Reviews

Mescalito Riding His White Horse

Mescalito Riding His White Horse: Insipred by The Musical Adventures of Peter Rowan is part Rowan biography, part author Mike Fiorito’s autobiography, part Peter Rowan interview, part Fiorito dream journal, part song lyric analysis, and part exploration of Buddhism.  All of that makes this book a fairly wild ride, but Fiorito is able to weave…

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Pretty Little Goat

This ensemble from the hills of western North Carolina has a unique and exuberant groove that is, at once, musically sophisticated yet determinedly rustic. It tends to draw listeners right in. On Pretty Little Goat’s third album you can hear this distinctive sensibility on traditional numbers like “Uncle Joe/ Leather Britches” and “Fisher’s Hornpipe,” as…

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Cascade: Transcriptions for 5-String Banjo

Unless banjo pickers frequent  the most advanced musical circles in Nashville, they are unlikely to walk into their local bluegrass jam and find someone calling out a tune from Wes Corbett’s recently released Cascade album.  So why the need for a book notating—in painstaking detail—each of that record’s ten ambitious tracks? Corbett, a current member…

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Coming Down the Mountain

Midwest band The Barley Jacks do things a little differently. Their third album, Coming Down the Mountain, is out—10 years after their previous album.  To get the album, The Barley Jacks joined a growing number of musicians and crowdfunded the work. At the time this review was written, Coming Down the Mountain had brought in…

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Izotope Spire Studio

The growing number of performers writing songs and developing their own sound within bluegrass and elsewhere face a couple of choices when preserving those carefully nurtured songs beyond a simple smartphone video or voice memo. If you want to overdub instrumental or vocal tracks, there’re several choices, including doing your overdubs and mixing directly on…

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Extrovert

Darol Anger’s unmistakable fiddle tone has graced a huge variety of recording projects from Dawg music to bluegrass to jazz and a few stops in-between. A founding member of the David Grisman Quintet, Anger’s distinctive sound, produced on his five-string violin, has dueled melodically with virtually every contemporary bluegrass master.      His latest project,…

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