More detached notes

The image on the right illustrates Alison Brown's online banjo teaching on the ArtistWorks website. On this link you can also listen to a 50-minute podcast interview of Alison Brown by Chris Pandolfi in his 'Inside the musician's brain' series. A Spotify playlist of Alison Brown recordings is included in Bluegrass Unlimited's weekly newsletter no. 142.

A week ago (21 July) the Bluegrass Situation online magazine published 'First & latest: Special Consensus' 40+year career', an interview by banjo-player Justin Hiltner with Greg Cahill, founder and leader of the Special Consensus, with YouTube recordings of Special C. numbers from their first and most recent albums.

Following yesterday's BIB post, we note that the Bluegrass Situation (BGS) published yesterday 'It's a great time to be on the Golden Highway', a new interview by Lonnie Lee Hood with Molly Tuttle, BGS's Artist of the Month, and others of her band Golden Highway. The photo above of the band is by Chelsea Rochelle.

For guitarists, the Bluegrass Situation presents a video (also on YouTube) of Jake Eddy and Jordan Tice playing the Norman Blake composition 'Orphan Annie' on their new Yamaha FG-9 guitars. More details are in the BGS article.

Canada's high-powered old-time trio the Lonesome Ace Stringband have a new album, Try to make it fly, scheduled for release in October, and released a single, 'Sweeter sound', which can be heard on YouTube and represents (as John Lawless's feature on Bluegrass Today puts it) 'a more Americana style of songwriting'.

Finally, another feature by Lonnie Lee Hood from the Bluegrass Situation a week ago: a compilation of seven videos illustrating occasions when the Father of Bluegrass, instead of playing mandolin, played acoustic or electric guitar, sang harmony, or danced (solo or with Emmylou Harris).

© Richard Hawkins