them miniatures, but really they’re sort of standard length for bluegrass. In the classical world they might be considered miniatures– little, crafted, sparkly gems.
But we put [Curios] out in the pandemic, which was very anticlimactic. We were supposed to have a release tour and we worked really hard on that album for a long time. We had received a great grant from FreshGrass and were able to do a lot of things in the way we wanted. We worked with Dave Sinko as our engineer, who was awesome, and recorded in this pretty church in Nashville with Egyptian stained glass.
So the third one, Speranza, is more organic. We’ve grown as a duo in terms of creating, so we decided that instead of writing a whole record of stuff we would write and record as we went, or write and improvise as we went, and do some of both. So I believe this album combines the freedom of the first album and the shape and craft of the second album. And the material for Speranza came out of the pandemic – that was such a crazy time. Life seems sort of normal now, but a lot of the tunes started in that time and then we finished them once we could get back together.
TS: I think that in a lot of ways Speranza feels very shaped by the reality of the pandemic, 2020, things getting shut down – the first stuff that we worked on remotely, because we had to. It feels wild that we’ve been working on this for years now. It’s funny, similarly to the pandemic, it doesn’t feel like that was five years ago. We recorded it over different sessions and then mixed it over different sessions.
AR: “Pandemic Buddy” and “Reaper” are the darkest ones – those I did write in like that first month of the pandemic, but I just came up with the beginning idea and then as a duo, over two or three or four visits, we finished writing the pieces together. We’re often coming up with ideas, kind of sitting with them, and then recording voice memos and listening to them. It takes us a fair amount of time to do it and we really flesh out the arrangement and how our parts fit together in person. That tends to be pretty time-intensive. Basically we’re writing the pieces, but we’re memorizing them at the same time, with space for improv – everything is fluid, but the basic composition is pretty worked out. So our compositional process is pretty spacious and lengthy.
What was inspiring you during the composition of these pieces? Any art that you were ingesting or other cultural touchstones of during that moment?
AR: In the beginning of the pandemic, Tristan did a tune challenge, which is where some of these songs started. There was a word prompt every day to write a tune about. For example, “Reaper” began with the prompt “death.” “Pandemic Buddy” was for the prompt “friend.” It was a really nice way to channel energy at the beginning of the pandemic, when everything was crazy. I spent hours every day writing these tunes and trying to get a good video, and I think I got a little better at them as I went.
TS: I mean, it’s sort of an obvious one, but we talk a lot about Mike Marshall and Darol Anger. It’s the same mando and violin pairing, but I love listening to them and listening to other people who do this kind of new acoustic music/composing. I spend a lot of time in Nashville with Wes Corbett. Wes produced our second album, but he’s also a friend of mine, and I helped him with publicity for his first album, which has a lot of really beautifully written instrumental pieces.
It’s interesting – we spent so much time working on this in chunks and that was a very different part of my brain than the part of that was working very hard on, like, Texas-style fiddle tunes. Those weren’t crossing over, exactly. I think rather than being influenced by something specific, it’s more that I try to cultivate something within myself by listening to both stuff I like and new stuff. Absorbing all of that, letting it ferment inside, and then figuring out how to express that all together, rather than trying to emulate any one thing.
AR: I tend to think that when composing, everything you’ve ever listened to, everything that ever resonated with you and definitely anything you’ve ever played with your body or had in your body – whether you danced to it, or you physically played it – is a part of your musical sensibility. I don’t know what I was listening to when I was writing these tunes, but I definitely love Darol Anger and Mike Marshall. I also love Schubert string quartets, I love Beethoven piano sonatas, and I love Debussy piano music – I love a lot of different kinds of music, and I think all of that is part of what comes out. That’s all part of what’s in my head when I’m conceiving of new material.
Photo Credit: Lenny Gonzalez