Brian plays banjo with Big Daddy Love. He's currently based in Richmond, VA but was born and raised in Sparta, NC. He studied for a Music Industries degree at Appalachian State and blogs about music at Lonesome Banjo Chronicles.
Few people can get away with describing their music as an “experience.” But then again, few words come close to actually describing the music of Larry Keel. To see Larry Keel perform is to have just that: a unique, singular experience that cannot be duplicated.
On February 26th, Larry Keel will release his 15th self-produced album, aptly titled Experienced. This album is a portrait of an artist coming full circle into his unique style and voice, but this time embracing it with a deeper sense of comfort and wisdom.
Experienced is a guest-filled album, featuring some of the biggest names in bluegrass and Americana on 5 of its 7 tracks, including Sam Bush, Del McCoury, Jason Carter, Peter Rowan, Keller Williams, Mike Guggino of Steep Canyon Rangers, and Anders Beck of Greensky Bluegrass. But the songwriting and playing from Larry, Jenny Keel (bass), and Will Lee (banjo) are so strong that it never feels like a guest album. The guests each give their respective tracks a sense of color, but even with the blazing fiddle of Bush in the album’s opening instrumental Ripcord, there is never a moment where you forget this is Larry’s music.
Even with the aforementioned star-power featured on Experienced, the album MVP is undoubtedly banjoist Will Lee. Larry and Will played in the cutting edge newgrass band McGraw Gap from 1990-1996, and were winners of the prestigious Telluride band competition in 1995.
Experienced starts out with the aforementioned Lee-penned instrumental, Ripcord, that builds a sonic tension throughout the first half of the song, and then allows each instrument to release a flurry of hard-driving bluegrass runs that take off with drag-racing intensity. Most artists wouldn’t pick an instrumental to open their album, but most artists don’t have the ability to bring so much joy out of their instruments as Larry Keel, Will Lee, and Sam Bush.
The second track, Lil Miss, quickly reminds you who’s in charge, as Larry’s distinctive voice hits you like a California mudslide. This track is vintage Larry Keel as the trio uses harmonies, punchy rhythms, and solos that alternate between laid back and chaotic.
There are two defining tracks for this project. The first is Miles and Miles, which features Larry’s soul-brother Keller Williams. The song was the title track of Larry’s 1997 release, but it takes on deeper meaning today. I mentioned to Keel that the song feels like a younger version of himself wrote a letter to the man he is today. “It does feel like that,” says Larry. “The song is the story of a traveler’s life, and knowing how much Keller Williams and I have traveled in the 20-plus years we have known each other, it seemed only fitting. Full circle, I reckon!”
The second defining song is The Warrior, which is written from the viewpoint of a Native American fighter and perfectly features the haunting, legendary howls of Peter Rowan. The Warrior is a seeker of truth and knowledge, a man that isn’t afraid to walk this world in search for something greater and more meaningful than himself. It is easy to see Larry Keel as this warrior, as he has spent his career following the spirit of his own unique sound.
Fill ‘Em Up Again is fun bluegrass romp by Will Lee that features Del McCoury, Jason Carter, and Mike Guggino that reminds us that this band comes from the world of bluegrass music and can play it as well as anybody out there.
Larry is a unique artist in that he never settled as just being a guitar wizard, as so many young virtuosos do, but instead, he created his musical identity through his own personal vision. Many artists are capable of one or the other, but few accomplish both. Experienced is not just a celebration of this accomplishment but also a retrospective embrace of it. We hear many original and unique voices in this industry, but rarely do we encounter one so incredibly genuine.
In Miles and Miles, Larry sings, “My truthful heart will light the darkened path.”
It would be hard to find anyone singing a line more honest than that.
Texas-born, Seattle-based banjo pioneer Danny Barnes is coming off a good year. Being the sixth person to win the prestigious Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass award—along with its $50,000 —brings the name Danny Barnes up from his dedicated and nearly-cultish underground following into the limelight of today’s top five-string pickers. As the world of banjos continuously features and celebrates players of speed, dexterity, precision, and creativity through complex runs and licks, the voting board, which is drawn from the who’s who of banjo players, voted to recognize a deeper sense of the instrument. “Danny is a real innovator,” says Steve Martin, “and we want to make sure innovation gets honored over the course of the prize. He plays three-finger, and he’s also not afraid to strum like an old banjo. You rarely see that, someone using banjo in all its capacities.”
Coupled with his newest release, Got Myself Together (10 years later), 2016 could be the year Danny Barnes becomes a much more recognizable name throughout the Americana and bluegrass worlds. Barnes decided to re-record his 2005 album Got Myself Together, an interesting choice with album sales at all-time lows and the time and resources it takes to record and release a full project. Industry insiders would probably advise against this move, but it only takes being in the presence of Danny Barnes for a few minutes to realize that he does not care what you or anyone else thinks about his art. Welcome to the world of Danny Barnes
Got Myself Together (10 years later) is a unique musical experience that allows the listener to experience how songs evolve—or better yet, devolve—through years of live performance. “The original context for these songs was as though I had made a movie and everything was all committed to celluloid,” says Barnes. “However, with music you tend to shape things as you play them live. The routine: You write something, you record it, then you go play it for ten years on the road. So, in returning to the music, I had a different perspective. It’s more like a dramatic work in that the company that performs it and the venue it’s performed in necessarily changes the meaning.”
For many artists, the growth of a song through a decade would include layers of harmonies, rhythms, and additional parts. But again, and I can’t stress this enough, Barnes defies almost everything we believe to be true about creating art to make a living. This collection of songs, which was already bare-bones raw in the 2005 edition, has been distilled down to the stark essence, as if ringing the last drop of juice from a fruit that everyone else believes to be dry. You almost have to look back to the depression era blues artists to find songs so raw, pure, and genuine.
Big Girl Blues, a song accompanied in the 2005 version by a bass string heavy acoustic guitar with swelling telecaster undertones, is now broken down to solo voice and a solo banjo with low guttural harmonics created by using fingers in place of banjo picks—one of the signature tones that make up Barnes’ unique style.
Like his banjo playing, Barnes’ lyrical style is honest and open. This album shows a man yearning for the simplicities of the past trying to reconcile the absurdities of both middle-age and modern-day life in small town USA. In Wasted Mind, Barnes gives witness to the new American realities that are so easily ignored.
“On a first name basis at the Police station
Where you spend a lot of lonely nights
Standin’ in the line up lights
“Ma’am, are you sure that’s him?”
They got books at school
But that ain’t cool
They got paintings at the art museum
You ain’t never gonna see ’em
Because they don’t serve light beer
Wasted mind
Smell like turpentine
You’ll be doin’ time
With no idea why”
Not since John Hartford has someone allowed the banjo to become such a natural expression of their personality. While many players use the banjo to show what they can do, Danny Barnes uses it to show who he is—something so rare that we have to look back decades for comparisons.
Many fans of Barnes will know that his never-ending creative mind has led him into the experimental avant-garde realm, playing what he calls “barnyard electronics.” You will find the slightest taste of that on the bonus track I’m Convicted, a remix from his days with the band Bad Livers. But Got Myself Together (10 years later) is the playful and rebellious old-time-music-lover Danny Barnes that we all know from those first Bad Livers albums.
If you’re a long-time fan of the Bad Livers then you are part of a small group of people that yearn for the comforts of tradition but relish the excitement of original experimentation. Those diametric qualities seem normal in today’s mishmash of musical genres, but in the early ’90s, when the Bad Livers came on the scene, it was artistic rebellion with Danny Barnes leading the way with a banjo in one hand and a freak flag in another. Welcome to the world of Danny Barnes!
Hank Smith, a banjo player from Raleigh, is a busy man. If playing gigs, keeping a steady stream of banjo students, forming a Béla Fleck tribute show, traveling to Wilkes County to study with Jens Kruger, and recently forming a newgrass super-group wasn’t enough, he has just released his first self-published novel, Leaving Auburndale.
Leaving Auburndale is a story about a band that travels to Florida in a converted 1971 Trailways bus for what they expect to be a typical small town bluegrass festival. As you can guess, the festival turns out to be anything but typical.
As the band gets close to the festival they start to sense something is awry, based on the people crossing their path. There is a man walking a tortoise like a dog and a liquor store cashier that has one arm and freely gives out spooky, cryptic advice with the vibe of a one-room-shack country psychic. Musicians who travel for a living quickly learn that experiences like these become, if not normal, at least expected. (Setting the story in Florida was not a random choice.) But that doesn’t mean you let your guard down or ever ignore your “spidey-sense” when things start to get weird. With their “spidey-sense” on high alert, they enter the festival grounds and quickly realize the weekend will not be a normal, boring one.
Their band, evenly split with two girls (guitar, fiddle) and two guys (5-string, stand-up), come from solid bluegrass traditions but are currently interested in forming their own original style through their lead songwriter, Katherine. Each member brings a unique personality that is intimately familiar to anyone that has spent years playing music in a professional or semi-professional capacity. As anyone reading this will probably already know, musicians are not normal people. The mixtures of extreme and sometimes diametric personality traits–from serious to silly, laid back to intense, hard-working to lazy, optimistic to pessimistic, and goal-oriented to immediate gratification-seeking–are all represented within the group.
The band is scheduled for two shows on the main stage for the weekend, and it is here where Smith’s vast performing experience allows the reader to understand the range of thoughts and emotions about going onstage to perform music that you’ve created. As someone who’s performed over most of this country for almost two decades, I can testify that Smith nails it. Much like the countervailing, or in some cases almost schizophrenic, personality traits contained within musicians, there are extreme emotions that come with performing in front of an audience. The experience can be exciting or incredibly boring. It can be self-affirming or soul-crushing. A performer can form a level of cynicism over time that will insulate them from these extremes, and one could even argue that one should insulate themselves for a long-term performing career. Smith not only understands all of this, but he encapsulates it within his characters as they compete for attention with legendary acts of the past, going through the motions, and a band of kids experiencing it for their first time.
As the story progresses, a mystery develops concerning what is inside a secret tent at the outskirts of the festival, where admission is only allowed if you bring the right combination of intoxicants. Smith flirts throughout the book with going into a Tom Robbins-esque surrealism, as if he’s bouncing on the edge of a diving board and threatening to dive into the absurd at any moment. But it is the constant tease of the fictional absurdity that ultimately gives this book its power–a traveling band lives on the edge of a world of absurdities, albeit between massively long bouts of boredom.
The narrator of the story (the banjo player, of course) stays in contact with his girlfriend back home in NC as she’s dealing with moving into a new place with unruly frat boys as neighbors. This part of the story serves as the anchor to the realities of wanting a home life that is stable and consistent. Again, Smith, with clarity and ease, nails these seemingly opposite desires that drive so many musicians and can make or break a full time career in music. Few people travel without having some type of emotional foundation back home that they can count on.
As I was reading, I was constantly surprised by how easily Smith seems to pull off his first attempt at writing a full novel. “Writing the book was something I’ve always wanted to do,” says Smith. “A friend of mine introduced me to NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, an internet challenge of sorts to write a novel of 50K+ words in the span of the month of November. I thought that would be a fun challenge and I had an idea to fictionalize some of the more absurd road experiences I had in bands over the years.” Smith plans to follow up these adventures by taking the group north to Canada.
Leaving Auburndale succeeds on two basic levels: it’s very entertaining and funny, and it allows anyone to peek into the realities of performing music around this great country. As I was reading, I kept thinking about the family and friends to whom I will recommend this book, so they can truly understand what traveling and performing is really like: the drive to make a living producing original art, the frustrations of having crowds with no reaction to your performance, the feelings of loneliness and boredom followed by excitement and wonder that can bookend almost any day. As a first time author, Smith has channeled the Hunter S. Thompson style of gonzo-journalism of distilling so much truth under the veil of fictional absurdities.
Leaving Auburndale can be easily purchased here from Amazon’s self-publishing CreateSpace service.
The national popularity of bluegrass music might ebb and flow with social and artistic trends, but the quality of picking and musical ability has stayed on an impressively upward trajectory throughout the decades. Anyone who keeps up with the music knows that this is especially true in the world of banjos. We see the newest generation exploring the instrument and its various playing styles in unique and creative ways. While Bela Fleck, Bill Keith, and Tony Trischka might have set a high bar for melodic playing, there are just too many combinations of 3 fingers playing 4 note phrases on 5 strings to ever stop exploring and creating. Most of us, I assume, are well aware of the hot players in today’s music scene, but you might not be aware of a rare banjo anomaly who has spent the last 9 years playing jazz throughout Europe, Russia and all parts of the world. I use the word “anomaly” because “amazing” and “talented” just do not properly describe the improvisational skills and musicianship of Ryan Cavanaugh.
For a guy that sight reads John Coltrane solos for fun (more on that later), Ryan came into bluegrass honestly and simply. “One of my earliest memories is hearing the banjo on records and watching my father play,” says Cavanaugh. “From Doc Watson records to Disney children’s songs, I heard banjo from day one of my recorded memory.” From a young age, Ryan’s father not only consistently played the banjo for him, but he also laid down an impressive musical foundation by exposing him to the basics of all western music: orchestral, jazz, and The Beatles. At 10 years old, Ryan found his father’s banjo in the closet and has been hooked ever since. “I was immediately intrigued with the sound and wanted to play like Earl Scruggs.”
Two years later, Cavanaugh heard Bela Fleck and describes it as an “ah-ha!” moment. “I heard Charlie Parker in my father’s record collection, and I immediately made the connection between that and the piano and harmonica in Béla’s music.” (I don’t recommend comparing what you were doing at 12 with Ryan sonically connecting Charlie Parker with Bela Fleck.) “I really liked what Béla’s concept was in this music, I also quickly understood the traditional bebop role that his other instrumentation was bringing to the musical table,” says Ryan.
Ryan then made the next logical leap in those pre-internet days, by tracking down the instructional melodic banjo books by Tony Trischka. Tony’s books opened up the fretboard for countless banjo players through the ’80s and ’90s, but something was still missing from what he was hearing in his head and what he was playing. As he was turning 16, Cavanaugh met someone who would ultimately change his life: Tom Marino, his high school music teacher. Marino, a jazz keyboard player from New Jersey, taught Cavanaugh how to read notation and to understand basic diatonic chord movement. “I had also just started using my 3rd finger in some single string passages [a technique he’s become well known for]. This was another big ‘ah-ha’ moment,” says Ryan, “and the beginning of a long journey into jazz and bluegrass.”
When you see Ryan play, you quickly realize that his single-string technique is unique and freakishly clean in both tone and tempo. In fact, several years ago, Cavanaugh and his good friend, teacher, and fellow banjo/fiddle master, Rex McGee, showed up at a bluegrass jam in Winston-Salem, and we all noticed that Ryan was playing high-speed bluegrass standards in the key of B without a capo. (For the non-banjo players out there, the speed and precision of the banjo sound relies on using open strings while the fingers of your left hand are changing fretted notes. The key of “B” with no capo only has one open string so your left hand has to move 2 or 3 times as fast to achieve the bluegrass sound. This physical feat is practically unheard of outside of Don Reno.)
Cavanaugh has released three albums, all completely unique in identity and style. Songs For The New Frontier would be considered his “bluegrass” album, recorded in 2004-2005 and featuring John Garris on guitar, Darrell Muller on bass, Danny Knicely on mandolin, Billy Cardine on dobro, and Rex McGee on fiddle. This album, a virtuosic project in every measurement, features the expected great picking, but listening to it closely you start to hear Ryan’s unique sense of melody and composition. Darrell Muller, bassist on the album and also for Love Canon (known for their amazing bluegrass renditions of classic ’80s music) remembers the project: “I was privileged enough to be invited to be the bass player for Songs For The New Frontier, and it was an unbelievable experience. Ryan sent me the demo tracks to work on prior to recording, and I knew this would be a life-changing experience. The odd time signatures, blistering fast melodies and solos, and captivating chord changes: this album has it all.”
The quicker songs on the album are all impressive and exciting, but it’s in the slower songs that we notice the depth of his compositions. The Ballad of Edgar Boone, The Guns of El Ridoggo, and Song For The North State all build around a type of sonic patience that can be so rare in today’s music, especially in the bluegrass realm. Ryan’s melodies and phrasing are allowed to just exist within their own time, as if giving the listener a moment to comprehend each note’s relation to the next, and to understand their place within a harmonic context that is both weirdly odd at one moment and soothingly comprehensible the next. There’s always a tense energy in his playing that he could be showing off, but he instead consciously chooses to go where the song and melody leads.
In the early 2000s, there were whispers floating around bluegrass circles of a young player learning Charlie Parker solos on the banjo. Young virtuosos are neither common nor rare in the bluegrass world—one of the unique traits of this music—but this was different. To have both the physical and mental ability to read and play some of the most complex western music of modern times is not common within bluegrass and caught people’s attention. “I learned how to read standard music notation and began applying it to the banjo,” explains Ryan. “Reading music was the easy part. Placing it on the banjo was an entire process very different from the bluegrass language. It took patience and a lot of hard practice. After I learned all of my scales and their modes, I then learned them in every key. That in itself is like learning an alphabet for a language, but then you need words to speak, followed by sentence construction (phrasing). So, it took a while and a ton of experimenting to apply the scales and modes to music I already knew (bluegrass). After the process of finding where all the notes in all the keys were, I began reading easy songs out of a fiddle book. Once I was able to read fiddle tunes easily, I transitioned to reading Charlie Parker solos.”
After spending the latter part of his teenage years immersed in jazz and fusion, Cavanaugh decided it was time to start touring. “I was experimenting with electric banjo at that time,” Ryan says, “and delving into some serious avant-garde music for the banjo. I formed SpaceStation Integration to use as a platform for my compositions and to educate myself in the electric band forum.”
After 5 years with SpaceStation Integration, Ryan released Songs for The New Frontier and thought his career was headed back into the bluegrass world, but things took an interesting turn. “I was recommended to play in saxophonist Bill Evans’ band. I was recommended for the gig by fusion guitarist John McLaughlin and Béla Fleck.” This was a huge decision for Ryan as he realized that Bill Evan’s career was overseas and he would be giving up his focus on bluegrass. One of the determining factors ended up being McLaughlin’s recommendation. “He is my biggest hero, and I was delighted to take the gig and to become friends with my hero.”
“What if Bela’s Drive had the vocals of Chris Thile/Michael Daves?”
You’ve probably never asked yourself that exact question, but I bet you’re imagining it now. Hank Smith, a progressive banjo player from the Raleigh area, has started a project that will seek to make that idea a reality.
Hank Smith’s banjo playing is equal to the best young progressive 5-string pickers on the scene, e.g. Pikelny, Pandolfi, and Thorn, but his career in the last 13 years been largely based in the southeastern jam-band/Americana scene more than the bluegrass circuit. Smith joined one of the top southeastern jam-grass bands, Barefoot Manner, in 2002. “I joined them straight out of graduate school. We toured the country until 2009 as a full-time band, but then people started getting real jobs and such,” says Hank. “But we still like to do fun pick-up gigs and festivals when we can.”
After a few different short-lived projects, Hank decided to tackle the grand poobah of all banjo challenges and lead a Béla Fleck and the Flecktones tribute band, which he called Blu Bop. “It was one of the more insane things I’ve done,” says Hank. “Everyone’s reaction was ‘Well, that’s ambitious!’ but we had some great gigs and raised some eyebrows, and it was also Bela approved!”
Hank, along with six other accomplished musicians, spent a year working up the material, featuring songs such as: Frontiers, UFO TOFU, Sinister Minister, Big Country, and Stomping Grounds. After booking some southeastern shows, Hank was at the 2013 IBMA conference handing out promotional handbills when someone alerted him that Béla and his wife Abigail Washburn were close by in the hotel. “I had never even spoken to Béla before, but a journalist told me I should go over and hand him a handbill. I gave it to him, he looked at it and said, ‘So you’re the guy!’ I had a brief moment of ‘Oh no, this could be bad,’ but he smiled and said ‘I think this is great. Some of the best years of my life were with this band and I think it’s fantastic that someone wants to do this! Best of luck.’”
Béla’s music has always been in Hank’s life since getting his first banjo. “I knew who Béla was before Earl,” he remembers. “I’d been playing his [Flecktones] stuff for a long time, so I knew it on a cursory level, but I’d never played it with anyone else. What changes when you unpack it is how much it works on an ensemble level. When we [banjo players] are playing bluegrass, we are just hammering through it, but this is ensemble music where you play your part; maybe it’s a few bars or maybe a very long passage, but then you step back and let the next person play their part. You’re just part of a greater whole. It’s great to see the inner workings of Bela’s music that I’d never heard before.”
In a true testament to the complexity of the Flecktones music, it took six great players to fully complete the sound of Bela, Victor, and Futureman. Blu-Bop consisted of Larry Q. Draughn on drums, Myron Koch on saxophones, Paul Messinger blowing the harmonicas, Justin Powell on the keyboards, Hank Smith on various banjos, Lindsey Tims on both fiddle and mandolin, and Scott Warren on bass.
“By watching the other musicians learn this music I realized that it’s still extremely banjo-centric,” says Hank. “These other instruments have to play these complicated 16th note runs that we take for granted because we roll. They can’t do that. It can be very difficult for them to play these banjo runs with the speed and precision required.” After seeing a couple of videos of their performances, Bela sent them a note saying, “This is great! You guys have worked so hard on this. I can’t wait to send it to the other [Flecktones] guys!” (Keep up with future Blu-Bop shows at their website and on Facebook.)
At this point, Hank and fiddler Lindsey Tims had played together in several bands, including Morning After and Barefoot Manner, and decided to record a duo album. “We wanted to honor all the music that we’d been listening to and playing through the years—the more progressive side of bluegrass,” says Hank. “We rushed through it,” Hank remembers. “We recorded and mixed it in our living room in five days so it would be out for IBMA.” The album, Impulse, is an instrumental powerhouse that revolves around banjo and fiddle interplay and can, in my opinion, stand toe-to-toe with any instrumental progressive bluegrass album out there. (You can find it on iTunes and Spotify.)
Impulse fell short of the IBMA instrumental album of the year nomination, but it was still one of the most successful projects Hank had done by this point. When Lindsey decided to take a break from the musician lifestyle, Hank started working on a band that would continue the progressive instrumental side of the album but would also feature strong vocals. Hank knew many great musicians that would work for the project, but replacing Lindsey on fiddle was the part he had to get right. Luckily, he had a lot of experience playing with fiddler Pattie Hopkins-Kinlaw in two other bands, Kicking Grass and The Morning After. Pattie, a classical violinist, started playing when she was 4, and her passion for the instrument took her to Asheville in her young adult years to embed herself in the heart of bluegrass. Her desire to trace the instrument back even farther led her to a backpacking trip through Ireland in search of teachers and jam sessions. “It is always eye-opening to be immersed in a culture that is not your own,” says Pattie. “Understanding the roots of our music was a real learning experience for me. As a fiddler, acquiring the skills that enable me to learn specific bowings, articulations, and melodies to produce a pure Irish sound on the fiddle was compelling. This particular journey changed my perception of the music from the stage and my own personal point of view. It made me contemplate my role as a young artist and educator at that time. I wanted to implement that feeling into my own world, both in performing and teaching.”
Both Hank and Pattie are IBMA Leadership graduates who consistently immerse themselves in both learning and teaching. “I am very passionate about education,” Pattie says. “I believe that as Americans we should learn our indigenous music. I started a violin studio in which my students learn classical and American styles, and like me, they sit in symphonies, read music and chord charts, and can jam on the 12-bar blues. I feel education walks hand-in-hand with my artistry and one without the other would not make me as passionate about my art.”
Bassist Scott Warren, who also holds down Victor Wooten’s lines in Blu-Bop, will be laying the foundation for this project as well. “Scott will add add a whole new element to the bluegrass side of us,” Hank says. “Most bassists can’t play lines and solos like he does.” And to bring back the Drive album with Thile/Daves vocals teaser, we have Ben Parker and Robert Thornhill on mandolin and guitar. They’ve performed as The Reckless Brothers duo since 2011 and sing with the comfortable ease that is the foundation of all the great duos in country music.
A common trait of bands who could be described as having an “all-star lineup” is the varied degrees of musical experience each person brings to the group. “All of the members are seasoned and serious about the music,” Pattie explained. “We all come from different backgrounds but seem to have a common link that has connected us from the beginning. Each individual brings his or her piece of the puzzle to the table, and this ensemble forms its own unique sound.”
One might think coming off the Flecktones tribute project and starting an all-star band might be enough for someone to tackle, but ever the life-long student of the 5-string, Hank has also become an understudy with Jens Kruger. “One of the world’s premier banjo players has taken an interest in what I’m doing,” says Hank, who is still surprised at his fortune. Jens Kruger, easily one of the greatest all-around banjo players to pick up the instrument, is creating some of the most beautiful instrumental music in the world right now, both in symphonic and progressive bluegrass areas. (Check out The Kruger Brothers album Suite- Volume 1.)
Hank describes his time with Jens as “profound” and “life-changing,” and from the sounds of it, quite Yoda-ish. “Jens has taught me to approach the music from outside yourself,” says Hank. “He tells me things like ‘Most people write from the heart or from an intellectual level, but it’s only as good as you’re willing to tolerate. You want people to discover new things about themselves that they didn’t know before. We paint with sounds. You start with a blank canvas and add a color and then another. So you start with a bare bones thing and build it up until you have a beautiful melody. We tweak [our shows] each time a little bit. We try to find the moment where we lose the audience and then we go back and try to fix that part where we thought we lost them. It’s really just melodic content and emotional delivery and inspiration outside of your own mind.’”
The Hank Smith and Patty Hopkins-Kinlaw Band hopes to record a full-length album in January of 2016. “Pattie will write half of it, and I will write half of it,” says Hank. “It will be an evolution of the Impulse album, but with vocals. It will be a one stop shop for all of the musical influences we’ve ever had.”
The Hank Smith and Pattie Hopkins-Kinlaw Band will be performing throughout the IBMA conference at the following dates:
Tuesday, Sept. 29 – 2:30 p.m. Duo showcase at Raleigh Convention Center, Room 304
Tuesday, Sept. 29 – 7:00 p.m. Full band showcase at The Vintage Church
Tuesday, Sept. 29 – 9:00 p.m. Full band showcase at The Convention Center, Room 304
Wednesday, Sept. 30 – 9:00 p.m. Full band showcase at The Pour House Music Hall
Wednesday, Sept 30 – 1:00 a.m. Full Band showcase at The Vintage Church (MerleFest)
Friday, Oct. 2 – 12:00 a.m. Full band showcase at King’s Barcade (After Hours Showcase, without Lindsey Tims)
Other performances by Hank Smith this week:
Friday, Oct. 2 – 6:30 p.m. Homegrown Music Network 20th Anniversary Festival with Barefoot Manner
Saturday, Oct. 3 – 1:30 p.m. Morning After Music at Street Fest on The Hargett Street Stage
Saturday, Oct. 3rd – 5:00 p.m. Acoustic Manner at The Shake It Off Benefit Show, Lincoln Theatre
On September 18th, they debuted the band at the Lincoln Theater in Raleigh, NC. A set of videos from the show has been released, showing off their progressive instrument chops with the Hank Smith-penned tunes:
Pattie’s soulful voice takes center stage with the great JJ Grey tune, Palestine.
Ben Parker and Robert Thornhill singing the Danny Barnes classic, Get It While You Can.
In all my years of playing bluegrass music, the Outer Banks of North Carolina have always held a special place in my heart. My band, Boss Hawg from Boone, NC, would travel all over the southeast, but the biggest highlight of the year was the week we’d spend on Ocracoke Island, playing in restaurants and bars all over the small, tight-knit village. Through the years, we discovered a small community that was passionate about live music and loved the driving energy that bluegrass pickers brought to the island.
I’ve often wondered what makes Ocracoke and the rest of the islands so special for this music that comes from, and thrives in, the Appalachian mountains. This summer I had the opportunity to write a feature article about the history and present day status of bluegrass music for The Mile Post Magazine, one of the Outer Banks’ top local publications. Through this process, I talked with people such as Larry Keel, who helped usher in the most recent bluegrass revival with his band McGraw Gap in the mid-’90s, “We would do shows at the Jolly Roger restaurant in Ocracoke,” says Keel. “Everyone on the island would come out — and I mean everyone. Most of the people didn’t really know what bluegrass was but they loved the feeling of it.”
The “locals,” as the people who are born there like to call themselves, have more in common with the small, rural appalachian mountain communities than they realize. A rich history of Irish immigrants and their fiddles, horse and mule logging operations, self-sufficient and rebellious temperaments, and even a brand of famous moonshine during the prohibition era out of the long-gone Buffalo City community paint a rich picture that mountain people will easily recognize as their own.
Today, the Outer Banks current passion for bluegrass was in part ushered in by an eastern Tennessee transplant, Mark Criminger. He had heard stories about these magical islands from a fellow forest ranger while fighting wildfires in Idaho and promptly moved there. “The family that owned Silver Lake Lodge had a music background from booking acts in New Jersey — people like Stevie Ray Vaughn,” Mark remembers. “So they were all about live music. I got a tape from a band called McGraw Gap. They had just won the Telluride bluegrass competition. So we started a little back door scene for acoustic and bluegrass music, and it just blossomed.”
McGraw Gap consisted of champion bluegrass guitar player Larry Keel, along with his wife Jenny on bass, Will Lee on banjo, and Danny Knicely on mandolin. (Larry, Jenny, and Will are still performing together today as The Larry Keel Experience.)
“After a couple of times we started renting a house and there’d be a bunch of us musicians,” says Keel. “We would play a show and then have a picking party back at the house. We made friends with everybody as we were playing parties and gigs. I think when we brought bluegrass out there it appealed to everyone in a wild way, and we kept going back.”
As bluegrass popularity ebbs and flows through much of the nation, it has remained strong on these barrier islands thanks to promoters such as Cory Hemilright and Wes Lassiter.
Cory is the founder of The Outer Banks Bluegrass Festival, taking place September 23-26 of this year. Debuting only 4 years ago, this festival has seen the attendance quadruple from 3,000 to 12,000 in the first three years. And with this year’s Cherryholmes reunion show, the numbers should keep going up. “I think what attracts people is it’s a very unique location,” says Hemilright. “People want to go somewhere that has beaches, bluegrass, fishing…the whole package. That’s why we’re doing so well. We are even getting fans from overseas.”
The festival will also feature the following national acts: Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver, Rhonda Vincent and the Rage, Sam Bush, Laurie Morgan and Pam Tillis, The Steep Canyon Rangers, Dailey and Vincent, The Lonesome River Band and a massive fireworks show to end the final night.
On a more local and regional level, Wes Lassiter brings bluegrass to his Red Drum Pottery Theater, located in Frisco, NC, every Wednesday night. “It’s really great to see a packed house where everyone is standing up and moving,”says Wes. “ The music is hot. The air conditioner can’t even keep up. I live for those nights.”
Bluegrass music has always had natural ebbs and flows of popularity throughout the country, but throughout North Carolina it remains a consistent, beautiful force, whether you’re on top of a mountain or enjoying a daiquiri on the deck of the Jolly Roger on Ocracoke Island.
Steve Lewis, from Todd, NC (a tiny community just north of Boone) was gracious enough to talk with me about his experience playing and winning some of the toughest banjo and guitar contests in the country.
In the interest of full disclosure, I first met Steve 20 years ago as my banjo teacher. Without exaggeration, I think he’s one of the greatest human beings I’ve ever met in my life. His out-of-this-world playing ability is matched only by his humble, gentle nature and his generosity as a teacher of bluegrass to kids throughout the Blue Ridge Mountains. Any kid within 100 miles who has the ability to become a great picker eventually seeks Steve out for instruction. He’s taught kids who eventually became national champions, such as Eric Harden from West Jefferson, NC, and he is currently teaching kids who will probably become national champions themselves someday.
But Steve doesn’t fit into the traditional contest picker mold of someone who can just play 5 songs perfectly. He has a deep understanding of bluegrass and possesses an encyclopedic knowledge that allows him to play and teach any song written. He’s just as comfortable on stage or in a recording studio as he is in the contest chair. As a new player diving head first into bluegrass, Steve taught me to listen to the small nuances of how the instruments work together. I tell people, “I loved to listen to bluegrass, but Steve Lewis taught me how to hear it.”
Brian Swenk: How many contests have you won?
Steve Lewis: I have no idea! I’ve won MerleFest a couple times on banjo and guitar. RenoFest twice, with banjo and guitar. New England banjo championships once, and the Wayne Henderson guitar contest twice. I’ve won Winfield [Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, KS] a couple times on banjo, but never on guitar. I’ve placed in the top 5 like 9 times, but I’ve never been able to get over that hump. A couple of times a judge told me I missed it by one point
BS: How did you get into playing contests?
SL: I got into them late actually, not until I was well into my thirties. We were signed with Rebel Records when I was younger, and they didn’t exactly say, “Don’t do contests.” but I got the feeling that they preferred that we didn’t, because it wouldn’t necessarily help anything if I did win, but if I didn’t, it could be detrimental in some way.
BS: Really? I didn’t realize a record company would be concerned about that.
SL: A lot of record labels were back then. If you enter and win you have people who say “Well, he’s a professional, he shouldn’t enter these contests.” And then if you don’t win they’ll say “Well, he’s a professional, why didn’t he win?” So I kind of waited until that deal expired.
People ask me, “Well, how do you win contests?” and I say “Well, you play every single one of them!” You just saturate yourself with as many of them as you can, and I figure if you throw enough stuff against the wall, something will eventually stick. The more you play, the more comfortable you get. The nerves are always a factor though. This year at Wayne’s (Henderson) festival I was up against at least 7 national champions.
BS: I’ve heard that’s one of the toughest guitar contests in the nation.
SL: That one and RenoFest are probably the toughest I’ve ever been to. At that level you can’t discount the human factor in the judging. There might be something that might not impress you at all, but it’ll impress me, or vice versa. So there again, you just have to play every one of them. Along with the big contests, I like to just go to a local fiddlers convention, where it’s not a high pressure situation. It’s just you sitting on the stage with a microphone and an audience. That helps a little too. But it takes a while to find the right tunes to play. You want enough tunes where you can walk onstage and not play the tune the guy in front of you just played. You don’t want to leave any kind of benchmark to be compared. You might think your version is better than theirs, but you still don’t want to leave anything out there to be compared to immediately.
BS: Do you find yourself switching tunes a lot, last minute?
SL: Not a lot, but I did at Wayne’s contest, because what I had in mind to play I heard another person was going to play it.
BS: What song were you going to play?
SL: Well I was going to play Alabama Jubilee, but i switched to Bill Cheatum because I overheard one of the other guys talking about that’s what he was going to do. We’re all buddies, so I didn’t mind switching. I’m pretty much winging it for the most part anyway. I’m not one of those contest pickers that can sit around and play the same 5 tunes over and over. I just don’t have that type of attention span. Those are the guys that win every time they sit down in the chair. I have an idea of an arrangement but it’ll change every time.
BS: You probably have a lot more stage experience than some of the people who play a lot of contests. Do you find that a lot of the champions have as much stage experience?
SL: These days it seems like contestants do have a lot more stage experience, and most of them work in some sort of band. You’ve got people like Andy Hatfield, Adam Wright, Allen Shadd (apparently having a name that begins with an A helps!) that have these super intricate versions, and they’re always good. The prize instruments are so nice now—and everyone wants a Henderson guitar; so you have a lot more stage players competing in big contests these days.
BS: What’s the difference between the banjo and guitar championships?
SL: The banjo players tend to wander off the path [of the melody] more than the guitar players, it seems like to me. Most of the guitar players take the melody and put a few crooked parts in there to make it interesting, but you still know what the song is. I’ve found the biggest factor is that you have to be true to the melody, for the most part, because you’ll lose people’s attention if they can’t follow the song.
I was judging a contest once and we got to an impasse with three of them. All 3 were very different and none of them had any flaws. Todd Hallawell, a great guitar picker, said, “Well, this is what I always do here. Would I have taken 4 hours of my Friday night and go see this person? Was it worth my time and money to watch this person?” And I thought, “That’s a great way to look at it!”
BS: How many contests have you judged?
SL: Oh, I have no idea. Traditionally, when you win one they want you to come back and judge it next year. I’ve probably judged Wayne’s 7 or 8 times. MerleFest banjo contest 3 or 4 times. RenoFest guitar and banjo, a couple of times. But with judging, it comes down to who’s having the best day that day. Who’s bringing it. It’s all about musicianship
BS: Do songs need to be complicated?
SL: No, songs need to be big, in your face, and moving pretty well. It has to have direction. A lot of people think you have to put so many hot licks in there to get people’s attention, but then you’ll hear somebody that will play half the notes and four times the music.
“Half the notes and four times the music” is a phrase I’ve heard Steve say many times, and it gives you a good glimpse of the depth of his musicality. I was at Merlefest this past weekend listening to [Charlie] Cushman play banjo with the Earls of Leicester, and his banjo is just so big and clean–it sounds like 1950 all over again. He was playing far fewer notes than a lot of the other banjo players there, but he just stood out.
BS: Tell me about the arrangements of your contest songs.
SL: Well, Alabama Jubilee is a right hand buster. It’s going along at a pretty good clip, and I have a boatload of crosspickin’ going on with bass strings, which is pretty physically demanding. It’ll vary a little every time if I have something different going on in my mind that day. I have some crosspicking going on in Bill Cheatum too. And I only have a couple of semi-arranged passes for that one, and the rest is just off the cuff. My philosophy is that if you have an arrangement chiseled in stone and you crash, where are you going to land? If I’m flying by the seat of my pants anyway, a little crook in the road isn’t a big deal.
BS: What are your best contest songs?
SL: For guitar I usually start with Angeline the Baker. It’s just a big song with the drop D tuning. I’m always looking for another big song like that, but I haven’t found one yet. I’ll do Alabama Jubilee and sometimes Bill Cheatum. I’ll also do St. Anne’s Reel and play the melody verbatim. I won’t wander off one iota. It just moves so well, and I’ll try to play it as big, clean, and fluid as I can. Most of the contests you have to play 3 songs.
BS: What about banjo?
SL: Rick Allred, who used to play with The Country Gentlemen, wrote a banjo tune called South Elm St. I took it and added a few more passes to it and it’s been really good for me. I have a twisted version of Clinch Mountain Backstep. The last time I won Winfield, I started off with Home Sweet Home straight out of the Earl Scruggs’ songbook. I never wandered off Earl’s version — I tried to play it as faithful as I could. Again, a good contest song has to move well, but it doesn’t have to be flying. I also have a few original tunes I can pull out, as well, if it seems like everyone is playing the same songs. I’ve used Little Rock Getaway several times too, and I’ll do a chord modulation with it to make it a little different.
BS: When you walk offstage after a contest do you ever have a good sense of the outcome? Of how you will place?
SL: No, never. It’s always a big mystery to me. I’ve placed far better when I felt like I didn’t play very well. Historically, I usually place much better when I feel like I didn’t play very well. We’re all our worst critics.
BS: Are there any mental tricks that you do before you go onstage or while you’re onstage?
SL: I wish I had some! I do sit around before and play if I can. The biggest thing I like to do is to just not take it too seriously. Ultimately you want to have fun with it. If you don’t have fun and you don’t win, then you don’t have anything! I teach a kid, Presley Barker from Traphill, NC, who has ice in his veins. He’s 10 years old. He just placed 2nd at RenoFest this year and beat 3 national champions. He just looks around like “Gee, I wonder what those people are doing up there? What’s he eating over there? I’m hungry.” He just looks around and smiles and finds something else to look at. He has no fear whatsoever. But he works at it—he spends about 6 hours practicing everyday.
BS: Any last advice?
SL: If you try to play what you think people want to hear, it may not be what you enjoy playing as much and you’re not going to play it as well. You don’t need to play what you think the judges want to hear. With song selection, I think the biggest factor is make it something you can hammer, something clean with big tone that has direction.
Traveling Show is the third album from the aptly-named Songs From The Road Band, which is a side project led by Charles Humphrey III, the bassist for Steep Canyon Rangers. This project is a testament to one of the unique traits that makes bluegrass so special —old friends getting together and making albums that can compete musically with the top talent of the industry. Bluegrass is special in this way —the shared body of knowledge, combined with ever-evolving playing abilities, allows projects such as this one to consistently appear.
Songs From the Road Band is more than just an all-star cast: it is a group of close friends who met very early in their bluegrass journeys and have stayed close for almost two decades. Much like your childhood friends, with whom you experienced almost every level of growth, these guys have seen each other develop into today’s top festival pickers. The core group includes Andy Thorn, banjoist with Leftover Salmon; Mark Schimick, mandolinist with The Josh Daniels and Mark Schimick project and a former Larry Keel and Natural Bridge member; Bobby Britt, fiddler with Town Mountain; and Jon Stickley, guitarist with The Jon Stickley Trio. Andrew Marlin of Mandolin Orange, along with Phil Barker, also of Town Mountain, and Sam Wharton round out the group for this project.
Most of the members live in or around Asheville, NC when they aren’t maintaining very busy schedules with their respective full-time bands. You can hear the regional influences of the NC mountains in the cumulative sound of the band, which is a nice alternative to the over-produced “Nashville-slick” sound that we hear so much. Humphreys has a talent for allowing the individual voices and personalities to define their sound as they take turns singing lead.
The title track, Traveling Show, written by Humphrey and Jonathan Byrd, is a mid-career reflection of a life in bluegrass, as it recalls the excitement of their first tours and a sense of gratitude for their current life in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It also speaks to the love of a life on the road and how that sense of adventure has not waned, but only grown with the continuous criss-crossing of the American landscape. While the song was written primarily with the Steep Canyon Rangers’ experience in mind, you can imagine the song touching each member of this group personally, as they’ve all seen substantial growth in their musical careers.
Just Let Go is a track that displays a sense of the musical interplay these guys are capable of, as it starts and ends with a banjo and fiddle exchange of cascading arpeggios. When I got to the instrumental track Kitsuma, I started wondering what would happen if this band were able to spend more time together, record more, play a few years of live shows, and explore the world their creative abilities would lead them to. I would argue that they would quickly challenge Greensky Bluegrass for the band leading the jamgrass world in live-show creative exploration. Not a bad “fall-back point” if all of their respective groups inexplicably disbanded at the same time.
There is a fun, banjo driven, barn-burner hidden jewel near the end of the album titled Sing To That Mule. Mark Schimick’s voice works perfectly as he takes us back to pre-tractor days when music was interwoven into the lives of Blue Ridge farming communities.
You’ve gotta sing to that mule
If you want to make him move
Sing good and loud, make a joyful sound
If you want that mule to pull that plow
—Sing To That Mule
Traveling Show won’t have the tour support, the release shows, or the national publicity that typically accompany albums of this stature, which is too bad because this album has personality and a sense of joy that is not present in a lot of what we hear today. If at first the album seems a little disjointed because of the multiple lead singers, I suggest giving it a few listens for those individual voices to start defining what the project is about—collective creativity. Along with the great songwriting, you’ll hear bursts of instrumental brilliance. It’s clear these guys listen and react to each other, as the album was recorded live and mostly with one take. There’s a special energy with this group of friends, and decades of traveling road shows have given them the experience needed to pull off an album that puts the song–the “joyful sound”— first and foremost.
Bluegrass has lost the regional sonic-fingerprints that could identify what state a banjo picker was from just by hearing him or her play, but I think Traveling Show serves as a perfect snapshot of Western NC bluegrass today. The members of Songs From The Road Band travel the world playing their own style, some more traditional than others, but when they get together, they play it right and they play it tight. I have a feeling we’ll be seeing more albums from this group, and I’m hoping we don’t have to wait another five years.
I look back now
and I can’t believe
how far we’ve come
or how far we’ve got to go.
— Traveling Show
Traveling Show is released today, April 21, 2015.
For more information, visit Songs From The Road Band online.
With this profile of Frank Solivan we welcome Brian Paul Swenk to our roster of writers here at Bluegrass Today. Brian is a banjo player and bluegrass nut in Richmond, VA who performs with Big Daddy Love, a multi-genre touring group based in Winston-Salem, NC.
Bluegrass music, like many art forms, experiences waves of both popularity and innovation, but those waves are not necessarily in sync with each other. In recent times, we’ve seen the O Brother Where Art Thou wave of popularity bring the music into new places, as millions of Americans heard Dan Tyminski’s voice through George Clooney’s face—an almost sure-fire way to bring an underground art to the mainstream, even for a brief moment. As the years moved on, and the hipness of bluegrass faded back to the core fans and pickers, we hit a spot where a little soul-searching overtook both the players and fans. We had to ask ourselves, what is the future of our music? These discussions have been both positive and vibrant, but while they were taking place, there have been a handful of bands working their way up that, I think, will show us the future of bluegrass.
One of these bands is Frank Solivan & Dirty Kitchen. A couple months ago I started listening to their three studio releases: Frank Solivan & Dirty Kitchen (2010), On the Edge (2013), and their newest release, Cold Spell (2014). These albums do not always conform to the typical traditional bluegrass sound, yet the musicianship and traditional knowledge have sprouted a very progressive sound that is being accepted in the traditional bluegrass community. This is a feat that is only impressive if you understand the insular nature of the bluegrass industry, where tradition still rules and Nickel Creek keeps getting pushed into the “Americana” category.
I caught up with Frank as he was touring with the Jerry Douglas-led band, The Earls of Leicester (pronounced “Lester”), a Grammy-winning tribute to the heyday of “Lester” Flatt And “Earl” Scruggs. Frank has just joined up with them to take the place of Tim O’Brien, who has Hot Rize commitments. The slight irony of interviewing someone on the forefront of progressiveness while touring with a traditional throwback band was amusing to both of us. But that’s what makes bluegrass so beautiful: no matter how far you go, you’re only one degree away from the masters who started it.
“It’s been a Flatt and Scruggs bootcamp lately!” Frank jokes. “We’ve spent a lot of time listening, and also talking about, what their music was about and getting into the little details of Lester and Earl. We’re recreating something for people to hear the blueprint of bluegrass music, the initial architecture, before it progressed into another form that we hear on the radio now.”
Frank & Dirty Kitchen are just coming off a Grammy nomination for their most recent release, Cold Spell. His band features Mike Munford on banjo, Chris Luquette on guitar, and a lifelong friend, Danny Booth, on bass. One of the first things you notice about the album is they don’t stick to the typical boom-chunk, boom-chunk timing that is synonymous with bluegrass. The first track of the album Say It Isn’t So, written by Frank’s cousin Megan McCormick, makes the statement that this band is not afraid to try new things.
Frank doesn’t consciously arrange his songs to push any boundaries within the music. “Everyone comes together and does something that is unique to them, and we’ll play as a unit. We’re always working on dynamics and the feel of the song.”
Dirty Kitchen seems to be that rare occurrence of experienced, master musicians who can put all ego aside and work as a single, creative unit. “Nobody tries to be in front of anyone else,” Frank explains. Everyone has a chance to shine in our show and on our records, but when the song is being played, everyone is playing soft.”
A lot of bluegrass is written with the bluegrass sound and rhythms in mind, but for Frank it depends on what kind of mood he’s in. “I hear all kinds of stuff, I hear a lot of blends too. Our common denominator is bluegrass, but I’ve spent a lot of time playing country music, and I’ve listened to a lot of funk and Beatles. Lately I’ve been listening to Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder.”
Frank grew up in California in a very musical family. His grandmother on his father’s side played both mandolin and fiddle and participated in acrobatic vaudeville shows with her sisters. His mother’s side had classical violin and cello players throughout the family. The bluegrass bug bit him early, as he got a Bill Monroe cassette tape and then started collecting Monroe 8-tracks as well. “We wore out some Bill Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs, and Elvis 8-tracks,” he remembers. At 9 years old he heard New Grass Revival for the first time, “…and they just blew my mind! I’d seen those instruments played before, but they melted my face off! I saw them doing what they wanted to do and not being constricted by what people thought.”
Frank started going to the west coast bluegrass festivals at that point, and another band that really made a big impression on him was the Johnson Mountain Boys with Dudley Connell, Tom Adams, David McLaughlin, Marshall Wilborn, and the great Eddie Stubbs on fiddle. “They were contemporary in that they were using what they learned in traditional bluegrass, but then brought it to the next level with cleaner harmonies and more structure. I was thinking ‘I want to be able to do that!’ and make my music as good and creative as it can be.”
A couple years ago, the previously mentioned “soul-searching” was kickstarted by Chris Pandolfi, the banjo player for the Infamous Stringdusters (one of the other bands who are key to the future of bluegrass). Pandolfi wrote a bluegrass manifesto of sorts, calling on the bluegrass community, and specifically the IBMA (International Bluegrass Music Association), to become more open to both younger players and bands who don’t hold to the strict tradition of the music, such as Yonder Mountain String Band, Avett Bros, and Mumford and Sons – bands who have elements of bluegrass in their music, but have reached out to much wider audiences. In typical political fashion, there was a division between the strict traditionalists and the progressives. It’s no surprise where Frank falls in the debate. “I think it’s common sense when it comes to accepting different types of music. We do have the so-called bluegrass industry. IBMA wants to further bluegrass music and they’re doing a fairly good job lately, especially with the conventions in Raleigh. It seems the umbrella of bluegrass has gotten bigger, but there will always be people who say ‘Well, that ain’t bluegrass!’ But you know what? It is music!”
Frank recalls Chris Thile talking about how genres aren’t as clear cut anymore. Thile’s description of how the clear-cut walls of genres are starting to blur, as classical musicians are starting to play with folk musicians, and jazz musicians are starting to play with bluegrass musicians, and it made a big impression on him. “I’d like to see more people trying that stuff. Traditional bluegrass isn’t going anywhere. When we get into jam sessions we’re going to pull out all the traditional stuff because that’s common knowledge, and it’s not going anywhere. The people that played in the ’50s and ’60s; they were pushing the boundaries of music, too. They were doing something different and it caused a stir, and people loved it. So if the music doesn’t progress we won’t have an industry or younger generations that listen and find their way back to those roots.”
One aspect of being a leader in your field is that the amount of work it takes can almost insulate you from what’s going on in the industry around you. “We’re working so hard to get down the road and keep everything moving forward that it’s kind of insular, so I don’t see it from the outside. We’ve gotten some of the accolades, which is totally awesome and incredible, but it’s hard to see it how the fans see it. It takes a lot of energy to run a business and keep everyone paid.”
In 2013, Mike Munford was voted “Banjo Player of the Year” and guitarist Chris Luquette received the “Momentum Award” for Performance Instrumentalist. At the 2014 IBMA awards, the band received 4 nominations: Frank Solivan for Male Vocalist of the Year and Mandolin Player of the Year, Mike Munford for Banjo Player of the Year, and the entire band won Instrumental Group of the Year. Their 2014 release, Cold Spell, was nominated for a Grammy in the Bluegrass Album category. All of this is a testament to the band becoming leaders in the industry, as well as the industry accepting different song structures that are not strictly traditional.
Frank Solivan & Dirty Kitchen are what bluegrass music needs these days. They are master musicians who fully understand the history and tradition but aren’t afraid to explore new sounds and concepts. We’ve always had people who fit that description, either outliers or people like Béla Fleck and John Hartford that by sheer force created their own styles. But we haven’t necessarily had a cohesive, single unit that had the force to shift the entire bluegrass spectrum, with ease and grace, in a long time. I think we’ve entered into a paradigm shift with Frank and Dirty Kitchen and some of their peers, such as Infamous Stringdusters, Balsam Range and Steep Canyon Rangers. With excellent songwriting and musicianship, we’ll see the rules and expectations loosen and the audiences and fan bases grow.
M80 – A banjo-driven instrumental
While the recording industry retracts each year with fewer album sales, connecting with your fan base becomes even more important. For this, Frank has a few tricks up his sleeve. He is known as a great chef and has spent years combining his music and food talents. “I want to bring people together and have an intimate experience. Connecting with your fans in any way you can is important. I just want to be a good human and have that come across the most. People get to a certain point and just assume you’re stuck up or unapproachable, and I don’t want any of that. I just want to connect with people on a level that is natural and human.”
