washerman's dog: Bluegrass

Showing posts with label Bluegrass. Show all posts

Friday, April 12, 2013

Ghost of India Hollow: Hindugrass

The experimentations of jazz musicians with Indian classical (Hindustani and Carnatic) music is a well established chapter of contemporary music. Indian garage bands began making rock ‘n roll in the mid-60’s; today the rock, hip hop and electronica scene is alive, innovative and well across India. Indian musicians have appropriated all sorts of Western instruments from the saxophone and violin to the mandolin and guitar to make beautiful and authentic South Asian music.

From time to time I have let my mind run wild and tried to imagine what a fusion of Hindustani music and bluegrass would sound like. I can hear the horrified gasps coming from both Varanasi and West Virginia. How dare you! Perish the thought! Are you mad?

And while I acknowledge the cultural dirt in which bluegrass thrives is very different from the Ganges mud and Himalayan snow that has nurtured Hindustani classical music for millennia, I could not help but thinking that there was some common ground that deserved to be explored.

Hindugrass

So imagine the joy I felt when I stumbled upon a band called Hindugrass! An outfit of scarily talented and deeply credentialed American multi-instrumentalists based around Chapel Hill/Durham, North Carolina Hindugrass’ music comes out of Appalachian bluegrass country. But it is most definitely not something Bill Monroe or the Stanley Brothers would recognise as the music they popularised. Various members of this unusual band have studied tabla, sitar, sarod and khyal singing in India and (amazingly) like me have dared to dream about the fertile soil of both countries. Unlike me (obviously) they have done something about it, namely make a self-titled album of Indo-Appalachian fusion!

I must say that just as this is not bluegrass it is not Hindustani music. It is genuinely something new and different and yet the twin spirits of ancient India and not-so-ancient Appalachia are surely present. Like some sort of ghost haunting the mountain hollows, Hindugrass’ music is ethereal and hard to pin down. Yet unlike that ghost, entirely pleasure inducing.

Fools gold this is not.

Track Listing:

01 Drive

02 Mi Ne Mie Kplo Fa Do

03 Bhairavi

04 Appalachistan

05 Headwaters

06 Yamuna

07 Velavali

here

Saturday, November 3, 2012

Collection Essentials: Old and in the Way

Blue Grass

This record falls into the category of ‘essential’. Whether you ‘get’ bluegrass music or not, Old and In the Way, the album by the super group of the same name, should be a regularly played part of your collection.

My ears first delighted to this record in the First Age of Vinyl in the mid-1970s. I shared a large house on a leafy avenue in Southeast Minneapolis (just a block and a half from two Minneapolis institutions: Ralph and Jerry’s Supermarket, which was hardly bigger than a postage stamp, and Positively 4^th Street, one of the coolest record shops in the Upper Midwest where I wasted away uncounted hours flipping through rack upon rack of records wishing I could afford the $5.98 each one cost…highway robbery I tell you!) with my best friend and two co-eds who were majoring in psychology and English Literature.

In those days of student housing it was expected that part of each person’s contribution to a harmonious and well-functioning household was bringing and sharing your record collection. If you didn’t have one or if you wanted to set up your stereo in your room and listen to the music on your Koss headphones then you probably weren’t going to last very long as a housemate. Exceptions, of course, were made for cute (or bolshy) co-eds, but definitely not for the men.

One of those cute co-eds (who went on to marry my best friend) had Old in the Way in her collection. I can’t remember what else she had to offer in terms of vinyl platters but this single record was worth 100 additional. I was not into bluegrass at all at the time. I sneared at people who listened to country music. I had a mental block against the Grateful Dead, whom I weirdly considered to be a threat to my Christian faith! Indeed, my musical tastes were very green at this juncture of life (I am embarrassed to admit that my favourite singer at the time was Al Stewart).

But it was J’s playing of this record that began the opening of my narrow musical tastes. I instantly took to the sprightly playing, the tight but rough vocal harmonies that gave the impression they could just as easily steer the song right off a cliff as bring it in for a safe landing. When J told me that Jerry Garcia was the main force behind O&ITW I didn’t know what to think. This was great music, but didn’t he play guitar for in that druggie band, the Dead? On the sleeve I recognized one other name, that of Vassar Clements, the great fiddler, who I remembered from Robert Altman’s 1975 film Nashville, which I had loved. Everyone else was completely unknown to me.

Funny how one record can lead to so many others. It was by listening to this record that I turned to American Beauty (Grateful Dead) and began a long, slow but powerful love affair for Jerry Garcia as a champion of American traditional music. Dave Grisman, who played mandolin on the record, became a favourite of mine because of this record and I later came to understand the stature of Peter Rowan in American traditional music.

I’ve owned this record as a home-recorded tape, a pre-recorded cassette, a LP and now as an MP3. It is an old friend and for those of you who (for whatever prejudice or injustice) have not had the pleasure, I commend to you from the bottom of my heart, Old and in the Way.

Old & in the Way was a one-shot bluegrass band whose legacy lasted far longer than the band. Led by Grateful Dead member Jerry Garcia (banjo, vocals), the band also featured David Grisman (mandolin, vocals), Vassar Clements (fiddle), Peter Rowan (guitar, vocals), and John Kahn (bass). Garcia formed the band in 1973 as a way to revisit his bluegrass roots and demonstrate his affection for the music. To round out the lineup, he recruited Clements and Kahn as well as Grisman and Rowan, who were both West Coast session musicians who had previously played together in the band Muleskinner. Taking their name from a Grisman composition, Old & in the Way played a handful of gigs, most of them at the Boarding House in San Francisco in October. An album, also called Old & in the Way, was culled from these shows but not released until 1975 on the Grateful Dead's own record label, Round. The record combined standards and Rowan originals, which later became standards. Although the album was the only one the lineup released during the 1970s, the members continued to play together in various permutations over the next two decades, and the record continued to sell steadily. The group reunited after Garcia's death in 1995, releasing a second album (actually composed of 1973 recordings), That High Lonesome Sound, in early 1996. A third album of 1973 vintage appeared at the end of 1997. (AMG)

Track Listing:

01 Pig in a Pen

02 Midnight Moonlight

03 Old and in the Way

04 Knockin' on Your Door

05 The Hobo Song

06 Panama Red

07 Wild Horses

08 Kissimmee Kid

09 White Dove

10 Land of the Navajo

here

Monday, March 7, 2011

A Journey Up Highway 61: The Delta and Northern Mississippi

Leaving New Orleans and the southern regions of Louisiana, Highway 61 moves northwest for a few hundred miles before bending slightly, like a thirsty diviner’s rod, eastward to join up with the mighty muddy Mississippi River. This is the route the highway will take for the next one thousand miles, following each bend and curve, cutting through eight States as it makes its way to the Minnesota North Star where it will at last terminate.

But first, as 61 leaves Louisana, the highway-river cuts through the most fabulous flood plain in the USA: the Mississippi Delta. Home of the blues and to so many early giants of American music, the loamy, nutrient rich Delta, as writer David L. Cohn famously said, "begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg." The land between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers, is some of the richest and flattest in the world and during the 19^th century the location of huge plantations worked by tens of thousands enslaved African Americans. No wonder the hollers, field songs and work songs and remembered African rhythms gave form to the Blues, the roots of it all.

And so 61 Highway is intimately tied to the Mississippi River. And America has yet to produce a more one-eyed Mississippi River-lover and booster than the late great, John Hartford. A veritable Mark Twain of music, John Hartford, spent most of his life singing about life along the river: paddle-wheel boats, gum tree canoes, fishing, slumbering, swimming holes, escaping city life to get to the river and so on. Plucking his banjo, stomping his foot, growling, groaning, moaning and harmonizing with his merry band of friends, Hartford, proselytized the great waterway with humour, love and some of the most heartfelt music ever produced.

So I offer you the collection Me oh My How the Time Does Fly an eighteen track collection of some of John Hartford’s most memorable songs, including the iconic Gentle on My Mind (I made my fortune on that song, he used to say), which is, ironically, not about the River he so worshipped. Every song here is a classic and will have you smiling, snapping your fingers and humming along as you listen to it over and over.

Track listing.

1. Skipping in the Mississippi Dew

2. Julia Belle Swain

3. Natchez Whistle

4. I Would Not Be Here

5. Miss Ferris

6. Bear Creek Hop

7. Cukoo’s Nest

8. Boogie

9. Gum Tree Canoe

10. Slumberin’ on the Cumberland

11. Gentle on My Mind

12. In Tall Buildings

13. Nobody Eats at Linebaugh’s Anymore

14. On Christmas Eve

15. Way Down the River Road

16. Let Him Go, Mama

17. Good Old Electric Washing Machine

18. I’m Still Here

Listen here.

Mose Allison is another American original. So much so, we named our first born after him. Born in 1927, in the small hamlet of Tippo, Mississippi, not all that far off 61, Mose Allison, released his umpteenth album in 2010 at the age of 83! His music comes out of the Delta and is rooted deep in its southern soil. It is bluesy, raw, earthy and jazzy all in one. His piano playing style is fun and seems effortless. It trips and skips and sashays all over the place sometimes punctuating, sometimes guiding and other times, bumping right up against his laid back, tongue-in-cheek lyrics. You can’t go wrong with Mose. Any number of his albums, especially those from the mid-50s to early 70s are registered in the great book of American classics. But even his later years produced some stellar turnouts like Live in London (2002) and Gimcracks and Geegaws (1997). But I offer you Mose Allison Sings from 1963, which includes one of his signature pieces, Parchman Farm, about the infamous max security prison, located just east of Highway 61. But that’s only one of the gems in this treasure. There’s Seventh Son, If You Live, Don’t Get Round Much Anymore and Young Man, to name just a few of the many songs that have become Allison-ised over the years.

Track Listing:

1. Seventh Son

2. Eyesight to the Blind

3. Do Nothing Until You Hear From Me

4. Lost Mind

5. I Got a Right to Cry Baby

6. Baby, Let Me Hold Your Hand

7. Parchman Farm

8. If You Live

9. Don’t Get Round Much Anymore

10. One Room Country Shack

11. I Hadn’t Anyone Till You

12. Young Man

13. That’s Alright

Listen here.

An hour and a half up the road from Tippo, is the slightly larger town of Senatobia, Mississippi. This is where Jessie Mae Hemphill, the cowboy-hat wearing, electric guitar picking mama of the Northern Mississippi hill country was born and lived for much of her life. In a field dominated by larger than life men with mythic appellations (Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, the three Kings) Jessie Mae Hemphill always managed to do her own thing. Which was playing her own songs, many of them in a slow laconic groove, while keeping beat with a tambourine she kept tapping with her foot. Listening to Jessie Mae’s music will transport you to a special corner of American music, the Hill Country, that is not nearly so well known as the Delta country style of the gentlemen named above (and the myriad others).

Here’s Get Right Blues.

Track Listing:

1. Streamline Train

2. Shake Your Booty (Shake it, Baby)

3. Go Back to Your Used to Be

4. Take Me Home With You, Baby

5. Baby, Please Don’t Go

6. Lord, Help the Poor and Needy

7. Cowgirl Blues

8. Little Rooster

9. He’s a Mighty Good Leader

10. All Night Boogie (Jessie’s Boogie)

11. Loving in the Moonlight

12. Get Right, Church

13. Jessie’s Love Song (Tell Me You Love Me)

14. Honey Bee

15. Jesus Will Fix it For You

Listen here.

Near Senatobia is Como, Mississippi. And here lived “Mississippi” Fred McDowell. McDowell was born in Rossville, Tennessee, near Memphis. His parents, who were farmers, died when McDowell was a youth. He started playing guitar at the age of 14 and played at dances around Rossville. Wanting a change from plowing fields, he moved to Memphis in 1926 where he started to work in the Buck-Eye feed mill where they processed cotton into oil and other products. He also had a number of other jobs and played music for tips. Later in 1928 he moved south into Mississippi to pick cotton. He settled in Como, Mississippi, about 40 miles south of Memphis, in 1940 or 1941, and worked steadily as a farmer, continuing to perform music at dances and picnics. Initially he played slide guitar using a pocket knife and then a slide made from a beef rib bone, later switching to a glass slide for its clearer sound. He played with the slide on his ring finger.

While commonly lumped together with Delta Blues singers, McDowell actually may be considered the first of the bluesmen from the 'North Mississippi' region - parallel to, but somewhat east of the Delta region - to achieve widespread recognition for his work. A version of the state's signature musical form somewhat closer in structure to its African roots (often eschewing the chord change for the hypnotic effect of the droning, single chord vamp), the North Mississippi style (or at least its aesthetic) may be heard to have been carried on in the music of such figures as Junior Kimbrough and R. L. Burnside, while serving as the original impetus behind creation of the Fat Possum record label out of Oxford, Mississippi.

The 1950s brought a rising interest in blues music and folk music in the United States and McDowell was brought to wider public attention, beginning when he was discovered and recorded in 1959 by Alan Lomax and Shirley Collins. McDowell's records were popular, and he performed often at festivals and clubs. McDowell continued to perform blues in the North Mississippi blues style much as he had for decades, but he sometimes performed on electric guitar rather than acoustic guitar. While he famously declared "I do not play no rock and roll," McDowell was not averse to associating with many younger rock musicians: He coached Bonnie Raitt on slide guitar technique, and was reportedly flattered by The Rolling Stones' rather straightforward, authentic version of his "You Gotta Move" on their 1971 Sticky Fingers album. (from Wikipedia)

I Do Not Play No Rock n Roll is one of the great blues albums, its possession worth the opening monologue on track one Baby, Please Don’t Go, alone. But listen to the anger in Red Cross Store and the hope in 61 Highway and the joy in Glory Hallelujah and you’ll see why this is an essential American recording.