Reviews

This debut alum from the lead singer and guitarist of the acclaimed Texas band Wood & Fire is a stylistically varied and winning collection of wise and exquisitely crafted original songs. Back Down Home features gripping arrangements that feature everything from banjos, fiddles and pedal steel to saxes, trumpets and a B3 organ while running…

George Jackson is a New Zealand native who now resides in Nashville, Tennessee. He grew up hearing bluegrass music and started learning fiddle at an early age. He moved to Australia at 16 and soon became the three-time Australian National Bluegrass Fiddle Champion.       Now residing in Nashville since 2016, he has established…

Fans of the band High Fidelity won’t be surprised to hear that frontman Jeremy Stephens credits older generations for most of the influence on his music.  With a new solo project titled How I Hear It, Stephens has produced an album with a bounce and vocals that hark back to an earlier time. Stephens called…

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…

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…