When I met Kelly Werts, we both discovered not only an affinity for bluegrass music, but for ideas in terms of stretching the concept of what a bluegrass instrumentation could do. We would sit in his one room hovel near Wichita State University and spend evenings listening to King Crimson’s Discipline, or to Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass and think about how we might take the rhythmic phasing that Crimson used on tunes like “Frame by Frame” and place it in a bluegrass context. Phasing can be interpreted in a variety of ways, but we worked on taking melodic fragments of, say, five notes, and playing them in unison, except that one person would add a note or two to his sequence putting the two melodies “out of phase.” If two musicians keep playing their melodic lines in tandem, eventually the two beginning melodic lines come back into phase.
Steve Reich accomplishes this effect a little differently in his “Piano Phase” from 1967, in which the same two lines are played together by two instruments, but the lines become out of synch when one person speeds up gradually. The piece cycles through a quite a number of iterations of this process until finally the two lines end up together again.
Anyway, this is what Kelly and I were thinking about in 1981 and how we might apply similar techniques to “bluegrass.” The thing is, when one starts to experiment with “bluegrass” in this manner, it may cease to be bluegrass. It might have a direct relation instrumentally and even in the choice of tunes, but it’s not bluegrass in the strictest of senses. But, by this perception, you could also argue then that the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Cecil Taylor, or Herbie Hancock’s late life transformation of his materials is no longer jazz. My favorite “new” band is the Punch Brothers who, with a high level of virtuosity, have taken bluegrass instrumentation to a completely different level of music-making.
I was listening to some old recordings of the Sons of Rayon that Kelly sent me yesterday, and one tune that stuck out was our version of the traditional fiddle tune “Forked Deer.” (Or sometimes known as “Forky Deer”). We were experimenting in this tune with a more contrapuntal support for the tune. It’s attached here (including Karen Crowson on guitar) as is a YouTube link to Piano Phase.
Fabulous. Thank you for creating the daily blog site
Posted by: CC Culver | 04/08/2014 at 02:59 PM
Thank you, CC! Nice to hear from you.
Posted by: Paul Elwood, Composer | 04/08/2014 at 05:15 PM