Mandolinist Ethan Setiawan’s Influences Run the ‘Gambit’ on New Album

Ethan Setiawan knows the importance of a good pick. The Portland, Maine-based mandolin player has lately been experimenting with changing the entire sound of his instrument through one tiny, flat piece, pinched between his fingers. The material, girth, texture, and weight of his pick all play a crucial role in how his mandolin sounds, sometimes bright and plucky, or dark and full-bodied. “It’s good to have a sound and have gear that you like, but often the thing that helps me be more creative is just being able to change it up,” he says. “Change is helpful for your own growth and can really spark new ideas or keep things fresh.”

On his new record, Gambit, he finds himself somewhere in between, which is fitting given the way he fuses his entire musical background to create something completely new. It isn’t jazz, but it’s not not jazz. It’s bluegrass, but not in the traditional sense. It’s funk, but also old-timey. 

The Berklee College of Music grad could easily fool you into thinking he’s much older than his years. A seasoned bandmate to some of bluegrass music’s finest — including Gambit producer Darol Anger, whom he first met as a high school student — Setiawan is beginning to carve out space for his own songwriting. Written in Boston, workshopped in California, recorded in Maine, and then mixed in Nashville, Gambit, as its title suggests, is a joyful mixed bag of the many styles of music that have shaped him into one of the most formidable mandolinists of his generation. 

BGS: Darol Anger produced this record, and though you had been playing together for some time, this was your first experience working with each other in this capacity. What led to this partnership?

Ethan Setiawan: We’ve played a bunch of gigs over the years, and it just felt like a good next thing to do was to make a record with him. And he was on board thankfully. We had plans to [record] in August 2020, and then the pandemic started to happen, and it became apparent that wasn’t going to work. So eventually I did make this big road trip out to California where Darol was living at the time, and we had these really nice couple weeks out there, working through the material, just me and Darol kind of playing through the stuff, trying to solidify arrangements and get ideas down on paper to go into the studio with. And eventually in October, we made it into a studio, the Great North Sound Society Studio in Parsonsfield, Maine. We had this four-day session and worked probably 12 to 14 hours a day, every day. And sometimes sessions like those feel like work, you feel tired and drained after a day. But at least for me, those sessions felt really fun, really good. Part of that was not having played music with a band before that time for six months or whatever, and it was cool for me to see these tunes come together, and just working with Darol and seeing how he functioned in the studio. He put in the longest hours of everybody. He was up until 3:00 every night, replacing fiddle parts and working on everything. 

The tunes on Gambit are all originals, but there’s so much tradition rooted in these styles of music you’re playing. How do you reconcile that when trying to create your own compositions?

I do a lot of that, pulling from past traditions or old recordings. A lot of the compositional ideas and things that remain the same throughout the record are tunes by people like Matt Flinner and Béla Fleck, other people that have kind of pushed the envelope compositionally. On the record there’s kind of a whole, well, gambit of different styles. There’s old-timey music with fiddle and banjo, Appalachian string band [style] — and kind of in chronological order, I guess the influences would start there. Then you’d move into bluegrass, get into jazz and eventually fusion, funk, that kind of thing. Darol actually summed it up nicely. He was in the David Grisman quartet way back in the day, so he kind of had a hand in forming this style of music. He said something along the lines of, it felt like a journey through the past 40 years of his career. It just ended up this way that all these tunes grabbed from different areas of the past 40 years. The old-timey, the bluegrass, the sort of new acoustic, the jazz. And hopefully by merit of them being my tunes, they kind of hold together as a collection at the end of the day. 

How much of creating an original arrangement is improvisational?

For me, there’s always a lot of throwing paint at the wall. There’s a stage that kinda looks like that, where I write a lot of tunes or even just generate a lot of ideas, not even taking the tunes to a completed state. The way I write is kind of two stages: there’s the melody and there’s the harmony, these two sides of the composition. Basically, I write the melody and I try all different combinations of notes and phrase endings. With chords, I’m always trying different stuff. That does a lot to create a mood, I think, for the tune. For any one note, you could harmonize in many different ways, and for any one bar. So I think the important thing for me is just to try all the options, really try to be objective, and see what works the best and what feels the best. Mandolin is the main thing that I play, but I also play some guitar and some cello. So just getting off the instrument I’m most familiar with and getting onto something else can be really helpful in sparking some creativity. 

Given this wide range of styles of music you’ve played over the years, how do you describe your sound now?

I’d say that it’s sort of a furthering of the stuff that Darol’s been really involved in, this new acoustic sound. Which is not a label I totally love—just the sound of it—but it’s kinda what we got, I guess. It’s using the attitude of bluegrass in a lot of ways, but not being confined to the stylistic trappings of bluegrass if that makes sense. If you think about how Bill Monroe created bluegrass, he’s kind of the guy that finally took all these influences and put ‘em together and said, ‘here’s the thing.’ He wasn’t even trying to be original; he just was being original. He was just taking all the music that he liked and synthesizing it into what he wanted to hear. And that isn’t often actually the attitude of bluegrass musicians today, but it’s an interesting concept to me and a really interesting way to sort of look at music. So that’s the essence of bluegrass that I’m trying to go after.

How has your relationship with bluegrass evolved since your earliest experience with it?

I think bluegrass is kind of the underpinning of everything that I do, even if it’s not at the forefront of the final product. When I started playing mandolin, I started playing these old-time fiddle tunes, which pretty quickly brought me to bluegrass. When we’re talking about progressions, that is kind of the natural next step for somebody who’s interested in the tunes and the music and improvising especially. You’ll get drawn to bluegrass and then eventually to jazz and so on. That bluegrass vocabulary on the mandolin is really the basis of most of my writing and my playing. And I think that comes through on the record almost more in the way that we approach the tunes and treat how we play the tunes more than the compositions themselves. There are a couple tunes that are a little more bluegrass, but they’re always a little weird. There’s always something a little funky about them. It’s sort of the attitude of the thing that I think has stuck with me the most. 


Photo Credit: Louise Bichan

WATCH: Goat Rodeo Returns for a Tiny Desk (Home) Concert

The Goat Rodeo was back in town in 2020, and while their stay was short, they left behind a new record for us to enjoy until their next visit. The all-star string quartet (no, not literally a rodeo) released their second album Not Our First Goat Rodeo in June, and much like the passing of a comet, audiences everywhere took it in with wonder and awe. The four visionaries that constitute the Goat Rodeo have each accomplished many incredible, out-of-this world feats, but when Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer, Chris Thile, and Stuart Duncan join forces, the music made feels less like an album and more like a rare phenomenon you’re lucky to see even once in a lifetime.

This fall, NPR’s Tiny Desk (Home) concert series shared music from their sophomore release. Chris Thile acts as an emcee sharing backgrounds and insights between the three songs featured, all of which can be found on Not Our First Goat Rodeo. As in the 2011 release, the rodeo’s second coming features the beautiful vocal presence of Aoife O’Donovan on the song “The Trappings” (as well as on two other tracks not performed for NPR). Despite their brief reunion, Not Our First Goat Rodeo will surely be considered as one of the highlights of 2020. Watch the Tiny Desk performance here – and read our BGS Artist of the Month interviews with Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, Chris Thile, and Yo-Yo Ma.


Photo credit: Josh Goleman

Artist of the Month: Not Our First Goat Rodeo (Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile)

A remarkable blend of improvisation and composition, Not Our First Goat Rodeo is the just-released second volume of music from four American acoustic icons: Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile. The eclectic group chose their name based on the aviation term “goat rodeo,” indicating a delicate situation in which 100 things need to go right to avoid disaster.

That intricacy is apparent throughout Not Our First Goat Rodeo, and so is the band members’ mutual respect and sense of joy that stems from collaboration. One such example is “The Trappings,” a cinematic piece featuring Aoife O’Donovan, who lent her talents to the first collection and returns as a guest vocalist for the new project, too.

Sharing the story behind the track, Yo-Yo Ma recalls: “‘The Trappings’ came out of a question of aesthetics. I believe Edgar was talking about pop music, how he used to think, ‘Oh, if something’s too poppy, I’m not going to like it.’ But that’s like saying ‘classical music is boring,’ or that jazz, rock, rhythm and blues are one way, or even ‘people from different countries are’…. You know that as soon as you make a general statement like that, it’s not true, because you can think of hundreds, thousands of exceptions. ‘The Trappings’ is one of those.”

The group’s initial set, 2011’s The Goat Rodeo Sessions, is a classical crossover masterpiece that won Grammy Awards for Best Folk Album as well as Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical. The critically acclaimed project also spent 11 weeks at No. 1 on Billboard‘s bluegrass albums chart. Nine years (and many other outside projects) later, the group’s camaraderie and undeniable chemistry remain intact.

Yo-Yo Ma observes, “What is so amazing about playing with Chris, Edgar, Stuart, and Aoife is that when I’m working with them, I’m almost not a full participant, because I’m actually a fan. I’m such a big fan that I approach what they’re doing with a mixture of wonder and awe at these fellow musicians whom I feel very close to, but who are doing things that are almost beyond my imagination.”

This month BGS will conduct interviews with each of the ensemble’s members about Not Our First Goat Rodeo as well as their individual inspirations and insights. Check out our Tunesday Tuesday featuring “Voila!” and enjoy this brand new Essentials Playlist featuring music from Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile.

Read part one with Stuart Duncan here. Read part two with Edgar Meyer here. Read part three with Chris Thile here. Read part four with Yo-Yo Ma here.


Photo credit: Josh Goleman

Keller Williams, “M&Ms”

Music made by Keller Williams, but without his whimsical, sideways, and often silly songwriting perspective might seem like a counterintuitive concept for a record, but Sans, his latest album, leans into just that concept, featuring nine purely instrumental tunes. Williams inhabits an equal parts entrancing and perplexing center of a Venn diagram that includes among its constituent circles bluegrass, jamgrass, musical humorism, satire, and instrumental prowess that combines flatpicking sensibility with Phil Keaggy-style ingenuity and song structure. It’s as if you dumped every single goddamn flavor of M&Ms candy you could find into one giant bowl and dared listeners to try their luck and grab a handful that made sense.

Of course, a handful of delicious, if not suspiciously harlequin, sweets will almost always excite glee, and “M&Ms,” a frenetic guitar/percussion/arco bass bounty unto itself most certainly does. It’s a kaleidoscope; a frenzy; a nearly perfect distillate of Williams’ singular personality, so potent that you almost don’t miss his lyrics — especially given the marked lyricism of the interplay between the looped guitar tracks throughout. The ebb and flow of the arrangement cast a wide array of colors and shades, each sugary scoop different from the last, but just as delicious; the “M&Ms” flavors in this bowl are not peanut, or pretzel, or classic, they’re trance, dance, jam, fingerstyle, loop station, foot-tapping, harmonic-plucking, sternum-vibrating bass, and many, many others as yet to be named. It deserves a taste.


Photo credit: Taylor Crothers

Kittel & Co., ‘Chrysalis’

It’s hard to say if humankind will ever know exactly how a caterpillar goes about shedding its skin, digesting itself, turning into a primordial soup, and then transforming its own goo into a resplendent butterfly or moth, but the entirety of this process happens in one of two places: inside a cocoon or a chrysalis.

Whorls, an eleven-tune elemental soup of its own, invites listeners to envelop themselves in the cozy, metamorphic trappings that Kittel & Co. explored as they fashioned a new identity from their harlequin musical backgrounds and experiences. Led by fiddler, composer, and virtuoso Jeremy Kittel, the outfit has accomplished a feat of new acoustic, string band-rooted chamber music that isn’t simply as mind-boggling and intangible as the inner workings of a butterfly’s transfiguration; it’s as whimsical, alluring, and magnificent, too. “Chrysalis” begins with Simon Chrisman’s bounding hammered dulcimer, contemplative and exciting, while the ensemble chimes in one by one, in dialogue, building and deconstructing the silky hook together, ever dipping back into the melodic soup to transform the song into newer, grander, wilder, softer, shimmering versions of itself.

It becomes abundantly clear, as “Chrysalis” ebbs and flows, wriggling to life, that from top to bottom, Whorls is as if innumerable chrysalises were arranged like nesting dolls, with each subsequent transformation revealing a more surprising, captivating conversion building up to and succeeding each magical metamorphosis it contains.

Mike Block, ‘Final Night at Camp’

Summertime = summer camp, doesn’t it? To musicians, though, camps of summer are only marginally related to The Parent Trap or Wet Hot American Summer motifs. Music camps borrow the familiar grounds, dormitories, and wood panel-clad mess halls and classrooms for a week or two here and there, when they would otherwise be left vacant, and then fill them with pickers and tunes. It’s an entirely different summer camp category, but they’re never less nostalgic, or memorable, or convivial, or sweltering than their more mainstream counterparts, even if they are a special breed of their own.

Mike Block, an acclaimed and traveled cellist, is a founder, proprietor, and curator of just such a music camp, and an experienced instructor at many others as well. His latest album, Final Night at Camp: Deluxe Edition, plays exactly like an end-of-week faculty concert, drawing on musicians and pickers who are just as familiar with the wonders and woes of folk music camps as he is. The title track seemingly mirrors a week a camp, for just as you begin to become comfortable and familiar with your surroundings, the craziness (sleep deprivation? One crazy, all-night jam? That one student who refuses to ask an actual question, opting for, “This is more of a comment, really…” instead?) sets in! On the cello-centered, original instrumental, that “craziness” is a wildly dissonant, dynamic breakdown, that reharmonizes the tune’s melodic hook fantastically and frenetically mid-song. But, just like camp, when everything settles, everything is finally sorted out and the time has elapsed, we’ve learned something — and we wish that the “Final Night at Camp” hadn’t come to a close so soon.

David Benedict, ‘The Golden Angle’

How does that old adage go? The one about “the company we keep” and all that? Based on the roster for his tune, “The Golden Angle,” it would seem mandolinist David Benedict had grown up with this principle as his cardinal rule. The title track of his upcoming album features bassist Missy Raines, the winningest bass player in the history of the International Bluegrass Music Association; Stuart Duncan, perhaps the most prolific fiddler and session player in Nashville and every bluegrass musician’s favorite musician; Wes Corbett, a former Berklee banjo instructor and one of the contemporary five-string’s most clever pickers; and Ross Martin, a flatpicker who impeccably combines the workhorse qualities of bluegrass with a more deft, subtle, jazz-flavored approach.

At the helm in the producer’s chair was another mandolin seer, Matt Flinner, whose fingerprints are found aplenty on the whimsical, Fibonacci-inspired tune. Like Flinner’s compositions, Benedict’s “Angle” is centered on a strong, cyclical melodic idea while it plays out linearly, each of the players listening intently to and building on what’s come before. It simultaneously registers as a danceable breakdown or a new acoustic chamber piece; it’s not better taken as one or the other, rather, its pliancy offers more varied perspectives on the song and its interpreters. Benedict’s voice as a composer and musician is remarkably mature and individualistic, without flirting with becoming too gratuitous — something that cannot be said for many pickers his age. It might be a safe bet to guess that these qualities are also thanks in part to the wildly phenomenal company he keeps, but either way, he should keep doing what he’s doing.