Hot stuff from Patuxent

The BIB editor reports:

Hot stuff will of course be provided, on and off the stage, by the Patuxent Partners (USA) next month at the Athy and Ardara festivals and all the band's intervening shows (see the BIB calendar).

Hot stuff is also available in abundance and variety from Patuxent Music, the record company run by the Partners' leader and mandolinist, Tom Mindte, with a catalogue that includes bluegrass, old-time, country, blues, jazz, and swing. Bob Allen's article on the record label, published in Bluegrass Unlimited in Sept. 2012, quotes Tom on some of his main concerns:

l'm working with a lot of up-and-coming artists as well as artists [...] who have had long, successful careers, but aren't playing as much these days, but are still great.

Another side of Patuxent's catalogue is shown in the two historic releases pictured above. The 2-CD Patuxent banjo project comprises forty tracks by forty-two banjo players, all based in the Greater Washington/ Baltimore region - predominantly bluegrass, but on a spectrum ranging from old-time to classical. A treat for all banjo freaks, right down to the copious biographical notes, which often include details of the instruments played.

Red Allen & Frank Wakefield: the WDON recordings 1963 is a compilation of twenty-two songs and instrumentals originally broadcast live on radio station WDON in Wheaton, MD, by Allen, guitar; Wakefield, mandolin; Pete Kuykendall, banjo; and Tom Morgan, bass. It exemplifies hard-core bluegrass - and 'hard-core' does not mean 'fundamentalist'. This is bluegrass as it was made in its first twenty years - by musicians who had grown up hearing old-time music; the country music of Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, Jimmie Skinner, Bob Wills, and Al Dexter; and much more beside. As Mark Yacovone writes in the liner notes, 'Theirs was a music of passion and conviction.'