© Adam Granger
Review: Harmony Grits, The Gritpickers, by Adam Granger
The three guys who comprise The Gritpickers have over a thousand years' experience among them. Well, not really, but they sound like it. Now, in some genres, that would be not be a good thing (think punk rock), but in the sometimes fusty world of old time string music, accusations of millenarianism are high praise.
The first thing I noticed when I fed Harmony Grits into my dashboard, was the groove. (Not in my dashboard; it's smooth). Rob Daves, Don Jacques and Myron Price have, separately and together, put in decades playing for dancers: they play regularly for Twin Cities contra dances and they have all, at various times, served hitches as accompanists for The Wild Goose Chase Cloggers. The skills required in these endeavors—timing, alertness, musicality, personability, stamina—also come in handy when making an album, as the trio demonstrates here.
I already knew that the Gritpickers were a good dance band, because I book them occasionally to play the First Saturday Contra Dance, but I wondered if Harmony Grits would reveal a more varied repertoire. And well might one wonder: the big risk a dance band faces when making an album is that it will be, well, an album of dance music which one is supposed to sit and listen to. Happily, in its generous 18 cuts, Harmony Grits steers clear of those shoals: peppered among the hoedowns are vocals, waltzes, original numbers and duets.
A particular favorite is My Old Home Waltz, played as a fiddle and harmonica duet by Don and Myron. This combination of instruments creates the kind of dissonance you love to love, like bagpipes, or accordions with “wet” reeds. Two other favorites are Amelia Earhart's Last Flight, with guest guitar and vocal by Gene Wilms, and the Rob Daves composition Ina's Lament, for which Daves's elegant banjo melody gets an intriguing descending arpeggial accompaniment by Mr Price.
And when the boys do go after the 130-beat-a-minute stuff, they are home for the holidays. They hook and fillet a wide range of southern tunes, and they do it with aplomb. For verisimilitude, instrumental selections are grouped by key here and there, echoing the old time jam convention of minimizing banjo and fiddle retuning.
Production-wise, chalk up another one for sound guy/engineer cat Doug Lohman: he nimbly captured and perfectly blended the 'Pickers sound with a no-frills declarative-sentence recording approach. I'm not surprised: he did an equally fine job recording and mixing chunks of my recent album with Alan Munde, and I've benefited from his fine live sound reinforcement for thirty years.
Finally, the Harmony Grits CD liner notes are a tunesmith's delight: they include keys, fiddle and banjo tunings, and brief provenances for the selections, as well as Fun Facts about band members' relationships with those selections.
Twenty-first-century America boasts a large, diffuse, enthusiastic, educated and skilled community of old time string musicians. The Gritpickers can hang with any of 'em and be proud. This is a fine first album by a group of committed musicians.
The three guys who comprise The Gritpickers have over a thousand years' experience among them. Well, not really, but they sound like it. Now, in some genres, that would be not be a good thing (think punk rock), but in the sometimes fusty world of old time string music, accusations of millenarianism are high praise.
The first thing I noticed when I fed Harmony Grits into my dashboard, was the groove. (Not in my dashboard; it's smooth). Rob Daves, Don Jacques and Myron Price have, separately and together, put in decades playing for dancers: they play regularly for Twin Cities contra dances and they have all, at various times, served hitches as accompanists for The Wild Goose Chase Cloggers. The skills required in these endeavors—timing, alertness, musicality, personability, stamina—also come in handy when making an album, as the trio demonstrates here.
I already knew that the Gritpickers were a good dance band, because I book them occasionally to play the First Saturday Contra Dance, but I wondered if Harmony Grits would reveal a more varied repertoire. And well might one wonder: the big risk a dance band faces when making an album is that it will be, well, an album of dance music which one is supposed to sit and listen to. Happily, in its generous 18 cuts, Harmony Grits steers clear of those shoals: peppered among the hoedowns are vocals, waltzes, original numbers and duets.
A particular favorite is My Old Home Waltz, played as a fiddle and harmonica duet by Don and Myron. This combination of instruments creates the kind of dissonance you love to love, like bagpipes, or accordions with “wet” reeds. Two other favorites are Amelia Earhart's Last Flight, with guest guitar and vocal by Gene Wilms, and the Rob Daves composition Ina's Lament, for which Daves's elegant banjo melody gets an intriguing descending arpeggial accompaniment by Mr Price.
And when the boys do go after the 130-beat-a-minute stuff, they are home for the holidays. They hook and fillet a wide range of southern tunes, and they do it with aplomb. For verisimilitude, instrumental selections are grouped by key here and there, echoing the old time jam convention of minimizing banjo and fiddle retuning.
Production-wise, chalk up another one for sound guy/engineer cat Doug Lohman: he nimbly captured and perfectly blended the 'Pickers sound with a no-frills declarative-sentence recording approach. I'm not surprised: he did an equally fine job recording and mixing chunks of my recent album with Alan Munde, and I've benefited from his fine live sound reinforcement for thirty years.
Finally, the Harmony Grits CD liner notes are a tunesmith's delight: they include keys, fiddle and banjo tunings, and brief provenances for the selections, as well as Fun Facts about band members' relationships with those selections.
Twenty-first-century America boasts a large, diffuse, enthusiastic, educated and skilled community of old time string musicians. The Gritpickers can hang with any of 'em and be proud. This is a fine first album by a group of committed musicians.