Whiskey Before Breakfast

Jug band veteran

2006-03-15T10:47:00.000-05:00

Last Wednesday, I went to my favorite neighborhood music club to hear Jim Kweskin, renowned to '60s folk music enthusiasts for his great jug band. (That group--which featured Maria & Geoff Muldaur along with the late Fritz Richmond, maestro of the jug and washtub bass--disbanded in 1968.) Looking dapper in a khaki blazer and scally cap that put a Beatnik accent on his greyed moustache and aquiline nose, Kweskin sang and played guitar in a trio that also included Matt Leavenworth on the fiddle and Matthew Berlin on the bass. They played an assortment of ragtime songs, swing tunes, and country blues in a straightforward style, encouraging the audience to sing along.

The performance had a very relaxed air--there was nothing outré in the arrangements of these tunes or in the soloing. But if this music sounded more conventional than fans of the Kweskin Jug Band might have expected, it was nonetheless warm and alive and deeply inhabited. Kweskin projected the easy confidence of an itinerant who had come home again with these songs--many of the very songs that had originally fed his crazy-quilt vision of American music. If one of them stood out as the emblem of the evening, it was probably the trio's cover of Mississippi John Hurt's "My Creole Belle," a wistful tune buoyed by a gentle ragtime rhythm that Kweskin picked out on his guitar as though his fingers moved to it naturally--hearing it was like putting your hand on the pulse that had been animating the entire set.

Hurt was a hill country farmer who recorded a handful of songs in 1928 and kept on with his quiet life--until '60s folklorists rediscovered him and made him into a star alongside the other surviving country blues singers. Though not a stranger to the blues, he wasn't strictly a bluesman; he was a "songster" who sang and played from a grab bag of styles. Ragtime songs, along with the minstrel songs and cakewalk tunes from which ragtime had developed, were in that bag. His style of fingerpicking--like a pinwheel spinning in the summer breeze--was molded out of their syncopated melodies and rotating harmonies.

The jug bands from the early decades of the 20th century, several of which made recordings in the '20s, were also grab bag affairs.

(To be continued...just wanted to get something new up here since I haven't blogged in so long!)

Bluegrass breakdown

2005-07-14T09:53:00.000-05:00

To get on with it then: the last time I got it in my head to enter blogdom was, synchronistically enough, last July, when I began and abandoned a rambling post about the annual Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival in the Berkshires. This year’s festival is coming up this weekend, and I’m determined to report on it in this space. Two of the musicians I most enjoyed last year will be returning: Del McCoury and Tim O’Brien. They represent two different sensibilities in the world of contemporary bluegrass: traditional and progressive. (Fred Bartenstein often features them, respectively, in the “Modern Roots” and “Walls of Time to Come” segments of his superb radio program.)

McCoury made his name as the guitarist and lead singer in the early 1960s lineup of the band that originated bluegrass, Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys, and he’s kept the traditional flame as fiercely alive as anyone ever since. (His most recent album with the band he’s led since the late ‘80s—featuring his sons Ronnie and Robbie on mandolin and banjo—just came out this week.)

O’Brien, who is a generation younger, got his start in the ‘70s as one of the founding members of the Colorado bluegrass band Hot Rize. Though he’d already been exposed to a lot of traditional music in his hometown of Wheeling, West Virginia, he became passionate about it—like a lot of young people on Northeastern campuses in the years following the folk revival—during his freshman year at Colby College in Maine, where he played mandolin in a bluegrass band.

Around the same time, his future Hot Rize bandmate, Pete Wernick (a doctoral student at Cornell University) and Wernick’s friend Tony Trischka (a recent Syracuse grad) were both experimenting with bluegrass banjo picking styles. Wernick’s approach was steeped in the three-finger “roll” style that had been one of the signature sounds of bluegrass ever since Earl Scruggs introduced it in Bill Monroe’s band of the ‘40, while Trischka’s was an extension of the melodic style that Bill Keith (one of Scruggs’s successors in Monroe’s band) had pioneered. The two of them happened to be friends with a few enterprising folk music enthusiasts who had just produced a couple of albums on their own label, Rounder Records, and were happy to cut a record of the tunes that Wernick and Trischka had worked up with their band Country Cooking. (It was the label’s third release and a big seller.)

I’ll have more to say about this record—and the Trischka-led projects that followed it—in a subsequent post. For now, the point I’d like to make is that it was the product (not the first one but a significant one) of a new sensibility, characterized by a generational and geographic distance from the bluegrass tradition that inspired both a sense of awe and a sense of experimentation. The folk revival that had sparked urban interest in roots music at the onset of the 1960s enabled the major figures of bluegrass to perform frequently in the Northeast, but there was an element of exoticism to these sojourns, as the folk music culture here was a fledgling thing, ad hoc rather than native and inherited. The young urbanites who were moved—I choose the word deliberately because there were many for whom it was much more than a novelty—to take up bluegrass had to learn it by copying licks from recordings. Knowing this, it’s astonishing how rapidly so many of them were able to develop the kind of blazing virtuosity—characterized not only by confident technique but also by original, unconventional ideas—you can hear on their own initial recordings.

I’d like to emphasize that, when I talk in the above paragraph about “the bluegrass tradition,” I’m not referring to something ancient and monolithic. Although it had evolved from the old-time country music of the Southeast, bluegrass was a musical style that had only been around for about twenty years at this point, and it was far from static. Monroe’s band had been, and continued to be, a revolving door for a series of adventurous players who would absorb the style and contribute to its development, many of them going on to push it in different directions by forming their own bands. I think this dynamism was part of what sophisticated young people like Wernick and Trischka responded to when they heard it.

It was pure serendipity that Wernick and O’Brien both ended up in Colorado at the same time. The first album they recorded together, Wernick’s Dr. Banjo Steps Out (1978), still sounds marvelously polymorphous and strange, bursting with new ideas about rhythm, arrangement, and soloing in a bluegrass style. One of Wernick’s inspirations on it was to plug his banjo into a phase-shifting device that creates an illusion of sustained tone, resulting in harmonies that aren’t possible on an undoctored banjo (which has scarcely any natural sustain). His mastery of the Scruggs style was so complete at this point that he was able to use this technique tastefully, alternating it with more traditional playing. And by the time Hot Rize released its debut recording the following year, Wernick and O’Brien had struck an elegant balance between tradition and progressivity. They chose to follow a more conventional format, integrating their innovative soloing styles into a straightforward bluegrass song structure (and even reviving the old practice of singing harmony into a single microphone, which had become obsolete as recording techniques evolved).

I have lots more to say about O’Brien’s solo career, which has been exceptionally varied and interesting, but since I seem to have gotten a little lost in sketching out his background—and in introducing a number of other topics and themes I hope to discuss in more depth (bear with me as I try to get out of critical essay mode)—I’ll put that off until I get back from hearing him at Grey Fox this weekend.

Road to blogging, or: How I learned...

2005-07-14T09:45:00.000-05:00

I’ve wanted to start an arts blog for a couple of years now—the first such blog I stumbled upon, back in the spring of 2003 when the blogosphere was young, was 2blowhards.com. Inspired by its chatty but brainy tone—by the casual back-and-forth format that seemed to encourage an astonishing play of ideas between its two participants—a few friends and I launched our own group blog. But we didn’t manage to get much dialogue going on it; I had a lot of trouble shaking off my anxiety about shaping and developing my ideas into reasoned critical statements, couldn’t get comfortable just offering up my naked impressions of stuff. So we disbanded. One of us went on to start The Forager Blog, where he’s attracted a good readership and has recently been posting at a steadier clip than ever; another of us started a blog that eventually petered out but produced some lovely posts, especially this one. Me, I still felt excited about the blogging medium—especially when I saw Terry Teachout and Kyle Gann, two writers whose printed criticism I had admired for years, plunge into it fervently around the same time that my friends did—but I didn’t feel confident that I was temperamentally suited to the form. I took a couple more stabs at it but still couldn’t shake off my innate deliberativeness, couldn’t loosen up and get into the proper free-associative rhythm. But I think I’m finally ready to stop worrying and love the blog—my own blog, I mean.