Tag: Tunesday Tuesday

Michael Cleveland, “5-String Swing”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Yes, Michael Cleveland’s brand new album, Tall Fiddler, includes a track called “5-String Swing,” and yes, perhaps the world’s foremost banjo player, Béla Fleck, is a guest on the song, but do not be fooled. This is not a banjo tune, this is is not an incendiary breakdown or a Scruggs-conjuring, “Foggy Mountain Special”-esque number. This is a fiddle tune. A five-string fiddle tune.

An eleven-time winner of IBMA’s Fiddle Player of the Year award (and current nominee for what may be his twelfth honor), Cleveland’s “ax” of choice has long been a fiddle with five strings — instead of the standard four — with a low, C-tuned string beyond the usually-lowest G string, essentially combining a viola and a violin on a violin’s frame.

In more standard, traditional bluegrass that fifth string doesn’t always jump out, but in a song such as this — skipping, gallivanting swing with a touch of Texas and a dash of Django bolstered by bluegrass — it can change a fiddler’s entire mindset, leading them toward sumptuous, lush double and triple stops that defy any sort of quantification. Cleveland is well known for milking these jazzy harmonies, leaning into quarter tones that no fretted instrument — and very few other fiddlers — could ever accomplish with such exact, scientific precision.

Besides Fleck, and his similarly innovative approach to combining rootsy aesthetics, Cleveland is joined by producer Jeff White on guitar, Tim O’Brien on mandolin, and Barry Bales on bass, perfect pals with which to swap licks over this cheery, energetic, toe-tapping tune.

Che Apalache, “24 de marzo (Día de la Memoria)”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Though it’s largely viewed as a music by and for Appalachian and southern white Americans, bluegrass is a genre born of a much more complicated, harlequin heritage — as is the case for most American cultural touchstones. The U.S.A. is a melting pot country and bluegrass is melting pot music. As such, it takes on touches, overtones, and undertones of many other folk traditions with ease. Musicmakers from around the world, from Eastern Europe to Japan to South America, have for many years fashioned string bands that begin with the skeletal structure of American roots music — banjos, fiddles, mandolins, and so on — and expand into incredibly imaginative realms informed by their own cultures, backgrounds, stories, sights, and sounds.

One such band helping to further this global potential for bluegrass is Che Apalache. An Argentina-based bluegrass and old-time quartet, the group (with members from Mexico, North Carolina, and Argentina) covers a vast musical space that includes barn-burning picking, soulful, gospel-tinged vocals, and composed, cinematic arrangements with touches of chamber music and the virtuosity of formal training. One standout song from their brand new, Béla Fleck-produced album, Rearrange My Heart, is “24 de marzo (Día de la Memoria),” an instrumental tango written by fiddler Joe Troop based on experiences of banjo player Pau Barjau’s family members.

The tune commemorates victims of an Argentinian dictatorship that was backed by the United States. Día de la Memoria por la Verdad y la Justicia is a holiday observed each year in Argentina on March 24, the anniversary of the coup of 1976. The bluegrass instrumentation doesn’t feel clunky or out of place utilizing the musical vocabularies of Central and South America in this context. Rather, it reinforces the fact that our communities — musical and otherwise — are strengthened by the experiences of others. And, it reminds us that there are so many more stories ready to be told by bluegrass bands, if we’re ready to hear them.

Hard Drive, “Missouri Road”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Ask a bluegrasser to define “mash” — that driving, head-bobbing, modern iteration of traditional ‘grass that refuses to commit to a minor or major third — and their answer will more than likely include some sentiment similar to, “It’s hard to explain, but I know it when I hear it!!” It’s true. The SON!-inducing subgenre within a subgenre can be traced back to artists like Tony Rice, Alison Krauss & Union Station, Lonesome River Band, and many others, but it does not have one single, tangible origin point or dictionary definition. 

Today, you can hear mash-inflected tunes from major touring bands and festival campgrounds alike — and especially from the halls of the Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Music of America’s (SPBGMA) annual gathering in Nashville. In the past, mash was generally relegated to the much more traditional-leaning spheres of bluegrass, but in recent years musicians and pickers from other circles such as old-time, Boston’s chamber-influenced bluegrass scene, and the Pacific Northwest and Colorado’s string-band vibes have championed mash as their own as well.

One such group is Hard Drive, a North Carolina-based bluegrass outfit that resulted from four musical roommates — Tatiana Hargreaves (fiddle), Aaron Tacke (banjo), Sonya Badigian (guitar), and Nokosee Fields (bass) — banding together. Their debut album, Random Access Mash, listens more as traditional, down home bluegrass with a fiddle focus and old time spirit, but it calls itself “mash.” Even the band name itself is a tongue-in-cheek reference to this specific picking culture. “Missouri Road” is a cheerfully loping rendition of a Kenny Baker tune that again finds the project straying from the ascribed format, but lets Hargreaves’ deliberate, timeless fiddling shine. The entire project is a delightful subversion of our expectations of what traditional bluegrass is supposed to be. And if it’s mash, it’s perhaps executed as artfully and subtly as humanly possible. Do we always know it when we hear it? 

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.

Patrick McAvinue, “Der Belsnickel”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

When Patrick McAvinue was awarded IBMA Fiddle Player of the Year in 2017, only six other fiddlers had ever won the award — one of them had won it eleven times. In the past handful of years the consistent, predictable fields of nominees in the instrumentalist categories have begun opening up more and more. Voters are now recognizing younger, up-and-coming musicians alongside returning stalwarts, rather than just the same old guard making it to the final round of voting year after year.

McAvinue is undoubtedly part of this “new wave” in bluegrass and that’s not simply due to the inventory in his trophy case. He’s toured with traditional bluegrassers Audie Blaylock & Redline as well as the more country-infused, Southern gospel-steeped bluegrass entertainers Dailey & Vincent, and his own cross-genre and folk outfit, Charm City Junction. In bluegrass, a genre that capitalizes on virtuosity — and often as a result, specialization — McAvinue demonstrates that a diverse approach isn’t necessarily a pitfall.

His brand new solo record, Perfect Fit, takes this idea to its utmost potential (there’s a Radiohead cover on the album). Another track, “Der Belsnickel,” is an impossibly quick, slightly atonal frolic — one that definitely calls to mind the episode of The Office referenced by the song’s title. Remember Dwight’s Schrute family holiday traditions? If you do, hold those in mind while this tune blazes by, performed in this video by McAvinue, his bandmates with Dailey & Vincent, and Matt Menefee on banjo. You’ll surely find “Der Belsnickel” is both impish and admirable.

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.

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.

Doc Watson & David Grisman, “Watson Blues”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

It’s fitting that this week, leading up to the 32nd year of MerleFest in Wilkesboro, North Carolina — a festival named after Doc Watson’s late son, Merle — that for Tunesday Tuesday we spend a few minutes with a song named after Doc himself. Bill Monroe wrote “Watson Blues” (or “Watson’s Blues,” as it’s also called), naming it after his friend and premier flatpicker, and the two performed it live and recorded it together on more than one occasion. This version with David “Dawg” Grisman, though, showcases the effortless way that Doc could keep up with and quietly, subtly innovate alongside musicians and artists who were much more famous for roaming further afield.

What’s additionally striking about this particular recording is how simple and focused the track is. Doc’s steady, unwavering hand pushes the song along at a perfectly breezy clip, matching the mellow, round, warm, huggable tones from his flattop. Meanwhile, Dawg plays the roll of Big Mon convincingly, peppering his signature, wacky, jazz-inflected phrases only rarely, choosing instead to let the tune stand on its own. Stuart Duncan’s plaintive twin fiddling is the icing on this tasty, minimal, “Watson Blues” cake.

If you’re headed to MerleFest this weekend, make sure this track is on your driving playlists to/from the festival — and be sure to check out our 2019 MerleFest preview for tips and tricks for the weekend. And, finally, make sure you stay tuned after the 3:52 runtime of “Watson Blues” passes — Doc, Dawg, and Jack Lawrence give us an incredibly tasty version of “Bye Bye Blues” to wrap up the album. It’s an acoustic pickin’ heroes encore.

David Grier, “Waiting on Daddy’s Money”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

The initial A and B parts of virtuosic flatpicker David Grier’s “Waiting on Daddy’s Money” will strike your ear as timeless. It’s a subtly haunting and awry melody that conjures many of bluegrass and old-time’s iconic fiddle tunes. But, as soon as the first form is complete, Grier’s countless embellishments and reiterations of that melody demonstrate that this is no play-the-same-tune-for-half-an-hour-in-unison old-time revelry. Instead, this is an artistic study, a series of complicated opuses revisiting and revising the tune into a truly original, nearly inimitable six-string soliloquy.

What’s remarkable though, through that artistry — that ebbs and flows from simplistic, familiar staple licks to utterly singular, mind-boggling musical acrobatics — is that the tune, and Grier’s cyclical interpretations of it, are never at any point esoteric or inaccessible to the listener’s ear. Somewhat counterintuitively, it effortlessly holds onto that classic fiddle tune vibe. Grier himself refers to these interpretations as “mutations,” though that descriptor belies the decades upon decades of learned, practiced nuance and ease that make each reharmonization, key change, chord inversion, syncopated rhythm, and string sweep a boon to the song, rather than self-aggrandizing distractions.

Above all else, “Waiting on Daddy’s Money” — and the entire album, Ways of the World — demonstrates that Grier is an unimpeachably superlative guitarist with a one-of-a-kind musical voice that not only draws on his history growing up with bluegrass, but also consciously and magnificently blazes an impeccably fresh trail that no other picker has yet to even attempt to trod.

Photo credit: Scott Simontacchi

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.