Alison Brown: A story and Interview : Part 1
Learning to play banjo at the age of ten years old, playing with bluegrass bands in San Diego with fiddler Stuart Duncan of The Nashville Bluegrass Band and having recorded a duet album together called Pre-Sequel in 1980, Alison then attended Harvard and got her MBA at UCLA. From there she went to work as an investment banker at Smith Barneyin San Francisco for two years, before deciding to return toher career as a musician.
In January of this year, Alison Brown returned to the UK for a short tour of London, Sheffieldand four dates in Glasgow as part of the Celtic Connection festival. I was fortunate to meet-up with her at Sheffield's Pheasant Inn, where Alison appeared on this occasion, with her quintet, drawing a full house for their performance,including all available standing space. Congratulating Alison on her two recent Grammy Nominations, she said, "It was a huge surprise, because as you know in the bluegrass category, there is a lot of competition this year. I was really surprised to get a nomination for the album and Country Instrumental too. There is so much great music out there, so I was delighted!" I asked Alison to tell me about the change of style in her music. "I started playing banjo when I was ten. I got turned on to it by listening to Earl Scruggs and his Foggy Mountain Banjo record. I just fell in love with bluegrass music. Pretty much all the bands that I played in, until I joined Michelle Shocked in 1992, were bluegrass bands. Local southern California groups playing with Stuart Duncan, which I did as a teenager. Then in college I played with a bluegrass group called Northern Lights out of the Boston area. Through business school and the time I lived in San Francisco, I played with different bluegrass bands and joined Union Station in 89. So through all of that there is a lot of bluegrass, but when I made my first record, I worked with David Grisman and we came up with this record Simple Pleasures, which I didn't think the bluegrass community were going to embrace. We put cello and percussion; there's flute on there. Really stretching the envelope. So when that got a Grammy nomination for Bluegrass Album, I was really, really surprised.
With the new record, my goal was to try and make a record that was really bluegrass. Because I felt that was something I hadn't done before. Over the last four to five years with my quartet, I've had them veering towards a more jazz direction. Writing my own tunes and finding they were taking me away from bluegrass and more towards jazz, with Fairweather I wanted to make a bluegrass record. I tried to write tunes that would fit into the bluegrass genre and get pop vocal covers and interpret them in a bluegrass fashion and really make something that would fit between the lines of bluegrass." I asked Alison why she came to choose the 60s song, Everybody's Talking, (from the movie Midnight Cowboy), for Fairweather. "It was the suggestion of my husband Gary West, who produced the record. It is a great song and has really good feel for banjo. It has a nice mid-tempo whirls sound that works great on the banjo and Tim O'Brien, lyrically it just fits him. So I got all the guys from NewGrange, which is an acoustic group that I have been touring with over the past few years and we recorded that track. Incidentally, that was the first track off the record." With the mention of NewGrange, I asked Alison how the group had come together. "That's an interesting story, as it's kind of backwards for a band. It started off with Mike Marshall and Darol Anger being contacted by their agent saying…I have an opportunity for a band to do a Christmas tour…So those guys said…it could be cool… and they called up Tim O'Brien, Todd Phillips and Phil Aaberg and myself and we put this band together to do a tour. We thought that if we are going to do a tour, we might as well do a record, so that we have a record to sell at the gigs. So we did a Christmas record, went out and did the tour and then decided that we liked playing so much together that we should start a band. So it is completely backwards, first the tour then the record, then the band. While we were doing the Christmas record there was a tune called 'NewGrange' that Tim O'Brien wrote that was about the wintersolstice in a place in Ireland. And we thought that would be just great name for a group, because it invokes a kind of agrarian theme. What we are trying to do with NewGrange is incorporate different elements of American Roots music into a contemporary hybrid, but still paying a lot of attention to the traditional roots. It was a fun record to make and it's a great bunch. We did a bunch of touring together this year. The band has a very unique sound, because it is a string band with piano and Phil Aaberg does an amazing job of keeping the piano fitting into the context, without taking anything away from it, but adding a really unique dimension. It's a really great bunch. For me it's a thrill to get to stand by Mike Marshall, who's one of my musical icons and I just can't believe that I'm playing in it." (continued in April 2001.....) Graham Lees, Heywood. Write to | Website
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By Graham Lees
Bluegrass
fans may remember Alison Brown from the band Union Station, which features
top fiddle player Alison Krauss. Brown played with Krauss from 1989 to 1991,
and in her final year with the band, won the International Bluegrass Music
Association's Banjo Player of the Year award, the first time a female won
as Best Instrumentalist. From there she toured with Michelle Shocked, playing
banjo, acoustic and electric guitars, as well as the Dobro. Since then she
has recorded and toured with her own band, known simply as the Alison Brown
Quartet.
Photo right: Tom Travis accompanies Alison Brown at
Sheffield