Guerrilla roots

Damn Tall Buildings honed its sound on the streets

After a hard day of shopping on Newbury Street, the last thing you expect to see is a bluegrass band. Especially one as good as the Berklee schooled Damn Tall Buildings, who built a following by busking there.

“There’s an undying honesty about playing in the streets,” said the band’s founder and fiddler, Avery Ballotta. “It’s the best performance practice ever: You’re shouting out your music and people will either like it or not. We were a surprising thing for people to see on Newbury Street, and that created a good perspective: They thought, ‘I wouldn’t expect these people to be playing here, but because they are, I’ll listen and I like it.’ That created a certain inspiration for us, an energy that’s permeated our sound.”

Damn Tall Buildings — Ballotta, singer/bassist Sasha Dubyk, banjo player Jordan Alleman and guitarist Max Capistran — host an event dubbed “Bluegrass & Beyond!” at the Chevalier Theatre in Medford tomorrow. Along with celebrating the band’s new CD, a live set recorded at Berklee’s Red Room, the night spotlights an overlooked musical community: Aside from Ballotta, who dropped out, everyone on the bill, including songwriter Aurora Birch and progressive folk band Honeysuckle, graduated from Berklee. To re-create the busking experience, they plan to have much of audience seated right onstage with the band.

Though Berklee isn’t always known as a bluegrass hotbed, Ballotta pointed out that some first-class players — including fiddlers Bruce Molsky and Darol Anger, both long renowned on the acoustic circuit — have joined the faculty in recent years. And there were plenty of students, himself included, who came in to study other kinds of music and had their heads turned around.

“I went to college in Montana for music technology and really got into composition, so I didn’t know if I was going to play the fiddle ever again. But one of my first teachers at Berklee was Bruce Molsky, who opened the door for me in terms of exploring old-time traditions and the deep resonance that this music holds. That was really the transformative moment.

“We’re all from different backgrounds: Max played electric blues and Sasha did musical theater growing up. But we all align with the traditional songs we play and feel connected to the feelings that are in them. I’d say the difference between a college-educated roots player and a family player would be the sense of tradition — you’re not going to play the same as someone who grew up with it. But once you step into the world of that music, it can still become a part of who you are.”

Because their sound draws from blues and gospel as well as bluegrass, they prefer to classify it only as “guerrilla roots music.” Said Ballotta, “Roots music is our overlying umbrella, but we all appreciate finding different approaches that work, that progress and perhaps work better. We can take ownership and say, ‘We can do this because we can figure it out.’ So we’re all punks in a way.”

‘It’s the best performance practice ever: You’re shouting out your music and people will either like it or not.’ — AVERY BALLOTTA