Alison Brown
Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine
April 2001, Volume 35, Number 10
Alison Brown is a recent Grammy award winning banjo player whose work has ranged to include jazz fusion, worldbeat, and cutting edge acoustic folk. On her latest album “Fair Weather” (Compass 742822), Brown wanted to bring it all back home to the roots of her musical inspiration—bluegrass. “Actually, I think bluegrass is a part of all the music I do,” said Brown, speaking from her office at Compass Records in Nashville. “I think you can hear some bit of bluegrass in everything I play.
“This is the first record where I’ve deliberately tried to use only the instruments that are associated with bluegrass music,” she continued. “Even my first album, ‘Simple Pleasures’ (Vanguard 79454-2), had some flute and cello on it— though it was recognized in quite a nice way by the bluegrass community, which was really kind of a surprise to me. But on this one, though the tunes I wrote may be a little bit on the newgrass or progressive side of bluegrass, I tried to stay in the bluegrass vein. For the cover tunes, I took tunes from outside the genre and tried to adapt them to bluegrass style. So, for example, we’ve got Sam Bush singing Elvis Costello’s time ‘Every Day I Write The Book’—it just had/has an interesting riff that sounds just like a banjo lick and we worked that into our version. ‘Everybody’s Talking’ has a great feel that we thought would flow nicely as a mid-tempo bluegrass tune and create lots of opportunity for some melodic banjo lines. Beyond that, Claire [Lynch], Tim [O’Brien], Sam [Bush] and Vince [Gill] are among my favorite singers in any style music and I was thrilled that they were interested in being a part of this project and willing to take a stab at the vocals we picked out for them.”
For the times she composed, Brown says, “The challenge I put to myself was to write bluegrass banjo instrumentals— which is a big departure from the kind of writing I’ve done for my other recent solo projects. I tried to represent what I see as the different styles of bluegrass banjo playing in the tunes. I took the inspiration for ‘Girl’s Breakdown’ from Earl Scruggs’ tune ‘Earl’s Breakdown,’ working the melody around the use of Scruggs pegs that allow you to change the pitch of a string while you’re playing. ‘Poe’s Pickin’ Party’ is an example of melodic style banjo playing, and it gave a great opportunity for some beautiful twin mandolin playing with Mike Marshall and Sam Bush. ‘The Devil Went Down To Berkeley’ is a tune I wrote with the original David Grisman Quintet in mind and I was delighted to get to record it with Mike Marshall, Darol Anger, Tony Rice, and Todd Phillips—all veterans of David Grisman’s early Quintet.”
Brown’s roots in bluegrass run deep. She was about ten years old and taking guitar lessons when her teacher played a recording of Earl Scruggs. “I just loved the sound of the banjo,” she recalls. “I wanted to learn how to make that sound.” She began to study Scruggs’ technique, and listened to his records as well as those of David Grisman and Tony Rice, and her father’s recordings of jazz guitarist Joe Pass. “There’s always been a big melodic content in what I’ve listened to,” she says. “I think bluegrass is a really melodic music—which sounds odd, but really in bluegrass that’s how you tell one tune from another, because the time signatures are all pretty much the same.”
When Brown was a young teenager the family relocated from Connecticut to southern California. There the young picker became immersed in a folk and bluegrass scene that also nurtured the developing careers of Vince Gill, Janis, and Kristine Oliver (who’d go on to become the Sweethearts Of The Rodeo), and Stuart Duncan. Brown and fiddler Duncan (now a member of the award winning Nashville Bluegrass Band) spent the summer of 1978, “driving around the country—well, his dad drove us around the country—playing at bluegrass festivals,” Brown recalled. “It was the first time we had gotten to play outside California, and hear people play who I’d been reading about, reading about in Bluegrass Unlimited in fact. It was really my window into the bluegrass world. There were a lot of magical things about that summer,” she went on.
“To actually be in a place where you see the road sign says Cumberland Gap or Pike County…it’s really an exciting moment to be in a place where the music came from. We got to play on the Grand Ole Opry that summer,” she said. “That was amazing. It came about because we went to the Canadian National Bluegrass Championship up in Ontario, and I actually won the five-string banjo championship, so we were able to get a spot on the Grand Ole Opry one night a few weeks later.” Brown and Duncan would team up for their first record, called “Pre-Sequel” (Ridge Runner Records 0030), which the duo recorded as they were graduating from high school in 1978.
Despite this involvement in music. Brown didn’t see her future as a professional musician. “I never had.” she says. “My parents are both lawyers, and I always thought I’d go into a profession.” Heading back east for college, Brown started on a pre-med curriculum at Harvard, “but I abandoned that about halfway through,” she says. While in Cambridge she hosted a bluegrass show on the campus station and sat in with the New England bluegrass band Northern Lights. Completing undergraduate studies in literature, she chose to enroll at UCLA for master’s degree in business administration.
“They had a lot of concentration in the entertainment industry, and I was thinking of maybe trying to find an MBA type job that would allow me to combine my love for music with a business degree.” An internship with a major record company proved discouraging, though. “I didn’t find anybody doing any actual work,” she remarks. “It was explained to me that you find one big act and it kind of floats the whole infrastructure—the rest was just this kind of charade, people goofing off. I’m one who believes more in hard work and such, so I felt a little alienated by that—coupled with the fact that most of the music they were doing just didn’t speak to me at all.” So Brown signed on with investment banking firm Smith Barney. “I actually could relate more to that corporate culture than to the mid-1980s rock-and-roll record company scene,” Brown explains. She accepted an associate’s position in the public finance section of Smith Barney’s San Francisco office, working with the underwriting of tax-exempt bonds. After two years there, though, she knew it was time to move on. “I worked with people who spent all their energy on thinking about bond issues,” she says, “while I on the other hand wondered what it would be like to spend that kind of energy on music. I didn’t resign from Smith Barney and decide: I’m going to be a banjo player for a living, though,” she points out. “I left Smith Barney thinking I wanted to have six months off and work on writing music, see if I could make another record, ’cause I hadn’t really had a chance to record anything since Stuart and I made ‘Pre-Sequel.’ Then, just as I was thinking it was about time to get my resume together, Alison Krauss called.”
Bluegrass star Krauss was looking for a banjo player to fill in for a couple of shows. Brown made such an impression that she was invited to join Krauss’ Union Station band, and stayed with them for three years. “That was a turning point,” she says, “in that I went from being a regional player to a national one. And getting to ride all over the country and play these great festivals—that was really exciting.” During this time, the music Brown had written during her six month sabbatical was released as her first solo record “Simple Pleasures,” and was nominated for a Grammy. She also became the first woman in the history of the International Bluegrass Music Association to win an instrumentalist of the year award in 1991, and played on Krauss’ Grammy winning disc “I’ve Got That Old Feeling.”
“Up until that time, my listening and playing had been almost all bluegrass, with maybe the occasional Buck Owens tune thrown in. While I previously had interests in lots of different music for a longtime I’d never really been exposed to it.” In 1992, she decide to explore those other interests and accepted an offer to tour with folk rocker Michelle Shocked. “Since that time I’ve had so many doors opened to me, listening to other people’s music and other genres. I think that’s really shaped the direction my music has taken,” she says, also crediting husband Garry West with opening her musical horizons. West, a bassist, “worked with folk groups in Atlanta when he first started, and then played with Patty Loveless and Delbert McClinton. and he went to the Berklee School of Music. He’s really had a hand in educating me and exposing me to all this great music that I didn’t know existed.” That came out in Brown’s next recording, “Twilight Motel” and “Look Left,” which featured world music influences, and “Quartet” and “Out Of The Blue,” which lean toward jazz. Of that diversity, Brown says “I really consider myself a folk musician. I totally embrace that. I think to folk music people we’ll always sound jazzy, and to jazz audiences we’ll sound like folk musicians,” she said, speaking of her current playing ensemble, consisting of West on bass, Rick Reed on percussion, and John R. Burr on piano. She’s recently gotten deeper into the folk side of her music by joining the acoustic supergroup NewGrange, playing with Darol Anger. Tim O’Brien, Todd Phillips, Mike Marshall, and Phil Aaberg, and recently wowed audiences at North Carolina’s Merlefest in a “Girls For Merle” ensemble which included Claire Lynch, Rhonda Vincent, and Laurie Lewis.
In addition to her playing and composing interests, Brown has found a way to use that business background she acquired in college, too, founding Compass Records with West in 1993. “In a way, I feel that we are people [at Compass] who are into protecting and preserving music that has ties to traditional American music,” she says. “There’s really no home at major labels for roots-oriented music, bluegrass music, folk music, and a lot of jazz too. We want to put out music that’s going to endure. I really feel like we’ve put out music that needs to be out there, that needs to be available to people,” she says of the label which is home to such diverse talents as Kate Rusby, Pierce Pettis, and Fairport Convention.
Brown has always been one to challenge herself, and she sees working in dual careers and different genres of music to be part of that. “I feel very, very fortunate to have created a situation for myself where I can do both things as simultaneously as I’m able to,” she says. “I guess it’s my challenge to figure out the right balance between the two. It’s a very interesting place to be,” she concludes.
Brown’s instruments: “My banjo is a Gibson Mastertone RB-3 made in 1938. It’s an original five-string flathead,” Brown says. “I’ve had it for about ten years. I do all my recording with it and some touring, depending on whether or not I think I can keep it within my sight at all times…I also have a Nechville custom classic that Tom Nechville built for me that’s a really nice banjo that I tour with a lot. And I’ve got a Martin D-18 guitar, made in 1939, I used that on the new record, too. I also have a Martin 000-18 that I use a lot on the road. It was made in 1941. I’m really partial to the sound of old instruments—I like the overtones and the depth of tone. I also like the feeling that I’m a small part of the history of an instrument that existed before me and will continue to exist after me.”
Selected Discography
“Fair Weather” Compass 742822 “NewGrange” Compass 742802 “Out Of The Blue” Compass 74248 2 “Quartet” Vanguard 79486-2 “Look Left” Vanguard 79422-2 “Twilight Motel” Vanguard 79465-2 “Simple Pleasures” Vanguard 79459-2 “Pre-Sequel” Ridge Runner Records 0030
Brown’s work has also appeared on recordings by Alison Krauss & Union Station, Michelle Shocked, Claire Lynch, and Chris Thile, and on compilation albums from Vanguard and Sugar Hill.
Kerry Dexter is a music journalist and broadcast producer, contributing writer to DIRTY LINEN and CROSSROADS, and the folk music editor of the Barnes and Noble website. Currently she’s working on a book about women songwriter’s.
