NewGrange
Playing Outside the Lines
by Kerry Dexter
NewGrange wasn't really supposed to be a band. "My agent called me up about putting together a holiday tour," recalled fiddler Darol Anger. "I got together with Mike Marshall, whom I've known and played with for 20 years, and we put together a list of our dream band — and everybody said yes! I figured we'd play the holiday dates, make some money, and go home." Guitarist and mandolinist Mike Marshall added, "It was kind of a mystery how all the personalities were going to fit together. I thought, either this is going to be really great or really horrible. I wonder if all these soloists will give each other the space everybody needs to do the music. I was amazed at how easily it all went together." So well that, pianist Phil Aaberg revealed, "After we'd played just a couple of dates together, we sort of all spontaneously turned to each other and said, 'Hey, you wanna be in a band?' "
"I think they challenged me, pushed me to try new tonalities and stretch a bit, and then I got to contribute as a player, too," said Tim O'Brien, who sings lead on the vocal tracks on the group's self-titled disc. "It really is an inspiration to play with these guys, who are some of the giants of modern acoustic music," pointed out Alison Brown, herself a Grammy-winning banjo player and composer.
The name of the group reflects the combination of spontaneity, inspiration, and discipline the six-person ensemble generates. "There's a place in Ireland called Newgrange, and Tim wrote a song about it for our Christmas record," explained bass player Todd Phillips. [Ed note: A Christmas Heritage, see pg. 53, this issue, for review.] "It's a place where the people of an ancient civilization built this structure so the light would shine through it on the winter solstice — kinda like a 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' sort of thing where you have to stand there and wait for the sun to shine through at just the right time."
"My whole bag is diversity, taking traditional music and making it new, while being true to tradition," said O'Brien, who has worked in bluegrass, country, Celtic, folk, and old-time genres. "These guys are mining the old stuff and remaking it. Darol Anger is such a giant folk music fan, and yet he's steeped in jazz, too. He came up with this idea to take this old song from Jean Ritchie's family, 'Goin' to Boston,' and make kind of a bluegrass rap with it. That's the thing — this music is a continuous line from the oldest music you've ever heard to the present — and beyond. Hopefully we're making the future here."
The experience of working together with a group of players whose musical achievements would fill a small book impressed each of the artists. "There was an ensemble feeling that you hardly ever get, especially in a group of six people," said Anger. "Usually you're lucky if you get such an ensemble feeling in a group of two." That helped the record come together quickly, in a space of three days. "None of us had seen the music until we got together at Phil Aaberg's house the evening before we went into the studio," Brown remarked. "And some of those tunes are pretty sophisticated — Mike Marshall's tune 'Shoot the Moon,' for example, that's a hard tune to learn!"
Bassist Phillips commented, "I like music like that, where you have to figure it out quickly, then move on to the next song. I like music where everybody has to figure out their own part, too. I didn't have to say this is the piano part or this is the fiddle part, I could just say this is what I'm looking for, and I knew they could invent it quickly and make it work."
Marshall said, "This turned out to be one of those completely natural combinations of people — it was about 15% talking about it and 85% walking into the studio and doing it." Darol Anger added. "The hardest point was knowing when to stop — everybody had so many great ideas."
The disc contains both reworked traditional tunes and original music by each of the players. "I think the tune 'Handsome Molly' really says something about the band," Brown said. "It's one of those traditional tunes that people have been playing forever, and Mike arranged it with these odd meter bars and different chord changes. Now I think it sounds as though it's always been that way. It hasn't, though — it's usually like maybe two chords, real straight." Pianist Aaberg remarked "We're not the kind of people who like to rattle off the same thing every time. What's unusual about this band is that it's a band that really that really listens."
Given backgrounds ranging from classical to rock, new age to old time, and past band and recording associations from Peter Gabriel (Aaberg) to Laurie Lewis (Phillips) to Michelle Shocked (Brown), what kind of music did NewGrange create? "Take the song 'Rock in a Weary Land,' " O'Brien said. "It's a gospel thing with a piano, and yet it's this hard driving bluegrass thing. Somehow they found the intersection of these two things, and they really work well together; it doesn't sound like you're just stickin' things together."
Darol Anger pointed out, "When you juggle the instruments —add piano and octave mandolin, which aren't normal string-band instruments, for instance — when you add that kind of creativity, you have to start rethinking the whole texture of things. We were trying to find common elements in these disparate musics and build on them." One of the common elements, he added, was that "these are people who have a lot of heart, who put a lot of heart and soul in their playing." Mike Marshall said, "It's exciting to me to think where this style is going. I'm most excited by the initial impulse that creates a new form – Earl Scruggs, or Bill Monroe, what was going on in their heads at the moment they created those styles? What music were they aware of? What did they want to bring out? The front edge of music evolution, that's where I live, and this record is part of that."
"I think we're all playing real American folk music when you get right down to it," Todd Phillips said. "I don't know that we consciously set out to do that. I'm sure I'm playing in a different way. The piano and the banjo don't usually come together. It's a new format."
"With a lot of bands, you have to sort of stay within the lines. This group isn't like that," Alison Brown observed. "These guys are such incredible improvisers that it's okay to let the music go someplace different. You don't have to stay between the lines. This music draws on traditional folk music, what's been done before, and then uses other inspirations — bluegrass, for example, or classical from Mike and Phil's backgrounds — to reach forward. I think it's very American music."
Phil Aaberg summed up: "A really important thing I've learned from working in NewGrange is that a real traditional kind of music can be an absolutely creative kind of music. To me, that's the way this band is, and that's the way music is. You bring your own creativity to something, you work out what works best in a situation, and you don't do it the way someone else has done it before."
NewGrange
NewGrange
[Compass 7 4280 (1999)]
I guess this group decided that Christmas Heritage wasn't going to get them gigs in the summer. Whatever the reason, this is the same group of musicians (Tim O'Brien, Todd Phillips, Alison Brown, Phillip Aaberg, Mike Marshall, and Darol Anger) that that album and tour were built around last year. What they are producing here is a heartlands acoustic fusion that is equal parts Windham Hill, Aaron Copland, and Bill Monroe. You certainly couldn't call it bluegrass, but it is considerably livelier (and the musicianship is more accomplished) than a lot of what you might generally hear on contemporary instrumental radio. By and large, these musicians have been playing together in various combinations for years. Pianist Aaberg is the newest recruit, and the pieces where his pastoral piano dominates, as on his originals "Under the Hood" and "Cabin Waltz," show the ensemble's most restrained, cerebral side. O' Brien takes the lead vocals, and pieces such as "Handsome Molly" and "Goin' to Boston" sound quite a bit stiffer than they might on one of his own solo efforts. However, the ensemble does let loose with some fiery picking, particularly on Brown's ebullient hoedown "Weetabix" and a dazzling rendition of O'Brien's "Land's End," which was recorded live on last year's holiday tour. Other high points include Phillips' tastefully jazzy "Round Trip" and O'Brien's lively original, "The Music Tree." On NewGrange, the six musicians that make up the group still sound like an ensemble in search of an identity, but they certainly manage to dig up some interesting textural contrasts in the process.
— Michael Parrish
(Downers Grove, IL)
Compass Records
117 30th Avenue South/ Nashville, TN 37212-2507; info@compassrecords.com; www.compassrecords.com/NewGrange
Selected Discography
The self titled disc NewGrange is the band's first official recording under that name. The same six players recorded A Christmas Heritage [Six Degrees/Koch (1998)], which was the recording and tour project that sparked the creation of NewGrange. Each artist has a solo career as well. Their most recent discs:
Darol Anger
Diary of a Fiddler
Compass
Mike Marshall
Midnight Clear
Acorn
Todd Phillips
Phillips/Grier/Flinner
Compass
Tim O'Brien
The Crossing
Alula
Phil Aaberg
Cinema
Windham Hill
Alison Brown
Out of the Blue
Compass
