DOUGLAS TAKES BLUEGRASS TO THE NEXT LEVEL
Imaginative, intelligent concert offered a wide range of musical experiences
There’s bluegrass, newgrass, truegrass (loved by purists) and soon-to-be legalgrass.
But Jerry Douglas and his band trade in fewgrass — a sophisticated fusion of jazz beats with the finger pyrotechnics of bluegrass that’s as rare as fescue in Flatbush.
Douglas, world-famous for his dobro mastery, is one of the most celebrated and connected performers ever to play the Sasktel Saskatchewan Jazz Festival. (For the record, he had a big smile at the enthusiastic standing ovation after his show on Wednesday at the Broadway Theatre and mused, “First time in Saskatoon. I’d love to come back.”)
Douglas has played on 1,600 albums (not a typo) and won or co-won 14 Grammy Awards. He’s been a member of Alison Krauss’s band Union Station for two decades and he had a hand in the monumental O Brother soundtrack. He’s worked with Paul Simon, James Taylor and Elvis Costello. (‘Paul Mccartney told me to stop name-dropping,’ Douglas joked at one point.)
But those expecting something as easy as Man of Constant Sorrow would have been sorrowful. This show was all about chops and an open-minded approach to embracing music, period, regardless of the genre. In other words, an inventive cover of Jimi Hendrix’s Hey Joe was as easy as it would get. (Extra points if you noticed Douglas slip in a reference to the Trump border wall on the line “I’m goin’ way down south, Way down to Mexico way.”)
Douglas’s musical imagination is as wide as the Scottish countryside, realized with a song from the BBC Transatlantic Sessions —a tune with keening celtic notes evoking windswept hills in busy, soaring, dramatic fashion. It’s all about tension and release in his music.
Overall, it was an education, a show for the intellect more than the emotions, so kudos to the crowd for getting into it.
Toronto bluegrass quartet The Slocan Ramblers (Frank Evans on banjo, Adrian Gross on mandolin, Darryl Poulsen on guitar and Alastair Whitehead on bass) opened the concert with a fireball of a set. They play so fast and so together that there ought to be a warning sign near the stage: “Professional musicians — do not attempt.”
The band’s latest album is Queen City Jubilee, so they highlighted some of the tracks like Down in the Sugarbush, which makes you think of driving fast on a winding dirt road in something with running boards.
Mighty Hard Road has a classic, catchy sound but tells a sad story of a marriage on the rocks — as the band noted, bluegrass may be unique in sounding bright but having gut-wrenching stories to tell (hence the death row song Long Chain Charlie and Moundsville).
One unexpected addition, one the band doesn’t really play live, was a cover of Tom Petty’s The Apartment Song, and it was a blast. Hey, has anybody copyrighted the term rockgrass yet?