By Ivon Evans

Acoustic Disc ACD 37

Tracks: My Walking Shoes/ Hound Dawg/ Maggie's Farm/ Memphis/ Flint Hill Special/ The Old Home Place/ Uncle Pen/ Airmail Special/ Rocky Top/ Room At The Top Of The Stairs/ Sittin' On The Dock Of The Bay/ Jerusalem Ridge/ Windy Mountain/ Maybelline/ Blue Ridge Cabin home/ Rocky Road Blues/ When I'm Sixty Four.

Personnel: David Grisman (guitar, mandolin, mandola, uke & vocals), John Hartford (banjo, fiddle, autoharp, guitar & vocals), Mike Seeger (fiddle, banjo, guitar, mandolin, Jew's harp, mouth harp and vocals). Grisman's eight year old son Sam plays a half-size string bass on one track .

As you can see from the listing of this very interesting 17 track CD, the instrumentation is not your normal Bluegrass line-up! Just as NewGrass and JazzGrass take Bluegrass music forward, Retrograss does exactly the opposite, taking the music back in time almost to the style of an Old-Time string band.

They all take lead vocals on various tracks as between them play just about anything with strings on. The songs come from a very wide range of sources, from bill Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs to Bob Dylan, via Chuck Berry and most of it works! If you're a Bluegrass purist you won't like this CD but if you like your music on the adventurous side you'll love it.

The two instrumentals are brilliant new versions of two old favourites of mine. Flint Hill Special features Mike Seeger on banjo, John Hartford on fiddle and David Grisman on guitar-banjo, while Jerusalem Ridge has John on fiddle, Mike on banjo and David on tenor uke.

I have plenty of favourites from the vocal tracks. Elvis never did Hound Dawg like this; John takes lead vocal and its done in the 1930s Charlie Poole style. Mike Seeger sings solo and plays banjo on Bob Dylan's Maggie's Farm the way Doc Boggs would have sung it. The Dillard's song The Old Home Place features John on lead vocals and is slowed down a lot. John takes lead on a bluesy version of Chuck Berry's Maybelline.

There's lots of variety of here: The Beatles' When I'm Sixty Four is in a ragtime-cum-barbershop quartet style, while Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay is in the fashion of 'Otis Reading meets Jimmy Rodgers', with John on lead vocal.Blue Ridge Cabin Home, by Flatt & Scruggs, is in the Carter Family style. My favourite track is Randall Hylton's Room At The Top Of The Stairs with Mike on lead vocals. All in all well worth a listen.

Ivon Evans, Sunderland.

<
1st March 2000