The Sound Is Rural, the Setting Urban
By NATE CHINEN
New York Times
“HOWDY, folks,” Chris Thile said one recent Tuesday night, as he twisted a peg on his mandolin. His audience, packed into the cozy Rockwood Music Hall on the Lower East Side, seemed to appreciate the salutation. Somebody voiced a request: “Over the Waterfall,” a bluegrass standard. “Second tune I ever learned,” he shot back, “after ‘Woody’s Rag.’ ”
Mr. Thile, of Nickel Creek fame, was sitting in with his friend Michael Daves, a guitarist and fellow virtuoso who can be found at the Rockwood every week. At that same moment a less dazzling four-piece bluegrass band was playing just across the street, at a new bar called the National Underground. A few blocks away the guitarist and singer Tony Scherr was playing his gritty country-rock songs to a full house at the Living Room. And further uptown there was a gig by Citigrass, a band whose name is meant to suggest not a financial institution but a hybrid musical ideal.
It was a roots music night in New York, with all the seeming incongruities such a phrase might suggest. Though more commonly associated with indie-rock upstarts, jazz improvisers and hip-hop survivors, New York has lately become remarkably hospitable to musicians upholding more rustic ideals.
Of course there’s precedent for this sort of thing, stretching back at least as far as the Greenwich Village folk revival of some 50 years ago. There have been setbacks, like the closing of the Bottom Line in 2004. But there has also been help from a couple of fairly recent surprise hits in the pop mainstream: the Appalachian-steeped soundtrack to “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and “Come Away With Me,” Norah Jones’s folk-pop debut. Both albums were game-changers, creating new opportunities and fan bases for bluegrass pickers and singer-songwriters.
(Continued here.)
New York Times
“HOWDY, folks,” Chris Thile said one recent Tuesday night, as he twisted a peg on his mandolin. His audience, packed into the cozy Rockwood Music Hall on the Lower East Side, seemed to appreciate the salutation. Somebody voiced a request: “Over the Waterfall,” a bluegrass standard. “Second tune I ever learned,” he shot back, “after ‘Woody’s Rag.’ ”
Mr. Thile, of Nickel Creek fame, was sitting in with his friend Michael Daves, a guitarist and fellow virtuoso who can be found at the Rockwood every week. At that same moment a less dazzling four-piece bluegrass band was playing just across the street, at a new bar called the National Underground. A few blocks away the guitarist and singer Tony Scherr was playing his gritty country-rock songs to a full house at the Living Room. And further uptown there was a gig by Citigrass, a band whose name is meant to suggest not a financial institution but a hybrid musical ideal.
It was a roots music night in New York, with all the seeming incongruities such a phrase might suggest. Though more commonly associated with indie-rock upstarts, jazz improvisers and hip-hop survivors, New York has lately become remarkably hospitable to musicians upholding more rustic ideals.
Of course there’s precedent for this sort of thing, stretching back at least as far as the Greenwich Village folk revival of some 50 years ago. There have been setbacks, like the closing of the Bottom Line in 2004. But there has also been help from a couple of fairly recent surprise hits in the pop mainstream: the Appalachian-steeped soundtrack to “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and “Come Away With Me,” Norah Jones’s folk-pop debut. Both albums were game-changers, creating new opportunities and fan bases for bluegrass pickers and singer-songwriters.
(Continued here.)
Powered by Blogger
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home