Special Consensus at Nottingham -
A Preliminary Report

WOOOAAAAAAH! DEREK!

You should have been there! Last night we put on Special Consensus in Westbridgford, Nottingham and it was just a fabulous night that everyone is going to remember for a long, long time. My old friend Eric Kwiatkowski was amongst the crowd and he’ll be letting you have the, ‘full Monty’ on the details. But I can’t wait to tell you about the tremendous atmosphere that gripped the place and the ripping performance of the band. When we saw that the Consensus were doing a tour Mark Tindle (of our band) and myself thought we’d go for them and just gamble on getting enough folks to see them to make it an, “on-proposition.” My wife Pat and I worked ourselves into the ground organising the event and never realised how much work is necessary if something like this is to succeed. How’s the song go? “Hard times and troubles and worries I have seen...” but let me tell you, we’d do it all again tomorrow for a band like this.

Whenwe “go out” (= do a booking. Ed.) we tape our own band through the mixer, and Greg Cahill was generous enough to let me do the same with them. (I’m sorry that I won’t be able to pass that on of course, though anyone passing our placeis welcome to an ear-full!)

I can tell you that the stage performance is actually even better than the latest great CD of theirs, Our Little Town - and that’s really going some!

It was marvellous to see and feel the effect that this performance had on everyone in an audience which represented a real cross-section of musical taste. There was stunned admiration at the rippling virtuosity shown by all the musicians, both instrumentally and vocally. I’ve have never been to a gig of any kind where all the people were happy. It’s hard to go the against the adage, but the “Special” part of this band is that they did please all of the people all of the time

I know the audience agreed when I said afterwards that, “The only way we’re ever going to top that is to have them back again!” I’ve asked our friend Neil White to send you a good photo, which I’m sure he’ll do.

Geoff’ Bowers....Happy bunny of this parish!
Gotham, Nottingham. Write to Geoff

By Lynn Oliver

I recently received the book, which contains all of the songs from the So Long, So Wrong CD. It is 100 pages long, with a section in front with lyrics and pictures of the composers and a four-page full color photo section in the center. There is also a two-page explanation of tab at the end.

General impressions - this is a slick package primarily targeted at guitar players (though officially to guitar, banjo, and vocal). Most mandolin and fiddle solos are “arranged” for guitar; others are omitted. I’d like to see some background information included, but there is no text other than lyrics. Overall I’m pleased to see a bluegrass songbook targeted at the mass market and I hope it encourages a wider audience to explore more deeply into Bluegrass. The book is a bit pricey at $21.95, which translates to something like $28 delivered from Amazon.com. Of course if you want to learn some of the material from the album it is well worth the money.

Banjo tab - yes there is banjo tab included along with the guitar and vocals. Ron Block is credited as consultant, so there is some hope they are reasonably accurate. I learned the intro to No Place to Hide well enough to play along with the CD and it seems correct. The tab format is not very familiar - the music is given in standard notation with tab below, and the tab consists only of left-hand fingering. Since no stems or other indications are given in the tab you will have to rely on the standard notation for timing. Slides and pull-offs are shown with ties, and the notation for bends is also a bit odd.

Onething I couldn’t figure out was the tempo markings. The tempo for most tunes is given as “quarter note = 210” with the time signature given as cut time.

The correct tempo seems to be the given tempo divided by two, but applied to a half note (e.g. “half note = 105”). On the other hand, Little Liza Jane has the tempo as “half note = 166” which seems correct to me as stated.

As a beginner myself I can offer the following on the suitability of this book for beginners. While the style of notation may cause some minor problems, some of the banjo material is very straightforward. The up-the-neck passages will take a while to work out, but there is nothing wrong with that. I doubt that much of this material will be useful in terms of building a foundation of licks, but there are some tunes that are slow enough that many of us will be able to keep up with the CD.

Lynn Oliver, Redmond, WA, Write to Lynn

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Updated 23rd Jan 1999