Life in the bluegrass lane

When you close your eyes and think really hard on the banjo, odds are, it’s not a pretty vista.
Hardly the sexiest of string instruments, the banjo calls to mind incredibly hairy extras from The Dukes Of Hazzard plucking away before the confederacy flag or scary-assed pinheads in a John Boorman film. You do not picture a delicate scholarly blonde like Alison Brown.
“I know,” laughs the unlikely banjo virtuoso. “And instead of Deliverance country I grew up in Southern California so it was even weirder than you think it might be. But when I was ten I heard a record by Earl Scruggs, the guy who pioneered the three-finger style of banjo playing – you know, the car-chase, bank-robbery school of banjo – and I just loved it. So I like to think that if there’s any way that an instrument can choose you, then the banjo came looking for me.”
That would certainly seem like the only reasonable explanation. Raised in prime surf territory (“I went to a high school that was a block from the beach. Do you guys say 'geek' here? That’s me.”), Alison’s parents, both lawyers, were bemused, then somewhat dismayed by their daughter’s youthful passion for bluegrass.
“My parents encouraged me to think of the banjo as something to talk about at cocktail parties when I became a doctor,” she recalls. “So I just went off and did it. I was fortunate because I grew up with Stuart Duncan, who is now one of the most famous Nashville fiddle players, and his dad was a retired marine who drove us around the festivals to play together. If it hadn’t been for them I probably wouldn’t have had the chance because, understandably, the last thing my parents wanted to do on Saturdays was stand around in a cow pasture at some weekend bluegrass festival.”
Happily, Alison had less trouble fitting in on those cow fields than one might suppose.
“Occasionally I still hear, ‘What you doing with that big ol’ banjo, little lady?’" she admits, "but with bluegrass everybody is new to the party. It’s a very new form of music. It only came together in 1945. You have to think of it as a kind of late sonic reaction to the industrialisation of the South. And it’s evolved a lot since then. That old time mountain music had, over a couple of decades, become faster and more aggressive. So nugrass, as some call it, was a revolution. During the ‘60s and ‘70s, David Grisman, the mandolinist and a lot of other folky types from New York incorporated a kind of swing and precision into those older forms. So it’s a very short history.”
Making an immediate splash, in 1978 Alison would take first place in the Canadian National Banjo Championship, an honour that secured her a one-night gig at the Grand Ole Opry. Even before she had finished school, she and Stuart would record Pre-Sequel, a duo album for Ridge Runner Records. Then, just to really mark her out as Ms. Achievement, to appease the folks back home, she took some time out to read literature and history at Harvard, before moving on to an MBA at UCLA.
Though she didn’t know it at the time, her business qualifications would come in handy. In the early '90s, while touring as a bandleader for Michelle Shocked, she and bassist husband Garry West found themselves in Australia, where an opportunity arose to become North American distributors for Natural Symphonies, a world music label.
“Natural Symphonies was a mom and pop label with six titles in the catalogue,” she explains. “But it’s how we got started. We have around two hundred releases on our own label, Compass Records, now.”
Compass Records launched in Nashville in 1995 and has since become home to an impressively eclectic band of artists, representing world music, folk and jazz.
“We have several Irish artists too,” continues Alison. “Paul Brady and Sharon Shannon have released through us. I guess the music community around the world is pretty small. And Irish music is closely related to bluegrass. That’s how I came to it. Honestly, ten years ago I would have imagined Irish music to be guys in beards and fisherman sweaters, but some of the most exciting acoustic music in the world is emerging from Ireland and the UK. We’ve been working with Lunasa on Se and we’re really excited about that.”
Compass Records was founded as an artist-driven label. It’s a romantic notion, but what, I wonder, does it mean in practise.
“Well, major labels are all about giving the people what they think they want. Music Row is such a great example of that. You get these people who look like, smell like, sound like the real thing. You give the guy a song and a hat and a video and hey, he’s a country artist. So our whole approach is about finding music that we think is great art, get it out there, and hope that the people will find it.”
When not (hopefully) troubling the sleep of major record moguls, Alison Brown has been busy revolutionising banjo sound. It’s easy to hear the delicacy of Grisman and other nugrass stalwarts in Alison’s Grammy nominated 1991 release Simple Pleasures. (Indeed, Grisman took on production duties for that record.) Her most recent release, however, fuses that beautifully intricate plucked sound with jazzier rhythms. Gorgeous, dizzyingly accomplished and utterly unique, Stolen Moments is nothing if not pioneering.
“I guess as a writer, because of where I come from, there are lots of different influences in my music. I don’t think it’s jazz. Not structurally anyway. I suppose it’s primarily folk although really it’s a mess I haven’t found a proper moniker for. One of the things that I like about audiences over here is that they don’t mind not knowing what exact slot it fits into. In America musical retail relies too heavily on marketing, when really, there are two types of music – good music and bad music.”
Falling firmly into the latter category, Stolen Moments, with its impossibly pretty covers of Paul Simon’s ‘Homeward Bound’ and Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Angel’, looks set to subvert all possible preconceptions one might have of banjo playing.
“It’s kind of silly to say it really because I hate to differentiate between men and women, but most banjo players are guys and they play in a big right-handed macho way. I’m obviously not a guy with a big right hand. And the way I like to arrange music gives everyone a chance to speak. That’s a girl thing too. We’re consensus builders. I guess I’m just taking a more feminine approach. So it can’t just be about duelling banjos.”