Preview Darol Anger's Rule-Breaking Bluegrass Album. Call It Meta

[Dobe]

Pretty nice lineup:
” the 60-year-old Anger hired one (relative) industry veteran—Sharon Gilchrist, formerly of the Peter Rowan and Tony Rice Quartet, on double bass—and three up-and-coming hotshots: mandolinist Joe Walsh, an instructor at Berklee College of Music, who co-produced the album with Anger, and recent Berklee grads Lukas Pool, a two-time National Old-Time Banjo Champion, and guitarist Courtney Hartman, of the Grammy-nominated bluegrass band Della Mae.

http://artery.wbur.org/2014/03/13/darol-anger-bluegrass

[OldSausage]

Sounds great.

It's a good job we live in 2014 and no-one has to go into a record shop and ask them if they have an album called "E-and'a".

[farmerjones]

Oh yeah! Fiddler's Pastime! He gets it.

[Joel Glassman]

This is a fine recording--one of his best I think.
"Meta Grass" eh? I've been playing "A-priori-Wahrscheinlichkeitgrass" myself... :whistling:

[Douglas McMullin]

Wonderful, I will add this to my must get list. I have seen Darol and Joe play together with different bad members twice, and both times they were outstanding.

[f5joe]

Very listenable. Thanks

[outsidenote]

That sounds great! Thanks for heads up. Definitely on my list.

[JeffD]

Their Farewell to Trion is wonderful. Not as dramatic as I (try to) do it, more lush and beautiful. Really nice.

[SincereCorgi]

On Darol's site they actually list the mics adn preamps they use, for those that like to sperg out on that stuff.

http://darolanger.com/index.php?page=cds&display=269

I take it that this is self-produced? I don't see anything about a label.

[Steve Sorensen]

What an awesome set of recordings. I have this and then Noam Plays Kenny Plays Bill then New Primitive as a one-two-three punch playlist of pure ear pleasure.

Steve

[Ivan Kelsall]

I have to admit that having listened to all the clips,i do like it - but !. I find it far too 'arranged' for my taste & it lacks the spontaneity that i like in Bluegrass. Even if that spontaneity is quite often 'arranged',most Bluegrass sounds less constrained & more free-wheeling to my ears. I think i'd get tired of listening to it quite quickly. Sorry to sound a sour note folks,:(
Ivan;)

[Charlieshafer]

I have to admit that having listened to all the clips,i do like it - but !. I find it far too 'arranged' for my taste & it lacks the spontaneity that i like in Bluegrass. Even if that spontaneity is quite often 'arranged',most Bluegrass sounds less constrained & more free-wheeling to my ears. I think i'd get tired of listening to it quite quickly. Sorry to sound a sour note folks,:(
Ivan;)

Hey Ivan,
In this case, I'm not too far off from you. A lot of the new acoustic alt/old-time is a strange blend of instrumental virtuosity, old-time and bluegrass tunes, and arranging in a way that's far more classical/chamber than anything else. A number of groups have been dancing around this edge for a while, trying to hit the sweet spot, none as long as Darol (think the Darol/Mike Marshall arrangements, or some of the stuff with Edgar Meyer). I absolutely agree that some can sound a little too mannered, and some can sound just plain noodley, like the composer had one good idea, but not quite good enough for 4 minutes of a tune.

That said, I still think there are a lot of great moments here, and I'll always enjoy really great musicians working together and really listening to each other as opposed to playing a sound-alike solo over and over again. The biggest problem is that this music is still in the development stages, so it's waiting on the next generation to push it a little further along. Right now, it's sort of in the chamber/bluegrass stage, which is great, as if you call it than in a promotion, it'll annoy both the classical purists and the bluegrass police.

My feeling is that if Darol keeps this one group together long enough to tour a bit and have everyone loosen up a bit, there will be some pretty spontaneous and fiery live performances.

[tmsweeney]

Listening as I type, I agree its laid back but very groovy, Daryl's style really speaks out, I guess I don't think they were trying to be hot and spontaneous but approaching traditional music from a more arranged approach, its a little more like jazz to me, and given Daryl's musical history, no surprise there. I like it a lot, it's very comfortable music. Kind of relates to Reichman's Walk along John or Todd Phillips In the Pines.

[Perry Babasin]

To me Darol is one of the pioneers of progressive string band music, more akin to Jazz than Bluegrass. Sounds potentially spontaneous to me just complex (which I personally really like). I would like to see them live where the spontaneity could really shine. To me Darol and Dawg and musicians of this ilk paved the way for Thile and other modern players to experiment with Bluegrass musical devices and blend them with Jazz, Classical, and traditional instrumentation. I like it... I like music to astound me.

[Atlanta Mando Mike]

I like it. It feels free and open to me. They did it in 2 days so they did much of it live. The groove is nice, everyone is playing very musically instead of trying to show off. And the Interaction between musicians is there at a high level. everyone's playing is good but the guitarist's playing is really great to me. She plays very hummable lines. An example of a great group of musicians getting together to make a record. Cool!!!

[Ivan Kelsall]

From Charlie - "...think the Darol/Mike Marshall arrangements,...". I was thinking of exactly that. The single 'Marshall/Anger' CD i have is possibly the least played CD i own. Terrific musicianship,but so 'arranged' that to me, it's unlistenable. Having said that,i do realise that all studio recordings are ''arranged'',fortunately, most don't sound like it,to me at any rate. I do however agree,that these same musicians playing the same music 'live', would most likely loosen up & sound much more spontaneous - that,i'd love to hear,
Ivan;)

[Darren Bailey]

The instruments are beautifully recorded - modern music has a reala dvantage over those classic albums for sure. mandolins have never sounded so good as over the last ten years or so. However, it just sound slike jazz to my unsophisticated ears, which is where many players seems to end up these days. I was listening to Bela Fleck's "Double Time" and David Grisman's playing blew me away - if only he'd use his incredible talent to play the music I like I'd be a happy man, but he loves his jazz so be it. This is why players like Ronnie McCoury continue to be up there in my mind - no matter how expressive or spontaneous they get, it still sounds like bluegrass. I know the jewish culture is rich with jazz tradition and respect to them for this heritage, but a simple country boy needs his music too.

[Ivan Kelsall]

HI Darren - Your analogy to Jazz is fine as long as we mean 'modern Jazz'. I love traditional Dixieland style Jazz,simply because it has the same spontaneous feel that Bluegrass has,in fact Bluegrass Music has often been referred to as the 'Jazz' of Country Music. When you come to the 'modern Jazz' genre, & think of the music of Dave Brubek & others,it IS very much arranged & always feels 'cold' to me.To take the analogy one step further & come to Bebop,somebody i read referred to it as ''the eternal search for the right notes'' - From Wikipedia on Bebop :-
''Bebop or bop is a style of jazz characterized by a fast tempo, instrumental virtuosity, and improvisation based on the combination of harmonic structure and sometimes references to the melody.. Well,that sums it up,no wonder they can't find the music !,:grin:
In the mandolin world,there are many terrific players with all the spontaneity you could wish for when it comes to Jazz Mando,including Dave Grisman at his best. However,if we didn't have such a diversity of musical tastes,what a boring world we'd live in,
Ivan~:>

[Bertram Henze]

I've been playing "A-priori-Wahrscheinlichkeitgrass" myself... :whistling:

No, that's called BayesGrass (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem).

[Dagger Gordon]

I believe the reviewer in the UK world music magazine Songlines didn't like it much either. Can't remember how he put it exactly, but he seemed to have an aversion to the music produced by youngsters who had been students at Berklee.
Great players but he just didn't like their music much.
A generalization and a sweeping and possibly mis-remembered description of what the review said, but I think that was basically the thrust of it.

For the record, I was always a huge fan of this modern string band approach back in the early eighties. The Tony Rice Unit's album Backwaters (with John Reischman on mandolin) is a classic to my ears. Incidentally, Sharon Gilchrist used to play really great mandolin with Tony. Can't understand why she hasn't got a higher profile as a mandolinist instead of playing bass.

[Petrus]

I love traditional Dixieland style Jazz,simply because it has the same spontaneous feel that Bluegrass has,in fact Bluegrass Music has often been referred to as the 'Jazz' of Country Music. When you come to the 'modern Jazz' genre, & think of the music of Dave Brubek & others,it IS very much arranged & always feels 'cold' to me.

I think the general (uninitiated) public probably only knows of jazz what they hear from Brubek and Marsalis and Davis and other sorts of mainstream work (Brubek's "Take Five" was a big pop crossover hit back in the day) and doesn't realize how much variety and sub-genres are out there. There's enough niches out there for someone to find at least one they like (and several they hate!) I only started getting into jazz a few years ago (Chet Baker, of all people, was my first attraction.) Unfortunately, today jazz represents only a tiny share of the overall musical marketplace, maybe about 1/10th of the share it used to have in its heyday.


To take the analogy one step further & come to Bebop,somebody i read referred to it as ''the eternal search for the right notes'' - From Wikipedia on Bebop: ''Bebop or bop is a style of jazz characterized by a fast tempo, instrumental virtuosity, and improvisation based on the combination of harmonic structure and sometimes references to the melody.. Well,that sums it up,no wonder they can't find the music !,:grin:

Bebop was actually pretty controversial when it first started to appear, leading to the "trad jazz" revival. Around the time of "The Birth of the Cool" and third stream jazz was already being accused of getting too intellectual, and bop was sort of a response to that (iirc.) A lot of these styles have yet to be fully realized in the mando world, so there's plenty of evolution yet to come.

(The whole thing about the melody, in your underlined part, was that the musicians were getting more and more into playing around with the chord progressions above and around the melody line, to the point that the melody itself became overshadowed or superfluous, yet the song was still recognizable, at least until free jazz came along.)

Not sure how BG fits into all this. The most recent material I've been listening to (the new Fleck/Washburn album, and the Thile/Meyer album of mando and bass duets) seems to be an eclectic amalgam of various styles; very good stuff but probably not BG. More old-timey if anything. Other groups like The Carolina Chocolate Drops (banjo, cello, fiddle; mando?) lean more towards old-time, and on the other end of the spectrum you have groups like The Devil Makes Three (who have a mandolinist prominently featured) that borrow more from rockabilly, or just rock outright (e.g., The G*ddam Gallows.)

I've been reading Nick Tosches' classic books Where Dead Voices Gather and Country recently, and the clear message is that genre distinctions, the further back you go, get very permeable and downright confusing. You can find images of old advertisements proclaiming Hank Williams as a "folk musician." Legends like Jimmie Rodgers who we associate with country borrowed very liberally from contemporary blues and jazz (Hank Williams trademark yodel is directly derived from 1920s blacktop singer Emmett Miller, according to Tosches.)

In relation to the mandolin, I'm always interested in how to bring new material and styles into my playing, especially material that has not usually been associated with the mandolin, like free jazz, noise, and whatnot.

[Bertram Henze]

...genre distinctions, the further back you go, get very permeable and downright confusing.
This has been exactly my impression all my life.


trademark yodel
If you want to permeate genre distinctions, yodelling is the fastest way (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4ouPGGLI6Q).

[Ivan Kelsall]

Realistically,ALL music in ALL genres is 'arranged' to one degree or another. Even music that we think of as being (mostly) spontaneous has to have a certain 'order' to it,otherwise it would degenerate into complete chaos. I love some things in most genres of music,from Medieval,to Classical,through to Opera,Rock'n Roll,Folk music,Bluegrass & on to Heavy Metal. Heavy Metal,which many folk would think was already chaotic,is far from it. Every member of a HM band knows exactly what to do & when to do it. The thing i really dislike is the lack of 'feeling' in some of the music i hear - musical 'posing' is maybe the best way i can describe it, & unfortunately,i think that many of even the finest players are guilty of it from time to time. Maybe it's just 'sour grapes' with me & i wish i had the talent to 'pose' & still sound as good as these guys - but not really !. We all like what we like & that's exactly how it should be,but we should also keep an open mind. I never thought that i'd ever love Italian Opera,until a friend of mine invited me to his home 45 years or so ago to listen to Puccini's Opera 'La Boheme' - that did it,& i've loved Opera ever since,
Ivan

[Atlanta Mando Mike]

I just don't get the very arranged comments about this record. It doesn't come off that way to me at all. I get the jazz comments, in that the feel reminds me of old Blue Note records - You get a group of musicians together and let them play. There is so much straight bluegrass out there, how many more times can we hear Roanoke or Train 45 at 160 bpm plus.

[Charlieshafer]

I'm definitely on the "spontaneous" side of the fence on this, and I love Darol's playing. He can really play. He can really teach, too. I love that he's encouraged young musicians, lending them a helping hand on the way up, that he's crossed-over from classical to old-time to the new alt-stringband stuff, but this one is just a little too precise and slick for me. Maybe it's the players around him. When Rushad Eggleston was the cellist in the Republic of Strings, things got pretty wild.

I suppose that's the listener's personality as much as the artists, though, in how perception is formed. I'd rather listen to one of Andy Statman's 15 minute improv journeys on "Cherokee Shuffle" than a Nickel Creek reunion. So maybe I'm just a messy, disorganized guy who resents organized people.. :)

The reference to modern jazz here is interesting. This is much more the Jazz At The Philharmonic style of music, very precise and sticking to the arrangements, as Marsalis is such a traditionalist. Statman is more the Chicago Art Ensemble sstyle, with Lester Bowie. And Bop? That might be old Bill Monroe. I remember listening to Theloneous Monk talk about how he and Dizzy were so angry at players stealing their chops and lines that they moved towards Bop to make it more unplayable for the "commoners."

[Atlanta Mando Mike]

Charlieshafer, nice points. One comment I will make though is one of the reasons Statman doesn't play with a guitarist or pianist is that with just a root note and lines from the base player to play from, harmonically he is very free. He has a much wider pallette of note choices that don't clash with the music. As soon as you add rhythm instruments playing chords, you are much more boxed in.

[UsuallyPickin]

Tight and clean ..two thumbs up... not anything I would generally describe as or paint with the Bluegrass brush however. R/

[farmerjones]

I don't see why we/they need to call it anything but Darol Anger Music.
He's been around for as long as the Dawg. Dawg music needs no other label.

-Darol, you're as established as any fine musician.
Put the content out there, and put your name on it,
and look toward the next project.

PS envious ensemble. ~o)

[outsidenote]

I have been enjoying this album very much. I don't perceive it as being "over arranged." I'm OK with perfection!

Its quite an eclectic style. I hear Jazz, Bluegrass, Celtic, Old time and Classical influences. However, the Bluegrass force is strong with this album even if it is not traditional.

It's right up my alley for sure.

[Atlanta Mando Mike]

I'm really digging the first tune "the gravel store."

[Bertram Henze]

They seem to be to BG what the Moving Hearts were to Irish music.
Plush recliners instead of straw bales, tuxedos instead of overalls, that's all.

[Paul Busman]

Just got an Amazon gift card and am strongly considering this as one of my purchases

[Dobe]

similar stuff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-Azt-XwZ7o#t=14

[Bertram Henze]

He is totally reminding me of Andy Warhol.

[Atlanta Mando Mike]

His mandolin tone reminds me a little of Tim O'Brien in that video. Really brings to mind the old "is there a definable difference in Tone between A models and F models?" debate.

[Charlieshafer]

Mr Sun is Darol's new touring outfit, and that's what you'll be hearing the most from over the next few years. Looking forward to seeing him live and the interaction. I can't tell you how many bands where the recordings and youtube videos just don't do them justice. I'm betting there will be some more improv and fireworks then, and not quite so well-mannered.

[ralph johansson]

Bebop was actually pretty controversial when it first started to appear, leading to the "trad jazz" revival. Around the time of "The Birth of the Cool" and third stream jazz was already being accused of getting too intellectual, and bop was sort of a response to that (iirc.) A lot of these styles have yet to be fully realized in the mando world, so there's plenty of evolution yet to come.

(The whole thing about the melody, in your underlined part, was that the musicians were getting more and more into playing around with the chord progressions above and around the melody line, to the point that the melody itself became overshadowed or superfluous, yet the song was still recognizable, at least until free jazz came along.)





Bebop evolved in the first half of the '40s, the cool school in the early 50's and third stream in the late 50's. The bop pioneers, like Parker, Gillespie, drummers Max Roach and Kenny Clarke, piano players Bud Powell and Thelonius Monk, certainly built on
musicians of the swing generation like Roy Eldridge, Lester Young, and Jo Jones. And the idea of improvisation on the changes, often with scant reference to the melody, certainly didn't start with them.

Incidentally, Monk, unlike most others, did refer to his compositions a lot, both in his own solos and in accompaniment.

Wonder where anyone got the idea that mainstream jazz is or was overly arranged. The boppers often began and ended with a statement of the theme in unison, if there were two horns. There might be sketches or certain figures, written out for the rhythm players on the theme, then usually nothing, except a chord chart during solos. A lone horn player would (and will) interpret the melody quite freely (but recognizably), at least on ballads.

[Perry Babasin]

I personally love modern progressive string band music, I've been a fan of Darols for a long time.

If you're going to talk bebop -- I'm going to post a video of my Dad playing with his progressive L.A. string band, the Jazzpickers in the early '50s. He was a bassist but pioneered jazz cello, earlier than Oscar Pettiford. He played and recorded with musicians like Charlie Parker and Chet Baker, but his heart was with this concept of rhythm section, mostly strings but also flute, vibes, drums and piano...

Just like today there is a theme that carries through the piece and the hot musicians trade solos. This is what I grew up hearing, all night jam sessions...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEg1Hw4tzXc&index=3&list=UU4Jht_OKgeKovXgQSThn88A