Reviews

Rising mandolin star Scott Napier’s career and life are on an upward trajectory. He’s just joined Wildfire as their new mandolinist, and he’s married to the stellar Lauren Price Napier of the Price Sisters, one of the top players and teachers of the pure Monroe-style bluegrass mandolin embodied by the likes of Mike Compton and…

Paolo Ercoli is a resonator guitarist from Brianza, Italy who has performed with many artists such as Eric Anderson, Malcolm Holcombe, Steve Forbert, and Kevin Welch, to name a few. Ercoli also plays mandolin, guitar and pedal steel, but he is best known as a square neck resonator guitarist, having been influenced by the playing…

Patuxent Music The McPeak Brothers, out of Wytheville, VA, had a significant impact on bluegrass music during their run from the early 1960s right through to the 1990s, mainly due to their fine vocal arrangements and distinct songwriting.  Along the way, they recorded for Rebel Records, County Records and RCA/Nashville. They were also featured on…

Mountain Home Sometimes compilations can be kind of … meh. They can often be a random sampler without much cohesion.  Sometimes they turn out to be a historic record, especially when grouped around a theme or instrument, like Masters of Slide: The Spider Sessions, a resonator guitar collection put together by beloved Dobroman Phil Leadbetter….

Mel Bay Publications There are relatively few books on the market today that teach you how to play the upright bass in the context of bluegrass music, so Nate Sabat’s new book Dirt Simple Upright Bass is a very welcome addition to the world of bluegrass instructional material.   In this 46-page book, which also…

It’s no empty figure of speech to say this Canadian mandolin/mandola master’s debut album was nearly two decades in the making. Maybe you could call it perseverance, or maybe you can call it procrastination, or maybe you could call it both. But in his liner notes, McNulty, who spent 40 years as a journalist, explains…