Jordan Logue

Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

Bluegrass in Downtown Jacksonville

In Music on June 24, 2018 at 12:47 pm

Bluegrass Music Downtown!

Can you believe it? A Bluegrass music festival right here in downtown Jacksonville. In Hemming Plaza. I am going to ignore the obvious cheap shots about the heat, the humidity and the homeless and focus on what I love – Bluegrass Music.

Bluegrass Music. Pure. Clean. No electric instruments. No drums. One of the things I love most about Bluegrass is truly a mystery. It is a percussive music – but has no percussion instruments. The effect is created by skillful interplay between an acoustic upright bass fiddle giving a heavy down beat, and the mandolin (or whatever other instrument is not involved in a melody, harmony, solo, or any other maneuver that prohibits it from answering the bass) on the off-beat. The result is a sound very like a snare drum. This bass line and percussive timing lays the foundation to begin building the rhythms and melodies that are Bluegrass music.

Right on top of this bass-percussive effect comes the big, rumbly, rhythm sound of the dreadnaught guitar. This does two things. It reinforces the bass/percussion effect, by playing the alternating bass notes of the chord, while the strum of the chord provides the rhythm. Lester Flatt and a few other greats managed to do this flawlessly with a thumb pick and finger pick. The rest of us rely on a heavy flat pick. No matter the method, all of bluegrass music has come to rely on what is known today as the “Lester Flatt G-run.” There are also other runs, or transitions, that the guitar player uses to get from one chord to another. These will often suggest or echo the melody and reinforce the tempo. They will lead, or sometimes push, and are not superfluous decorations, but rather are the very nature of bluegrass guitar.

Bill Monroe, the undisputed founder of the genre, played the mandolin. He wove the tapestry of bluegrass music around his style of mandolin playing. The punch and the drive from his mandolin pushed all the other instruments to be what they are today in a typical bluegrass ensemble. That strong punch comes on the offbeat, creating the aforementioned percussive effect. Then out of the blue (grass) comes the tremolo driven melody that Monroe used to create his solos (we call them breaks in Bluegrass music.) But just as the great one developed his style, other artists picked up and started their own styles.

Then we have the heart of bluegrass music, the five-string banjo. In a 1960 interview with NBC News, Lester Flatt said, “If it don’t have a five-string banjo in it, it ain’t bluegrass.” What Bluegrass music did was take the banjo out of its role as a rhythm instrument and make it a lead instrument. Earl Scruggs did this by developing a system of three finger rolls that when executed upon the chord patterns of a song result in a barrage of notes from which the listener’s ear forms a melody. Using thumb and finger picks, Earl managed to get volume and brightness out of the banjo that had never before been anticipated. The Scruggs influence and innovation on the banjo cannot be overstated. But it was only the beginning. Not too long after Earl, other artists of the five-string banjo came along and the chains were off and the banjo would never be the same.

The fiddle, or fiddles if you are lucky, is another traditional instrument that figures big in bluegrass. Like the guitar, the fiddle is ubiquitous in the music world. How it is played in the bluegrass style is what matters. The average bluegrass fiddler draws influences from old-time music with the shuffles and bowing patterns. But also from classical structure in terms of stating a melody and answering it with a variation. And also from jazz when it states the melody, then a variation, then an improvisational rendition. And it draws from traditional country with long bow, whole-note melody lines. Listen to Paul Warren’s fiddle break on “Shucking the Corn.” It is certainly not the melody that Earl plays on the banjo. But it is so perfect, it could not be anything else. Words cannot help us here. Go listen to it. Sometimes you hit the jackpot and get a band with twin fiddles playing harmony. The only rule is that they can never be playing the same note at the same time!

The resonator guitar, which is often called a Dobro, (which leads to lawyers fidgeting because the D-word is a trade name, like Frigidaire or Kleenex,) is the latecomer to the genre. You find it in a lot of Bluegrass bands, and indeed when Flatt and Scruggs broke away from Monroe to form the Foggy Mountain Boys, they used the Resonator Guitar to distinguish their sound. And Josh Graves created the form of bluegrass dobro that we know today. The resonator guitar, like its kin the banjo, continues to plow virgin ground.

But my favorite thing about Bluegrass Music? The singing. The harmonies. The most important instrument in a Bluegrass Band? The voice-box. Duet harmonies, like Jim and Jesse. Three-part arrangements like the old Carter Family. Not Bluegrass, but certainly a part of the DNA. Quartets like the old gospel harmonies of Flatt and Scruggs. Or find the Country Gentlemen singing East Virginia Blues. Look at your arms. Those are goose-bumps. Don’t be embarrassed.

These are the reasons that I love bluegrass music. I would put your average Bluegrass Band on the same level as any chamber orchestra group in terms of musical skill. Maybe they can’t read the standard notation, but they know what each instrument does, and how the music should sound, and they deliver it. And to think all this will be right downtown in Hemming Plaza. I will dearly miss the campground jam sessions that usually go along with bluegrass festivals. But I will be proud to see and hear Bluegrass music right in downtown Jacksonville. Saturday, July 21st. I’ll be there listening to Bluegrass music!

Music Review: Chris Henry – Making My Way to You

In Music on April 2, 2013 at 11:14 am

Chris Henry

Making My Way to You

This is another Chris Henry solo project. Jason Carter plays fiddle and Smith Curry plays pedal steel and resonator guitar. Sarah Sellari sings with Chris on “Robot Dreams” and “As Long as You Have Love.” Everything else is all Chris. All original material. You want a review? OK here it is. This is a great album. Buy it (or take it or whatever one does to get music these days) and listen to it. You will love it. There. That’s done. Now what this album really needs is not a review but an analysis.

Chris Henry is a skilled and talented multi-instrumentalist, but also a productive and prolific songwriter. This work adds a new dimension to Chris Henry – that of stylist. I guess producer is more the accepted term of art, but that word is somehow insufficient. Chris does a number of things with this album that demonstrate his maturity and a grasp of music as a nourishing commodity that most folks in the music industry might wish for but never fully develop. Fundamentally, Chris Henry is a skillful architect. Form follows function in his music as much as it does in anything Louis Sullivan ever built.

Here are just a few examples of what I am talking about. Bluegrass players will remember the ’70s and ’80s when every now and then the music industry would stick a banjo track into some piece of pop or mainstream country music. Think “Misty” “Rockford Files” “Eastbound and Down.” No matter what they did it ended up sounding like a novelty piece. This is the architectural equivalent of attaching a pointed arch to a steel and glass skyscraper. It serves no real purpose and does not fool anybody. It is mere decoration and out of place at that. Chris has succeeded where New York, L.A. and Nashville failed, not by shoving a banjo track where it does not belong, but by allowing electric and pedal steel guitar to contribute to his music on terms that add to the function rather than simply the form. I suppose that Jim and Jesse, The Louvin Brothers and The Osborne Brothers also excelled at this. But Chris Henry does it in a way that links form and function, the result of which is great music, not mismatched instruments forcing songs into keys in which they wither. Listen closely to “I Keep Dreaming of You” “Gone” “On This Mountain” and “Tears in My Eyes” and you will hear bold columns supporting graceful archways that define the enclosed space, rather than features that are merely stuck onto buildings as decoration.

Closely related to this notion of musical architectural is musical onomatopoeia in which the melodic structure suggests the lyrical theme. This is a trait that we often see in classical music, and one that I suppose a lot of artists attempt. But Chris Henry carries it to an extent that excludes all other possibilities. “Medicine Man” “Spirit Traveler” and “Incarceration” are simply incapable of conveying any other feeling other than that which is told by its story, musically and lyrically. Now, I know Chris’s family, and have to think that this may be partially a matter of DNA. Listen to some of his Dad’s (Red Henry) mandolin compositions and you will understand.

Chris can also be as whimsical and witty as anybody. In this, he tends to put things where we would least expect to find them. “Robot Dreams”  gives us as accurate an assessment of the state of artificial intelligence today as you are likely to read in any serious scientific journal, served up in a traditional and lively bluegrass manner with Sarah Sellari singing along with Chris.

But to get past all the intellectual bullcrap that I have just shoveled all over the place, this album gives us some of the best traditional country songwriting I have heard in a long time. I won’t say the Chris is channeling anybody. If he is, we’ll let him tell us that. But he is writing songs and playing them the way we all love to hear them. There is some stuff here that is so traditional country, it is hard to believe that anybody born in the last half of the last century even has the ability to recognize it, much less write, perform and produce it. Chris’s music is bold and daring. But skillful and sensitive architect (producer) that he is we are not assaulted with features that serve no purpose. On the other hand it is by no means sparse. It is everything it needs to be, with no waste and no superfluous decoration. What you get with a Chris Henry project is that rare combination of amazing talent and unbound work ethic. And great music.

Chris Henry is talented in many ways. “Making My Way to You” puts it all on display. Get the album. I guarantee that it will move to the top of your playlist.  Buy it here: http://www.christopherhenry.net

,

Violin or fiddle?

In Music on September 4, 2011 at 10:40 am

Is that a violin or a fiddle?

If you have read my first novel, “One Fiddle Too Many,” you might have picked up that I have more than a passing interest in violins. Some close friends and family members have suggested that it is a substance abuse problem, and on occasion have attempted interventions. The closest they have come to success is an agreement that I divest myself of two instruments for each one that I acquire. This applies to all my musical instruments, not just fiddles, with the result that I am down to three playable violins. (This does not count bass fiddles which get special consideration. The agreement is more complex than most U.N. treaties, and at least as controversial. For example, my workshop which is full of violin carcasses and bones, is exempt from the agreement, but on a case by case basis can be made subject to most of the terms.)

As to my playing ability, I am a passable jam session bluegrass fiddler. I can do some Irish, some old-time, some country. I can’t read a stick of music, but I have a pretty good ear, and I can figure my way through a lot of what I need to.

Today, I am going to address the issue of the difference between a fiddle and a violin. There is none. I could end this piece right here, but what a waste of the internet if I did. I mean Al Gore went to all that trouble to invent the internet, the least I can do is my part to fill it with what little bit of information I can scrape together. So, here goes.

People associate the word fiddle with old time country fiddlers from the backwoods of the Appalachians. Most fiddlers probably have little brothers with pale skin and pointy ears who play the banjo. The fact is that the word fiddle probably pre-dates the word violin in reference to bowed string instruments.

I have heard some people say that a fiddle is flatter than a violin. Not true. The instruments that are more rounded and more highly or gracefully arched are designs that came from violinmakers such as Amati or Guarnerius. Stradivari came along with his design that flattened out the arches.

I have heard folks say that a fiddle player sets his sound post a little farther back, farther up, closer to the center, closer to the edge, grain running crossways to the top, grain running with the top; everything in the world to try to differentiate it from a violin. The fact of the matter is this: There is one place for the soundpost to be installed properly. Minute adjustments in any direction can be made by a luthier in conjunction with the musician to reflect personal preference. But that does not turn a violin into a fiddle. (If you don’t know what the sound post is, fear not. I will publish an article on this remarkable 3 inch piece of spruce dowel another time.)

It’s the strings! Fiddlers play on steel strings. Violinists play on gut strings. First of all I don’t know anybody who uses gut strings anymore. Especially here in Florida where they would grow mold and rot. I know a lot of fiddlers and we all agree on this: steel strings are very useful in the garden for making fences around your vegetable patches. You want your fiddle to sound good spend some money on strings with some kind of synthetic core wrapped with something smooth. A string that is good enough for a concert hall will be just as welcome at a barn dance.

I guess the myth I hear most often regards the bridge. The bridge is that little slice of maple that hold up the strings. The strings cross over it and it transmits the vibrations to the body of the instrument where the magic takes place. On a properly set up classical violin, this bridge has a rather dramatic arch to it. This enables to violinist to play each string separately and distinctly. I had long been told that if one is going to fiddle, you need a barely perceptible curve to the bridge so that you can play two strings at once easily.

Old bridge on the left; new one is on the right.

Now it is true that a fiddler will play more of what we call double stops – playing two strings at once. Why that is may be the subject another article altogether. But in fact, classical music has its share of double stops, so it is entirely possible and often necessary to play two strings at once on a highly arched bridge.

Now, with this as background, let me tell you about one of my recent bouts with lutherie.  It is a perfectly adequate violin. The person from whom I bought it was a well-known and highly accomplished professional fiddle player. The bridge was very nearly flat, and the soundpost was almost adjacent to the foot of the bridge rather than the recommended 4 – 5 mm back. I played this just as it was set up when I bought for probably the next 12 to 15 years. Volume and tone suited me perfectly, and this is the instrument on which I learned most of what I know.

I decided to mess around with things. I cut a new soundpost and installed it properly, then set to work fitting a bridge of classical description to it. Fitting a bridge is an activity that requires a great deal of patience, skill and very, very sharp knives. It should not be done during cocktail hour. So, I carved, and fit and set, and removed, and carved more, sanded a little, carved again, and finally had a very respectably carved bridge of classical proportions.

I restrung the instrument with the new bridge, tuned up the strings and with the playing of only a few notes of a scale, I wondered where my old fiddle went. I realized that I was playing an instrument that had only been giving me sixty percent (this is a very subjective assignment of a mathematical notion, mind you) of what it was capable. Everything that I liked about it got better. The high notes got brighter and stronger. The low notes took a warmth that was noticeable before, but now somehow, well warmer. Volume increased. Many folks who have heard me play the fiddle may not be pleased with that development. It will take me some time to develop the proper bowing technique to play on a classical bridge. But that’s me not the fiddle.

So, there you have proof positive that there is no technical difference between a violin and a fiddle. There may be personal preferences among individual musicians, but we are all fiddlers; we are all violinists.