The Cutting Edge

“pan-cultural” ethos and all but declared Nickel Creek the
bluegrass Beatles.
Close, perhaps. On the essential Nickel Creek debut, the musicians
cull stylistic statements from folk, classical, pop, country,
Celtic, and jazz, adeptly deploying these elements over the course
of a dozen mostly original songs that are by turns haunting and
exhilarating. Krauss is all over Nickel Creek, especially in the sustained
dreamy ambience that pervades most tracks.
Yet Nickel Creek is a band that prides itself not on rising to
the challenge but in redefining the challenge each time out.
Hence, the deserved critical ballyhoo and emotional investment in
the work of three young people who weren’t even born when the
progressive movement flourished, but who have gone back and
picked up the basics from Monroe on, then added stylistic
approaches from outside the bluegrass realm to become a kind of
new progressive movement all their own. The band’s third album,
2005’s Why Should the Fire Die, produced not by Krauss but by
Eric Valentine and Tony Berg, is driven by tales of troubled relationships
and wrenching interior monologues addressing love
gone awry, with the producers packing the soundscape with information
in the form of sonic buzzes, clicks, sighs, and bleeps that
serve as an electronic Greek chorus signaling another relationship
shorting out. There is a countrified, jubilant instrumental
(“Stumptown”) and an unsettling, melancholic bluegrass-based
instrumental rumination titled “Scotch & Chocolate,” but musical
explorations lean heavier towards folk and dark edgy pop.
Even as Nickel Creek and Thile explore new turf, the traditional
very much has its place in contemporary bluegrass. After
serving a near-year-long tenure in 1963-64 as one of Monroe’s
Bluegrass Boys, North Carolina native Del McCoury set out on
a solo career, working the burgeoning Pennsylvania-Maryland-
Virginia circuit in his spare time away from his day jobs. In
1987, he cut an album (The McCoury Brothers) for Rounder with
his brother, but the course of his career was altered first in 1981
when he welcomed into his band his then-13-year-old son
Ronnie, a mandolin whiz who has been named the International
Bluegrass Music Association’s Mandolin Player of the Year for
eight consecutive years, and again in 1987, with the arrival in
the professional ranks of his other son, Rob, a banjo-picker par
excellence. As the Del McCoury Band, this quintet—rounded
out by engaging bassist Mike Bub (replaced by Alan Bartram on
the group’s stirring new gospel album, The Promised Land) and
fiddler Jason Carter—has made the distinctions between progressive
and traditional irrelevant, so advanced is the soloing, so
compelling is the musicians’ emotional commitment, and so
piercing is Del’s quintessential high lonesome tenor.
Del has written solid originals (his “I Feel the Blues Moving
In” from 1990’s Don’t Stop the Music should become a bluegrass
standard), and Ronnie McCoury, who has also become the band’s
producer, always has a barn-burning instrumental to add.
Otherwise, the McCourys range far and wide for material, from
usual suspects to mainstream country writers such as Lefty
Frizzell and Harlan Howard, to folk rockers on the order of
Richard Thompson (whose “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” has
become a beloved McCoury standard) to classic American pop a
la Frank Sinatra (“Learnin’ the Blues”), even embracing renegade
country in cutting Steve Earle’s “If You Need a Fool” and then
collaborating with Earle on The Mountain. In addition to the
must-have Promised Land, Rounder’s single-disc overview of
McCoury’s 1987-1995 tenure with the label, High Lonesome and
Blue, offers a succinct portrait of Del and the boys coming of age,
as well as including some interesting Del solo cuts from back in
the day. An essential McCoury collection might well contain
every album the band has released, but most certainly has to
include 1996’s The Cold Hard Facts, 2001’s Del and the Boys, and
1992’s Blue Side of Town, incorporating the Patty Loveless title
tune, Earle’s “If You Need a Fool,” and Arthur “Big Boy”
Crudup’s “That’s Alright Mama.” Basically, any Del McCoury
Band album is a primer in bluegrass that at once looks forward
even as it embraces the music’s core values of yore.
And McCoury isn’t alone. Dolly Parton, Patty Loveless,
Mountain Heart, Ricky Skaggs, the Grascals, Blue Highway,
Ralph Stanley, Jim Lauderdale, Marty Stuart—bluegrass
embraces its elder statesmen, draws in established country
artists who revitalize their careers by returning to the source of
their inspiration, and welcomes young practitioners steeped in
tradition but ready to move the music into the future. It’s a true
and timeless thing, as Mr. Bill knew way back when. &
52 THE ABSOLUTE SOUND ■ SEPTEMBER 2006