Tag: Jeff Scroggins & Colorado

Combining Classical and Bluegrass, Scroggins & Rose Improvise and Inspire on ‘Speranza’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

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

Jeff Scroggins & Colorado: Over the Line and Across the Divides

Posted on by Editor

Bluegrass is barely older than rock and roll, but it’s a lot smaller. The problems that small size can engender are obvious, but there’s also a bright side, where a fan seeking to understand how the music has grown can more quickly see musical lineages, trends, and tendencies — for the same reason it’s easier to see the trees in a sparser forest. Even today, the influences of most artists are pretty easy to trace, no matter how creatively they’re built upon.

So it is with Jeff Scroggins & Colorado, whose new release, Over The Line, offers a delicious update of one long-running bluegrass strand. Produced by the band’s occasional bass player, Mark Schatz, Over The Line’s folk-leaning material gets a treatment that isn’t afraid to invite comparisons with the sounds of the Country Gentlemen, a group that navigated its way through the bluegrass and folk revival scenes of the late ‘50s and ‘60s (and beyond) so successfully that they were inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame years ago.

Even so, the pronounced individuality and musicianship of banjo man Scroggins and each of his band members (Greg Blake, guitar; Ellie Hakanson, fiddle; Tristan Scroggins, mandolin) ensures that the sound is fresh and unique — and it’s that sort of double vision, where you can see at one glance how these artists relate to those who came before and what new, distinctive things they’re bringing, that is one of bluegrass music’s most endearing characteristics. In that respect alone, the album is a triumph.

Another consequence of bluegrass’s small scale is the persistence of geographical variety. I’m not talking about bogus efforts to claim that only those from a certain area have the capacity to play “real” bluegrass, but rather about variations that range from the attitudinal to the climatic to the economic, all of which combine to make the experience of bluegrass surprisingly different from one part of the country to another — most broadly, from east of the Great Plains to the Front Range and points west.

Whether for cultural, economic or musical reasons, there are plenty of bands that stay on their own side of the divide, so although he’s been a staple of the western scene for a long time, Jeff Scroggins’ name is just now starting to ring in the ears of the rest of the country. With that in mind, gathering a little background seemed like a good way to start our conversation.

I suspect that for a fair number of readers, this is probably the first time that they’ve heard much about you and the band, so let me jump back to the beginning — you’re a westerner by birth?

I was born in Oklahoma, I suppose that’s pretty far west.

It is from the Nashville perspective! How did you come across bluegrass music?

Probably the first time I heard it was when my parents would take me on little vacations in the Ozarks; I didn’t know anything about it, but I always liked it. And then, when I was 20, I bought a banjo at a garage sale. I was playing heavy metal music at the time — but six months later, I liked it so much I sold my Les Paul and my Marshall amp and bought a better banjo. So that kind of ended my rock and roll career.

So how’d you learn to play?

The guy who had always been my music store guy, he was a bluegrass guy. So when I brought the banjo in, he kind of fixed it up a little, and he sold me the Earl Scruggs instructional book and record, and he sold me a Peter Wernick book and a Tony Trischka book, and I went home and started figuring it out. Then a couple of years later, I ran into Alan Munde, who was teaching lessons in a music store in Norman, Oklahoma, which was about 20 minutes from where I lived. That was my real first serious connection to bluegrass, seeing him do it correctly.

I started playing in some local bands, around where I grew up, and I ended up moving to Irving, Texas, to be in a band — which was short-lived. But I moved into the Dallas area, and it was an amazing scene for a short time there. There were a lot of people who were really good who were all there at once; I was seeing people like Brad Davis and Greg Davis, Scott Vestal — in fact, I replaced Scott Vestal in a little family band. And that was sort of my learning, going there and being around a lot of people who did that; I was learning it all as I went.

And you’re a contest winner, too, right?

I grew up in Oklahoma, but it wasn’t that far to Winfield, Kansas. I started going to the big festival there, and decided I wanted to win that banjo contest — and I did, and won a bunch more along the way.

Talk about the difference between what you think about and focus on when you’re playing contests, and what you think about and focus on when you’re playing in a band.

Well, it certainly is different. For me, I watched the contest, and I tried to figure out what I needed to do to win the contest. I think the most important thing is to be a good Scruggs style player, because if you’re not doing that, I don’t think the rest of it is going to help you much in a contest, honestly. So I really focused on that, and I also tried to get the melodic and single-string; I specifically started getting the single-string stuff because people who were winning contests were doing that.

But yeah, I think when you’re doing contests…I was recording everything every few days and listening to it, and just trying to really perfect these tunes. And it ends up being reasonable training for doing the other thing, but it is certainly different. I felt like I developed the techniques I was going to need to play bluegrass, but I didn’t really know how to do that.

People who have played a lot of contests have told me that there, it’s all about you and not much else, but in a band, you’re playing backup. You learn that the space you make for other people is at least as important as what you’re doing — that it’s a real mental adjustment to not be the center of attention.

I found for myself that I didn’t really want to be the center of attention. I was pretty shy. And to this day, if people compliment me on my backup playing, it’s sort of the thing that makes me the happiest. Because I figured out a long time ago, that’s what you’re going to be doing 90 percent of the time. So I decided that if I was going to do it 90 percent of the time, I was going to try to get really good at it. And obviously that really is one of the main differences, is learning how to work without the ball, as they say in sports.

I think I first saw your name with the Blue Canyon Boys. Was that the last thing you did before you got Colorado started?

It was. I was getting divorced, and coming to Colorado, and I was looking for some sort of musical thing to do. That was the thing that fell in my lap. I had known the bass player for a long time — in fact, he went back to my Texas days — so it was based on friendship. I didn’t necessarily feel that it was an awesome fit for me, but they were looking for a banjo player and I was looking for a band, and so I did it for a few years. And by then, Tristan — he was 14 at the time — was becoming pretty amazing, so we decided to start a band.

Who else did you have in the band?

Greg Blake, Tristan and I were the founding core. And then we had Annie Savage playing fiddle, and a guy playing bass who had a business, and he was the first one to bail when it started to get busy. It’s funny, we’ve had one banjo player; one guitar player; one mandolin player; three fiddle players and 37 bass players.

How did you meet Greg?

I met him in 2011, at a mutual friend’s wedding where he was doing the music. The reception was a bluegrass jam, and we jammed for seven hours until they threw us out of the place. Sort of played every song we knew. At the end of the night, I said, “I’m starting a band, and I think you should join it.”

So you’ve been working pretty hard since then, putting four albums out.

I had written out a business plan, and written goals five years before this, when I first decided I was going to get serious about this. I had a very specific idea of what I wanted to accomplish, and so when I asked people to join the band, I just handed them these pages and said, “Read this, and if it seems like something you’d like to do, then join this band.” But I was out of work and looking for a way to make a living. I had applied for a million jobs, and none of them came through, and I took that as a sign from somewhere that I was going to do this. So when we started, I started out immediately trying to make it pretty serious, and within a couple of years we were working full-time.

When I was younger, I hadn’t been very smart about it; I’d never thought about doing that sort of thing, so I never tried to make a lot of connections with promoters. But over the few years that I was playing with the Blue Canyon Boys, I made connections and kept them. I also had a lot of older connections, too. When I had been younger, I’d been in a lot of bands, but I’d never called in all the favors I’d had, because I figured that at some point I was going to have a project that I was going to pull out all the stops on. So I called everything in all at once, and that got us working really fast.

Photo credit: Clyde Clevenger

ANNOUNCING: The BGS Midnight Jam at MerleFest 2016

Posted on by Editor

The BGS is very, very pleased to announce that we will, once again, host the Midnight Jam at MerleFest this year. Our popular Saturday after-hours hootenanny gathers many performers from the festival for impromptu artistic collaborations and one-of-a-kind superstar jams that have become legendary in the festival’s history. Artists confirmed to play the BGS Midnight Jam include Donna the Buffalo as the house band, along with Tommy Emmanuel, Peter Rowan, Mipso, Jeff Scroggins & Colorado, Wood & Wire, Billy Strings, Becky Buller, South Carolina Broadcasters, Jim Lauderdale, Lindsay Lou and the Flatbellys, and Joe Smothers. Additional artists may also be added.

“Many years ago, Tony Rice and a few others started the Midnight Jam,” remembers Steve Johnson, Artist Relations Manager at MerleFest. “From there, the Midnight Jam has become a highlight of the MerleFest weekend, bringing together unique configurations and surprising ensembles of musicians gathered at the festival. You never know who may walk out from behind the curtain to take the stage on Saturday night in the Walker Center! And, for 2016, we are extremely excited to have MerleFest fan favorite Donna the Buffalo serving as the host band along with the Bluegrass Situation.”

Here's a little taste of Midnight Jams past:

The BGS Midnight Jam takes place at the Walker Center; a separate ticket is required and available for purchase by four-day ticket holders and Saturday-only ticket holders.