Tag: fiddle

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.

BGS 5+5: Ross Holmes

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Ross Holmes
Hometown: Fort Worth, Texas
Latest album: Not Very Good at Winning
Nickname: ‘Rooster’ is a nickname that has lingered since the glory days of Cadillac Sky.

What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?

I can’t say I have one favorite memory from being onstage, but I do have a great story about a particular gig in late 2014. As a native Texan, there isn’t a more sacred shrine than the Alamo. I’d been invited to perform at an annual ceremony in March of ’14 inside the Alamo chapel. I wound up composing an original piece an hour before the event honoring those who perished in the fight.

An iPhone recording I made of the piece, “We Fall a Sacrifice,” made its way to Phil Collins (who is an avid collector of artifacts from the battle of the Alamo and war for Texas independence), and I was invited to perform this tune again at a ceremony honoring Phil for the donation of his extensive collection to the state.

We took it a step further and, with permission from the Witte Museum in San Antonio, borrowed Davy Crockett’s supposed fiddle for the gala. Here I was, onstage with Crockett’s fiddle at the Alamo, playing this piece I’d written, in the presence of presidents, politicians, astronauts, sports legends, and recognized Texans. My sister, Katie Shore (Asleep at the Wheel), joined me for the set and, to this day, we still laugh at the absurd “WTF just happened” of that evening.

What other art forms — literature, film, dance, painting, etc — inform your music?

Imagery and color stimulate my musical thinking the most. I often turn on films or pull out prints of my favorite artists to glean inspiration from their creativity while I practice. The imagination of others is revelatory and channeling the intent of these minds has helped me grow as a composer and player.

Try this sometime: turn on Planet Earth, mute your TV, and play a soundtrack for the episode as you’re watching. Let the dynamic environment of each scene take you to a place of quiet calm or intense fear. You’ll be amazed at what comes out, maybe a familiar idea you filed away will emerge again, or maybe a new melody or groove will come to you. If anything, it’s really fun to provide fiddle accompaniment to snakes chasing lizards and sloths chilling on a branch.

What rituals do you have, either in the studio or before a show?

I don’t have a set routine when I record or when I take the stage, as those environments are always changing. I do, though, have a special relationship with my case and the process of opening it and taking out my violin and bow. My case is my home-away-from-home and inside I keep a small, personal collection of memories. I find it’s a spiritual experience to unlatch and lift the lid, remove the blanket over my violin, and prepare my heart and mind to play. Those first moments are filled with thoughts and energy, like a prayer, and the respect I show my instrument feels like an abiding friendship when the first notes come so easily.

If you had to write a mission statement for your career, what would it be?

Early in my career I focused, obsessively, on being the “best” player I could be — the most technical, cleanest, impressive, etc., because I felt those skills would prove to listeners I was “elite.” Time has gone by, life has happened, victories and losses, the ups and downs that come with this profession, then something clicked a couple of years ago. I arrived at a point where I didn’t care about being the “best” anymore (thank god), and a new word replaced that selfish adjective — HONEST. I will always push the limits and challenge boundaries, but now my heart’s desire is to simply be the most honest musician I can be. That’s my mission statement, “In all things, be honest.” That’s it.

Which elements of nature do you spend the most time with and how do those impact your work?

There’s no hiding that I’m a bona fide space junkie, completely taken with the cosmos and the notion of leaving earth on the greatest adventures to explore the deep expanse of our universe (I have a tattoo of the Apollo SM, CM, and LM on my right arm). We can’t see beyond blue skies during the day, but we know endless creation is still above us. When night falls and the sky is peeled back, the heavens are once again revealed and we sit and gaze at the mysteries between the stars.

The relationship between mankind and space and music is intrinsically linked because of curiosity and our need to explore. The greatest composers and players continue to seek new heights with their melodies, chords, and expression because that is our nature, journey to the new place. What will beings find on that golden record affixed to Voyager? Bach. Chuck Berry. Blind Willie Johnson. The human voice.

Photo credit: Allen Clark

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.

The String – Byron Berline and Andy Statman

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

This week’s show is split between two string instrument masters who have little in common save for a lifelong commitment to nurturing traditional music while allowing it to grow and adapt to the times.

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Byron Berline is an Oklahoma-based fiddler who’s a hero in bluegrass music, but who also led the way in the country-rock movement out of Los Angeles for 25 years. He recently had a setback when his famous and beloved Double Stop Fiddle Shop in Guthrie, OK burned down and with it a huge loss of valuable instruments. Also in the show, Andy Statman talks about how and why he mastered the bluegrass mandolin and the Klezmer clarinet. He’s released more than 30 exceptional albums, his latest being Monroe Bus, a tribute to Bill Monroe instrumentals that took on unexpected range and dimension.

WATCH: Heather Maloney, “Oklahoma Lullaby”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Heather Maloney
Hometown: Northampton, Massachusetts
Song: “Oklahoma Lullaby”
Album: Soil in the Sky
Release Date: June 14, 2019
Label: Signature Sounds

In Their Words: “‘Oklahoma Lullaby’ was inspired by the Ken Burns documentary, The Dust Bowl — so when I starting working on the lyric video for it, I decided to incorporate some historic footage as a little nod to my inspiration. Digging around in the National Archives, I eventually found the perfect footage to use in the video: The 1936 short documentary film on the Dust Bowl (by director Pare Lorentz) called The Plow That Broke The Plains.

“I filled an old book with green construction paper and green-screened the images below the words to make it a sort of ‘moving picture book.’ At the last minute, I decided to write a quote by 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg inside the first page of the book. (‘I want you to act as if the house was on fire. Because it is.’) I added the quote because, while the song is inspired by an environmental disaster that happened in the past, I wrote the song to point to the environmental disasters we are creating now. Near the end of the Dust Bowl, we took some accountability for what we’d done to the land, changed the way we farmed, and passed legislation that has kept it from happening at that scale for nearly a hundred years. That gave me some hope that we can make change again.

“Fun fact: Jay Ungar wrote and played the theme song in Ken Burns’ PBS series The Civil War. He also plays the fiddle on ‘Oklahoma Lullaby,’ as well as the prelude to the song ‘Porch Story.’ It was incredibly special to me, having his fiddle on this song.” — Heather Maloney

Photo credit: Scott Housley

LISTEN: April Verch, “Durham’s Bull”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: April Verch
Hometown: Pembroke, Ontario, Canada
Song: “Durham’s Bull”
Album: Once a Day
Release Date: April 12, 2019
Label: Slabtown Records

In Their Words: “A fiddler first, I’ve always adored the country stars who turned it over to the band for a rippin’ instrumental halfway through the show. I felt that including something similar would be an important part of making this classic country album complete. Paul Warren used to play a version of this tune at the end of some of the Flatt & Scruggs TV shows. Buddy Durham played it regularly on the WWVA Wheeling Jamboree from 1955-1966. My sources for this assortment of parts also include Uncle Dick Hutchison (who contributed the crooked B part, via my good friend Jerry Correll of Elk Creek, Virginia,) and Paul Holley (the only version I found that had a C part at all) along with Benton Flippen and Paul Brown. Having Al Perkins and Redd Volkaert solo on this fiddle tune took it over the top for me!” — April Verch

Photo credit: Sandlin Gaither

Small Town Therapy, “Cimarrón”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Fiddler Leif Karlstrom and mandolinist Adam Roszkiewicz — both veteran members of Bay Area pop-stringband Front Country — together in their duo form are called Small Town Therapy. Their latest single, “Cimarrón,” is their first studio follow-up to their 2014 debut self-titled album, which was produced by mandolin virtuoso Matt Flinner. “Cimarrón” reveals the pair charging back onto the scene with more new acoustic-inspired goodness with duet-precision that conjures other notable bluegrass-and-then-some twosomes like Darol Anger and Mike Marshall.

Though the title may evoke wild frontiers and raw, feral beauty, immediately listeners realize that Karlstrom and Roszkiewicz are neither untamed nor unpredictable in their execution of the tune. In fact, their impossibly tight, intertwined duet is almost perfectly antithetical to the wildness of the song’s moniker. The melody runs along like a raging river or a stampede of wild horses that while turbulent and fraught up close, are deft, intricate, deliberate choreographies when viewed at a distance.

The song never loses the frenetic, improvisational energy that we’ve come to recognize as a hallmark of these acoustic offshoots of bluegrass and old-time, yet Small Town Therapy are effortlessly in control. Their years spent in bands and on the road together are perhaps to blame — and thank — for this balance. In such a loose format, merely two voices bouncing off of and responding to one another, one might expect that freneticism to inevitably run off the rails, but it never does. And once again, like that coursing river or galloping herd, it sets its passengers down ever so gently at the end of their rollicking, musical journey.

George Jackson, “Dorrigo”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

As a fiddler in Nashville, a town whose guitarist population is only rivaled by the sheer quantity of fiddles and bows, it takes a singular voice to stand out. Or, in George Jackson’s case, perhaps it takes a singular accent. The New Zealand native recently transplanted to Music City and has been carving a niche for himself in bluegrass, old-time, and their offshoots ever since. He currently tours with acclaimed bassist Missy Raines’ latest lineup, a minimalist-while-mighty acoustic trio, and he’s also been spotted collaborating with folks like Front Country and Rachel Baiman.

On his brand new album, Time and Place, Jackson steps into the role of frontman and bandleader, demonstrating that his voice — musically and otherwise — is so much more than just a charming, Oceanian accent. His fiddling is an intentional, pragmatic, and judicious combination of styles that range from Vassar Clements’ harebrained wit to Clifftop, West Virginia’s down-homiest old-time sawers. “Dorrigo,” a tune whose title tributes Australia, another former home to Jackson, perfectly demonstrates this old-meets-new, Northern Hemisphere meets Southern Hemisphere originality. The turns of phrase and melodic hooks register as familiar and timeless, before being unwound in surprising trajectories. Mandolin Orange’s Andrew Marlin, Charm City Junction’s Brad Kolodner, Mark Kilianski of Hoot and Holler, and Jackson’s longtime friend and collaborator Andrew Small fill out the band, demonstrating laser focus on old-time simplicity and bluegrass precision.

Perhaps thanks to his international roots, or his egalitarian approach to fiddle styles, Jackson’s “Dorrigo,” and by extension, Time and Place, simply do not bother trifling with authenticity signalling or genre designation. They simply elevate his singular voice.

Deanie Richardson, “Soppin’ the Gravy”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Nashville often feels like a town simply saturated by fiddlers. It is Music City USA, after all, and of that music, most is centered on the pop country machine, which thankfully still sees fiddles as prerequisites for most of the music being fashioned, manicured, produced, and cranked out by this city writ large. In and amongst the myriad fiddles and bows it takes a singular musical voice to stand out.

Deanie Richardson has just such a voice. Her fiddlin’ is just as fiery and unyielding as any other fiddler on the scene, but without ever being overbearing or cliche. She balances Texas influences and contest styles with her immaculate bluegrass chops — and that balance makes her the perfect shoulder to tap for all manner gigs, from house fiddler at the Grand Ole Opry, to touring with Vince Gill or Patty Loveless, or decidedly less normative-country acts like the Chieftains and Bob Seger.

Her anchor though, has always been bluegrass, and when she isn’t out cutting up and bringing slap-happy joy to the people with her currently Grammy-nominated ensemble, Sister Sadie, she’s making bluegrass/fiddle records like Love Hard, Work Hard, Play Hard (available now on Pinecastle records). Close friends and musical compatriots like guitarist Brandon Bostic (Patty Loveless, Blue Moon Rising), mandolinist Ashby Frank (Special Consensus, Earls of Leicester) and banjoist Gena Britt (Sister Sadie) round out the band du jour on “Soppin’ the Gravy.”

It’s a tasty barnburner that’s as precise as it is breakneck fast, with Deanie’s endless embellishments demonstrating that a) she has the listener exactly where she wants them and b) she’s having a whole lot of fun with it. If you’re craving a fiddler that stands out, grab a biscuit and hit play, because there’s plenty of deliciousness to sop up with “Soppin’ the Gravy” and we ought not waste a drop.

Allison de Groot & Tatiana Hargreaves, “Eighth Of January”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

It’s become something of an unofficial tradition here at BGS to celebrate the eighth day of the first of the month of the year with a nod to one of old-time’s finest instrumentals, to be sure: “Eighth Of January.” This year, the stars and calendars have aligned, allowing the first ever Tunesday Tuesday + “Eighth Of January” celebratory post. Hoorah!

Now, those same stars and calendar have aligned even further, allowing Tunesday, January 8, and a brand new collection of fiddle/banjo tunes from clawhammerist Allison de Groot (Molksy’s Mountain Drifters) and fiddler Tatiana Hargreaves (Laurie Lewis & the Right Hands) to coincide so perfectly that we’re able to premiere de Groot’s and Hargreaves’ rendition of “Eighth Of January” on its namesake day. Fortuitous, indeed.

Even more fortuitous is the care, attention, and finesse given the often-rowdy, haphazard old-time melody. This duo, despite their youth — and often because of their youth — are two of the foremost old-time virtuosos on the scene today, executing these timeless songs and melodies with a clean and straightforward approach that sacrifices neither innovative thought nor modern embellishments to do so.

Furthermore, de Groot and Hargreaves are committed to making music that tells the full, unrevised, unabridged history of American roots music, with overt attribution to the amazingly diverse humans who pioneered these vernacular art forms. An old-time standard isn’t just an old-time standard, after all, and this fantastically talented pair of pickers demonstrate that and more on their upcoming self-titled album (out March 22 on Free Dirt Records) and this, its lead-off track.