TORONTO BLUEGRASS QUARTET RAMBLES ON
There’s an old debate among professional musicians about what’s more important — exemplary technique and speed, or the amount of soul in each pluck of the strings. It’s especially pertinent in the bluegrass genre where serious competitions exist to test a player’s ability.
Toronto’s Slocan Ramblers have technique to burn, but they take a different philosophy.
“We’ve all talked about shaping a good show and what kind of experience we like to listen to,” admits Frank Evans, the band’s lead singer and banjo man, “because sometimes a bluegrass show can be exhausting, almost like a feat of technical athleticism, and we’ve tried hard to avoid that.”
The Slocan Ramblers choose to incorporate what Evans calls “the attitude” of old-time music.
“We try making it more communal, less about featuring one person, more about making the ensemble tight and making it sound big and fun. We’ve found that a lot of times, really focusing on the rhythm and groove of the band is what gets people up and dancing.”
Together since 2011, the Toronto quartet takes that philosophy a step further with Coffee Creek (2015), and their forthcoming release, Queen City Jubilee. Both of these entertaining albums were recorded live off the floor, largely without overdubbing or corrections, to mirror the band’s live shows.
The group’s bountiful spirit comes through in performance, too, as some fans will recall from their appearance at the 2015 Edmonton Folk Music Festival.
Adrian Gross’s mandolin, Darryl Poulsen’s guitar and Alistair Whitehead’s bass fill out the band with Evans’ banjo and his vocals on most tracks. They will be doing classic covers and original tunes from Queen City Jubilee when Uptown Folk Club, Blueberry Bluegrass Festival and Northern Bluegrass Circle co-host the band’s western tour at the Norwood Legion on Saturday.
So what’s a bluegrass band called the Slocan Ramblers doing in Toronto? That name reflects some family connections back in British Columbia’s Slocan Valley, but the band will tell you that Toronto has had a thriving little bluegrass community for many years. Early on, they took inspiration from another Toronto bluegrass outfit, The Foggy Hogtown Boys, and Evans started lessons in clawhammer banjo from that band’s banjo player, Chris Coule, when he was just nine. Coule remains an informal mentor to the Ramblers and co-produced their last two albums.
Their 2013 debut album, Shaking Down the Acorns, took more of a formal studio sound and a focus on classic repertoire, but the band has evolved to include more and more original music and some fine songs from all four members.
Queen City Jubilee still includes excellent covers of Mississippi Heavy Water Blues, Hillbilly Blues
and a surprisingly uptempo take on The Sun’s Gonna Shine in my Back Door Some Day, drawing from Roscoe Holcomb’s version. They make the tunes their own.
Bluegrass icons such as Holcomb, Bill Munroe, Dave Grisman, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs inspire deep respect from the Slocan Ramblers, but much of the band developed their own “grass credentials” through an indirect route. Newfoundland-born Whitehead, with his love of Maritime folk styles; Montreal’s Gross; and small-town Ontario-native Poulsen all met in the music program at Toronto’s Humber College, and jammed with Toronto-born Evans before he enrolled in Humber.
Given that, you might wonder if the band shows traces of training in the jazz stream at Humber. The Slocan Ramblers are very much about bluegrass, but there are jazz parallels, as Evans explains.
“They sound different, but the two styles of music are actually more similar than most people would think. The way you learn them is quite similar, and the way you learn other people’s solos or arrangements, and there’s a need for a certain level of technical ability in both bluegrass and jazz. One of the biggest influences might be in how we approach learning the music, but in the end, the way we arrange is almost influenced by pop, too.”
They started to build their sound in a regular weekly pub gig during those years at Humber and launched the band after graduation in 2011. Since then, they have developed a loyal fan base, playing up to 200 dates a year at home in Toronto, on frequent tours through Canada’s small towns, big cities and music festivals, making it down to bluegrass strongholds along both the east and west United States coasts, and even over to the U.K. in recent years.
American bluegrass fans tell them they have a uniquely Canadian sound, but taking their first extended tour through Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales last fall was something else, making contact with folk traditions tied to bluegrass music. Apparently, the locals liked what they heard.
“It was an amazing experience bringing this music over there. It’s interesting to play in a place where one of the strongest influences on bluegrass — Irish and Celtic music — lives on. Some melodies of the Irish fiddle tunes have remained essentially untouched, maybe just with a different name, in bluegrass. You never know when you visit a new place, but they really connected.”