Plays Well with Others
Some new musical finds remind me of how I became more interested in how musicians interact than in the virtuosic displays of shredders
At some point in my late teens, I started seriously listening to music. I knew something had changed when I began paying more attention to what was going on behind the main thing you were supposed to focus on: lead vocal, guitar solo, etc. I think the song that did it was the Band’s “Rag Mama Rag.” Garth Hudson’s funky ragtime-inspired piano is omnipresent behind the vocals and immediately draws your attention, but I also noticed Robbie Robertson’s guitar playing a loose harmony part to the vocal instead of some sort of rhythm part. I started paying more attention, and soon my teenage self—who had barely started playing guitar—was getting blown away by Garth’s organ swirling in the background of nearly every song or what the guitar played behind the lead vocal on “When You Awake” or the interlocking rhythms of the bass, guitar, and drums on the intro to “Up On Cripple Creek.”
At the time (1972–73), the guitar virtuosos—Hendrix, Clapton, Page, Beck, Frampton, Howe, Allman, Santana, etc.– were getting all the acclaim. But I was more interested in, for example, Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines’s recording of “Weather Bird” (which I found in the back of my father’s jazz record collection), and the moments at 1:18 and 2:09 when time seemed to stretch and bend. I soon realized that it wasn’t time that was stretching, but Louis and Earl playing with the time, while the unstated beat remained solid.
One of the first bluegrass records I bought, after a Will the Circle Be Unbroken initiation, was the Kentucky Colonels’ Appalachian Swing. I was later disappointed to learn that the way Clarence and Roland White’s guitar and mandolin played off of each other on songs like “Nine Pound Hammer” and “I Am a Pilgrim” was a rarity in the bluegrass world. But to me, Clarence and Roland were playing with time and dynamics much like Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines did.
Since those days, my musical goal has always been to be part of a band that could approach the sort of interplay I heard on those records. I never thought myself capable of the technical brilliance of the lead guitarists I soon found myself worshiping—Clarence, Charlie Christian, Tony Rice, Doc Watson, Django Reinhardt, Amos Garrett, Jim Hall, etc.—but while I was trying to learn as much as I could from those masters, I was mostly playing in bands led by singers, where shredding was not really appropriate. I’ve always been more interested in the mechanics of a band and how to get individual parts to coalesce than in how many solos I got. And even when playing a solo, I’m more interested in fitting it into the dynamic arc of the song than using it as a “vehicle for self-expression.”
As the technical level of instrumentalists in bluegrass has grown in the last couple of decades, with shredders gaining the high ground, I’ve kind of lost interest in the music. Maybe it’s just that I’ve heard so much bluegrass in the last 40–50 years that nothing surprises me anymore. But recently, Bill Evans turned me onto an astonishing live recording of J.D. Crowe and the New South (the famed “Rounder 044” version) at McCabe’s Guitar Shop on August, 15 1975, and I realized what I’d been missing.
The live recording came straight off the board and J.D. Crowe’s banjo and Tony Rice’s guitar are panned hard left and right, so you can hear exactly what each of them is playing, especially if you’re listening with headphones. This might seem to be an odd sonic choice, but Tony and J.D.’s interplay (along with Jerry Douglas’s dobro and Ricky Skaggs mandolin) is mind-blowing and reminds me of the Band or Appalachian Swing or “Weather Bird” more than any bluegrass I’ve heard in a long time. There are times when Tony and J.D. sound like they’re soloing simultaneously, which is more common in jazz, of course, than bluegrass. These days, bluegrass instrumental students are taught to stay out of the way of the vocals and other instruments, but at this gig, J.D., Tony, and Flux sound like they think this is the craziest idea they’ve ever heard. Of course, some people will be put off by this, but the excitement and immediacy it creates is undeniable.
One of the reasons this is possible (besides the fact that J.D., Tony, Jerry, and Ricky are among the best musicians ever to play their instruments, and this was a band that had honed their sound playing together for weeks during their legendary stint at Lexington, Kentucky’s Red Slipper Lounge) is that they’re basing their solos on the melody or on preconstructed solos instead of on the chord changes or scale patterns. The familiar mandolin and guitar solos to “Old Home Place,” copied by scores of guitarists and mandolinists, are not discarded in favor of hot licks. In the live set, Tony and Ricky often start their solos like the recorded versions, but modify them as they go, creating variations that seem to inspire the rest of the band to react. (See “Tony Rice’s ‘Old Home Place’ Solo,’” below.) It would be difficult for accompanists to react in the same way to a shredder’s dynamically flat string of unending eighth notes.
More Interaction
Fortunately, I’ve heard a few recent recordings that prove that shredders haven’t completely taken over the music scene, and give me hope that group interaction is still valued.
Fred Hersch and Esperanza Spalding’s Alive at the Village Vanguard (recorded in 2018 and released in early 2023) has the same sense of freedom and interplay as those early Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines recordings. I’ve always thought that “free jazz” should mean that you are free to play whatever you hear in the moment, not just music free of prescribed chord progressions or time signatures. If you’re not free to play a diatonic melody or triad when that’s what you feel like playing, how free are you? This live piano/vocal duet recording is as “free” as it gets.
My current favorite progressive string band recordings—Joe K. Walsh’s If Not Now, Who?, Hawktail’s Place of Growth, and Grant Gordy’s Peripheral Visions—all feature some of the acoustic music scene’s most compelling virtuosos, but they also include large helpings of group interplay, usually to the extent that it’s often hard to tell what is composed/arranged and what is improvised.
Here’s a Playlist with most of the music mentioned above:
Tony Rice’s “Old Home Place” Solo
In the music below, you’ll see Tony Rice’s famous solo to “Old Home Place” from Rounder 044 followed by the solo he played at McCabe’s with J.D. Crowe and the New South on August, 15 1975. The live solo starts with the G run he plays at the end of the vocal chorus after which he launches verbatim into the first two bars of his studio solo. When he gets to the C chord Tony starts improvising, but he returns to the bluesy D chord lick from the studio recording, a half measure early this time. The rest of the solo seems a bit random. Getting to that D lick early might have confused him, but I don’t think so. Starting familiar licks in different parts of the measure is a common device for Tony, and notice that he finishes the solo on a G note on the down beat of the dobro solo that follows. In my book, this is how you improvise bluegrass guitar solos. You start with something familiar that alludes to or follows the melody, and then, at some point, maybe two or four bars into the solo, you use a chord change to lead you to a different place, and then you find your way back by the end of the solo, ending with a strong run that puts you in position to get back to your rhythm guitar job.