Not like they used to

[AlanN]

Many people have heard a lot of the old songs through groups like the Bluegrass Album Band, who, as good as they are, are a lot smoother than the early guys. I like it all, but with the early guys you always had the feeling that you never knew what was coming next, which made the music more exciting to me.

Good points here. The 'not knowing what comes next' is missing from a lot of today's bands. I was at a jam recently and the tunes that were picked were too 'canned'. Not so much the tunes, but the way the vocals happened and the breaks taken - too regular and following a formula..."Ok, here's my mandolin break and I'm going to tag the ending for 2 measures." And every break by every instrument was done the same way. It was boring and annoying at the same time. But the guitar man and banjo were the forces and that's the structure they drove.

I have an old Saturday morning radio show of Buzz Busby, Al Jones, Don Stover, Ed Ferris - rough at times, but never canned or 'regular'.

[Don Stiernberg]

How about David Long? There's a young player that has it goin' on!

Jazz players influenced by bluegrass? That would be saxophonist Bill Evans, who recently did a gig in NYC including Sam Bush on the mandolin...

Bassist Edgar Meyer, a classical maestro, also embraces bluegrass in his recordings and compositions, even having gone so far as to learn and play mandolin and dobro..

I like to try to play jazz and bluegrass, they're not...what's the term?..."mutually exclusive"? I get a thrill whenever anyone mentions Buzz Buzzby, and I think that ferocious tremelo can be felt in the playing of others like Mr. Dawg, John Duffey, Earl Taylor, The Bray Bros...

We had a great one here in Chicago for a long time too, Red Ratliff. Bona Fide, I assure you.

Vassar Clements used to pick his fiddle! That would seem to
legitimize fiddle-pickin'. He may have even done it on cello too.I think I saw a foto of that on the Dawgology thread here at the Cafe..

...random thoughts...now back to regularly scheduled programming....

[jmcgann]

I like to try to play jazz and bluegrass, they're not...what's the term?..."mutually exclusive"?

Me too; they aren't; and some people just like what they like to the point of being political about it. Which I think is sad, because those folks are missing out on a world of great music...

There's great jazz and bad jazz; great bluegrass and totally lame bluegrass. Great musicians often make great music, and most of the time they could care less about "purity". That Jerry Douglas fellow is a big Hendrix fan, and it doesn't seem to have polluted his 'grass.

It's often the less developed self-appointed keepers of the flame that like to tell people what they should and shouldn't do in a style of music, and what is and isn't the "real traditional bluegrass" (or 'real jazz' or 'real Irish' or 'real rockabilly' or 'real blues' or #'real Hindustani" or whatever).

I wonder how many of the "Gee, no real bluegrass pickers graduate from Berkley" type "thinkers" have really LISTENED to what's going on in the Monroe/Flatt and Scruggs original bluegrass band- if they hear someone ELSE play like Chubby Wise (heavy Grapelli influence) or Cedric Rainwater (WALKING BASS!!!! THAT'S JAZZZZZZZZ!!! ) they'd be the first to head for the door thinking "that's not traditional!" Maybe because rather than going to the actual roots of the music, they are more geared toward listening to much later generation neo-traditional bands that play in a style that is very conservative and has less to do with the original spirit of Monroe-Scruggs and more with the mannerisms.

Plus, they probably can't do that stuff anyway, so it must be bad

"Fiddle style", "saxophone style"...whatever....those labels don't necessarily
mean that the mandolin playing lacks sweat, garlic, or gonads...

[Peter Hackman]

Hhmmm, maybe "playin' a fiddle with a pick" wasn't the best way to put it. #What I was trying to get across is that a lot of modern players play in what I would describe as a more linear fashion. #Lots of single notes and scales. #And usually mostly 1/8 notes. #Where the older style of playing was more chord form based. #More double stops, syncopation and feeling. #

There is nothing wrong with any of it. #I enjoy listening to all things mandolin. #I just prefer the older style of picking.

Shaun

So double stops distinguish the mandolin from the violin? Don't tell
Svend Asmussen that.

Seriously, what I dislike in many contemporary grass-newgrass players is
their playing doesn't breathe. No rests, no rhythmic interest.

[MartinD_GibsonA]

Chubby Wise (heavy Grapelli influence) or Cedric Rainwater (WALKING BASS!!!! THAT'S JAZZZZZZZZ!!!

I just completed a six-hour interest class on the history of Bluegrass given by a U of NC professor, Dr Robert Cantwell. #(Note -- He's also written several books on such subjects.) #He talked about both Chubby Wise and Cedric Rainwater, and even about how Earl Scruggs began life as more of a jazz banjo player from listening to the old minstrel show music before he finally figured out to use his thumb to tie lines of triplets together. #He even delved into the influence of the clarinet on Bill Monroe's music. #It was really fascinating stuff.

Don Smith

[Jonathan Peck]

I think the early players had a broad musical perspective and drew from many, many, musical sources and instruments. They also played with alot of raw emotion - from the gut, not from the head so to speak. I think alot of modern players, like the ones that graduate from Berklee even, tend to play more with their heads than their hearts. They might have larger musical vocabularies, but the raw emotional power of the gut player when missing can sound slick.

[AlanN]

but the raw emotional power of the gut player when missing can sound slick.

Unless of course the gut player has a Tone Gard

Someone above mentioned the BG Album Band. I loved those records, and at the time, I thought "Man, the classic tunes, but done up with modern sounds, Thank God". Age has given me the wisdom and clarity to see that there is indeed greatness in the old ways that maybe surpasses the slickness and cleanliness of the new breed. But, as Doyle said, they limited the guitar breaks on those recordings to pay proper homage to the originals.

The Kentucky Colonels, to my ears, married the rawness and emotion of the old with the slick of the new.

[JeffD]

They just don't write any old songs anymore.

[travers chandler]

You may want to give a listen to Travers Chandler and Avery County. #Try # http://averycountybluegrass.com/

He has a little bobble head of Buzz Busby on the dashboard of his 1967 Chevrolet Biscayne......

Thanks I think

When i was learning to play I had nothing but records to learn from. My heroes were my teachers. Buzz Busby,Frank Wakefield especially. Monroe,Vernon Derrick were other influences.

Some other players who i think you should check out lemonhill:

David Davis
Skip Gorman
Compton
Lyle Meador
Randy "Bobo" Lindley



And if you are hankering for CD's Avery County's debut is available #

i like my bluegrass all different kinds of ways. #i prefer it to be in the older style. i dont politicize it at all.
with jazz, there is much jazz that i think isnt jazz at all, but i do think it is at the same time. #confusing i know!
some people really dig bop, some dig swing, just like some dig old BG and some dig new. #
i try to play both jazz and grass. #but i usualy dont like to blend the two, i like to try and play jazz like it is jazz, and bg like it is bg.
thats just me.
ive read monroes biography cover to cover more than once, and i dont remember anything ever about clarinets! #maybe i missed it?
bill i thought gave credit to a blues guitar player for where most of his inspiration came from. the #name escapes me now.
also the old time fiddle and songs that he grew up with.

its funny, i play music with berkelee grads. i know a couple of guys who went through there. none of them can play a lick of bluegrass, but they are not bluegrass guys anyway. #they definatly do appreciate the music though.

i see where you are coming from jmcgann, but i dont think anyone here went the direction you are talking about.
this is about personal preferences. i dont recall anyone saying that such and such isnt "real" or whatever.
however someone did say something about berkelee, and id like to think that there proabably is a good mandolin picker who graduated from there, but they probably didnt go to school for the mando!
anyway, what is this all about jmcgann?

"It's often the less developed self-appointed keepers of the flame that like to tell people what they should and shouldn't do in a style of music, and what is and isn't the "real traditional bluegrass" (or 'real jazz' or 'real Irish' or 'real rockabilly' or 'real blues' or #'real Hindustani" or whatever)."

nobody even went there. # whats your deal? that sounds like you got a bone to pick.

as a matter of fact i would strongly dissagree with you!!!!!

dear lord how many times i have heard PHENOMENAL players go off about who isnt playing it true and who is, in bluegrass, jazz, rock, and in middle eastern music (my musical heritage) #

so whoever you were trying to gently demean by saying they are "less developed and self-appointed" #did not post and is not here to defend themself. #and who are these people anyway?

this is a post about personal preference in bluegrass music.
you are in the bluegrass section of the forum!
you probably just offended a handful of people by making those super broad statements.

i hope you dont think because someone likes one thing more than something else that means they are "sad" and missing out on a world of music. #i obviously did not list my other interests in music, wich probably are more diverse than your tastes because im younger and listen to music you proably wouldnt listen to, but thats a assumption so whatever and that really has nothing to do with the subject.

they dont teach soul at school. #you either got it or you dont. #so berkelee or no berkelee it dont matter!

furthermore,
quote jmcgann
"they are more geared toward listening to much later generation neo-traditional bands that play in a style that is very conservative"

who are you talking about? who is this they? if you are wondering about me, no i dont adhere to that. i listen to mostly old stuff, early sixties the latest. i do listen to newer music, but i have always listened to the old stuff.

and to quote tony rice
"you can always tell who listens to the old stuff"

[jmcgann]

I'm outta here. Y'all know more about soul than me...

One last thought- those who think they are all heart and no head are probably right #

yeah i guess you are right about that.

next time you drop bombs like that at least use the lysol.
common courtesey to clean up the stink. #

its amazing i dont know where this stuff comes from.......

the only "soul" comment i made was how it was something you have or you dont.............

WHATS WITH THE ANIMOSITY!

doyle lawson can kick it old school any day. he can also new school.
don stiernberg mentioned john duffey, someone well known for going off the beaten path, but that guy can really play it true as well!

i think the recording process has ALOT to do with the changing of the sound.
back in the day when you sang into the can, it was different than tracking stuff out and having your own mic (or two!) for just the mando.
a good modern example of singing in to the can....
the johnson mountain boys, working close. i beleive that was a one mic recording, it says somewhere on the cd jacket, wich is somewhere unknown to me.
i really enjoy david mclaughlins mandolin stylings as well.

[Don Stiernberg]

Here now,music lovers! I hope none of my earlier comments really prompted any unecessary emotion...let's leave that in
the music. McGann, you come back! If the coin lands on heads, you will receive, tails, you kick off...

Great to see another of my heroes, Vernon Derrick, listed. That is the stuff! The round hole mandolin, the Jimmy Martin blues licks, the cleanliness, the drive--love it!You can hear that style carried forth by the likes of Doyle and Jimmy Gaudreau..

When Mike Compton and David Long came to my town they shared the stage with David Davis. Great night of mandolin! I think of all of those guys as great "Monroeologists", yet they have individual, identifiable personal sounds, don't they? That's another thing I love about music and mandolin. As Charlie Parker supposedly said.."If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn"

Speaking of Bill Monroe, he reflected his own times somewhat too--the triple fiddles supposedly a tip of the cap to Bob Wills, and the swingin' accordion was even in there a bit...

Some days Sam Bush's break on Butch Robbins record of Sally Goodin' is all I need, the next day Red Rector singing "Before I Met You" will take me apart...

I think it's all good and we're all on the same team.

Once again, my earlier comments were not meant so much to be provocative as to draw parallels. Best wishes to all and thanks for singing the praises of all the aforementioned great artists.

[sgarrity]

Wow.....why doesn't everybody have a beer and chill out! There is room for all styles of players on this little instrument we all love. This was a discussion of preferences. Nobody was saying anything about, "That ain't bluegrass."

Shaun

john and i have an understanding now.....
he was in a sense standing up for modern players who might be deemed souless!

however, its just a different shade of soul, wich is something we can all agree on id say.

i really like the bird quote from don.

here is one from sam bush "bill monroe is one of the ultimate "feel" players. if he played it, it's because he felt it."

or conversely "fake it till you make it"

[jmcgann]

I lied. I am back to add a few points:

To those who feel:

I think alot of modern players, like the ones that graduate from Berklee even, tend to play more with their heads than their hearts. They might have larger musical vocabularies, but the raw emotional power of the gut player when missing can sound slick.

So who are the players you are thinking of who graduated from Berklee? Without looking below, can you name two (since you said 'players')? Or is this just reverse snobbery?

Oh yeah, I graduated from Berklee, so if you want to call me soulless, go for it, but I'd much prefer you to actually listen to me play first...or better yet, come to one of my gigs and say it to my face

id like to think that there proabably is a good mandolin picker who graduated from there, but they probably didnt go to school for the mando!

Check out Joy Kills Sorrow, with Joe Walsh, the first mandolin principal to graduate Berklee. I think he's a very soulful player. If 'slick' means good tone and technique, sure- but I think most of you use 'slick' in the sense of 'slick salesman'.

Good players put thought into their music- it may not be book-learnin' music theory type thought, but no one gets to be a great player without using their noggins.

No one mentioned Nate Bray, one of my favorite of the old school mando players. That's some great bluegrass right there (Rounder reissued some stuff in the '70's with John Hartford writing the liner notes).

In my world, Adam Steffy is as soulful a player as Monroe or Nate Bray or Doyle or anybody- and if you want slick as in good tone and technique, there you go.

Lastly- you Monroe fans must be aware of the botched job Gibson did on Mr. Monroe's mando that led him to take a penkinfe to the headstock. He played for many years from the mid 50's on on an instrument with tremendously high action. Check out the Monroe Bros. era stuff, then the Flatt and Scruggs era, then the early and later 50's recordings. Other than the recording quality getting better, notice anything about the mandolin playing getting rougher, with less left hand clarity? Could that rough-and-ready sound from 1959 be because the mando is in a rugged state of setup compared to 1945? I wonder how he'd have sounded in that era if the strings weren't a half inch off the fingerboard...

they dont teach soul at school.

Nope, they don't 'teach' it anywhere...and one man's 'soulful' can be another man's 'slick', so it's all just opinion as to who has what!

[mythicfish]

To those of you who a young enough to wait it out ... give it 20-30 years and these will be the good old days.
"And for beans and for bacon I will open up my door ..." (For those of us who aint!)

Curt

[picksnbits]

So why is it that not many of today's pros pick like Doc and Bill? Nothing wrong with what's going on, but it does seem that there's more scale-based pickers than chord based pickers, and more jazz-influenced than blues. Maybe if we talk guitar it won't get so emotional, so let's talk Doc Watson and Tony Rice. Both of them are great pickers and I'd be thrilled to be able to pick like either of them. Seems like more young pros are in the Tony camp than the Doc camp. Why is that?

[travers chandler]

I lied. I am back to add a few points:

To those who feel:

I think alot of modern players, like the ones that graduate from Berklee even, tend to play more with their heads than their hearts. They might have larger musical vocabularies, but the raw emotional power of the gut player when missing can sound slick.

So who are the players you are thinking of who graduated from Berklee? Without looking below, can you name two (since you said 'players')? Or is this just reverse snobbery?

Oh yeah, I graduated from Berklee, so if you want to call me soulless, go for it, but I'd much prefer you to actually listen to me play first...or better yet, come to one of my gigs and say it to my face

id like to think that there proabably is a good mandolin picker who graduated from there, but they probably didnt go to school for the mando!

Check out Joy Kills Sorrow, with Joe Walsh, the first mandolin principal to graduate Berklee. I think he's a very soulful player. If 'slick' means good tone and technique, sure- but I think most of you use 'slick' in the sense of 'slick salesman'.

Good players put thought into their music- it may not be book-learnin' music theory type thought, but no one gets to be a great player without using their noggins.

No one mentioned Nate Bray, one of my favorite of the old school mando players. That's some great bluegrass right there (Rounder reissued some stuff in the '70's with John Hartford writing the liner notes).

In my world, Adam Steffy is as soulful a player as Monroe or Nate Bray or Doyle or anybody- and if you want slick as in good tone and technique, there you go.

Lastly- you Monroe fans must be aware of the botched job Gibson did on Mr. Monroe's mando that led him to take a penkinfe to the headstock. He played for many years from the mid 50's on on an instrument with tremendously high action. Check out the Monroe Bros. era stuff, then the Flatt and Scruggs era, then the early and later 50's recordings. Other than the recording quality getting better, notice anything about the mandolin playing getting rougher, with less left hand clarity? Could that rough-and-ready sound from 1959 be because the mando is in a rugged state of setup compared to 1945? I wonder how he'd have sounded in that era if the strings weren't a half inch off the fingerboard...

they dont teach soul at school.

Nope, they don't 'teach' it anywhere...and one man's 'soulful' can be another man's 'slick', so it's all just opinion as to who has what!

I am sorry Jim but none of the players that i consider great that i know personally have never played with their heads....they play what comes to them.....You don't have time to think you just do.....natural as can be.....


You are mighty confrontational......Did you learn that at Berklee too???

Not saying one should not play with their head...just sayin that's all....

[travers chandler]

I like to try to play jazz and bluegrass, they're not...what's the term?..."mutually exclusive"?

Me too; they aren't; and some people just like what they like to the point of being political about it. Which I think is sad, because those folks are missing out on a world of great music...

There's great jazz and bad jazz; great bluegrass and totally lame bluegrass. Great musicians often make great music, and most of the time they could care less about "purity". That Jerry Douglas fellow is a big Hendrix fan, and it doesn't seem to have polluted his 'grass.

It's often the less developed self-appointed keepers of the flame that like to tell people what they should and shouldn't do in a style of music, and what is and isn't the "real traditional bluegrass" (or 'real jazz' or 'real Irish' or 'real rockabilly' or 'real blues' or #'real Hindustani" or whatever).

I wonder how many of the "Gee, no real bluegrass pickers graduate from Berkley" type "thinkers" have really LISTENED to what's going on in the Monroe/Flatt and Scruggs original bluegrass band- if they hear someone ELSE play like Chubby Wise (heavy Grapelli influence) or Cedric Rainwater (WALKING BASS!!!! THAT'S JAZZZZZZZZ!!! ) they'd be the first to head for the door thinking "that's not traditional!" Maybe because rather than going to the actual roots of the music, they are more geared toward listening to much later generation neo-traditional bands that play in a style that is very conservative and has less to do with the original spirit of Monroe-Scruggs and more with the mannerisms.

Plus, they probably can't do that stuff anyway, so it must be bad

"Fiddle style", "saxophone style"...whatever....those labels don't necessarily
mean that the mandolin playing lacks sweat, garlic, or gonads...

Awful lot of assumption there pal....

[Don Stiernberg]

John,

Thanks for coming back.

I did mention The Bray Brothers, just couldn't remember Nate and Harley without reaching for the album cover. And I do mean album. Important musicians here in Illinois, apparently having a big effect on a fellow named Hartford back in the day..

the trained musician may have to meet the challenge of connecting emotionally to his audience...wait, that's the same challenge the untrained player has. Oh well, carry on, we've almost got this figured out

My friend Pat Cloud is a genius of bebop on the five string. Also drives the hard grass as well as anybody. Interestingly, he keeps the languages seperate--no bluegrass licks on the jazz tunes, no jazz on the grass. Just another way to cope with these dillemae I guess. What a great player.

I hope it's OK I'm gonna stay tuned here...

[Timbofood]

Sounds to me like there is a "never change" thought here. I have been playing for 30 years with the (mostly)same guys; banjo ,guitar and me, only the bass player has changed. With every change the sound changes, maybe this is the very nature of the dynamics of this music. Heaven forbid that it becomes so static that a picker is ostracized because he didn't play the lick from the record! I don't want to think that would ever happen. We are all influenced from outside sources and that is something that will just happen unless you live in a vacuum. The world keeps on turning.

[tiltman]

Wow,
I was away from this thread for a couple of days and it looks like all heck broke loose!

When I referred to David Peterson and 1946 (with Mike Compton on mando) I was referring to the cd "In the mountaintops to Roam".
Big Joe's comment makes it sound like there are other(s)
out there?
I'll have to do some looking.

If you're not careful, you might learn something.
Kirk

[AlanN]

Kick back wif dis. No flash 'n gash, but it's good.



Sauceman Brothers in the 60's