Bluegrass

From GusWiki

"Four men were standing together with instruments (guitar, banjo, mandolin and bass), and from the conversation, I could tell they had just met. ... By the fourth beat of the kickoff, all the instruments were playing. After the kickoff, the guitar player sang a verse and a chorus, and then the mandolin player played a wonderful break. ... Remember, these are the same two men who seconds before had said they did not know the song." -An Introduction to Bluegrass Jamming

Bluegrass is originally a form of American country music pioneered by -:Bill Monroe in the 1930s (it's younger than jazz!). Since the '60s, it started taking new forms, inspiring fusion musicians such as -:Béla Fleck, -:David Grisman and -:Alison Brown.

One amazing thing about bluegrass is that its simple harmonic structure enables total strangers to play with each other immediately, and freely improvise on tunes that they never heard before (often known as "picking parties" or "parking lot jam sessions").

My own initiation was through a college friend, Steve Grimes, who invited me to a folk festival in Lowell, Mass in the summer of 2001. When I heard James Price playing for Ralph Stanley, I decided that I would soon buy a fiddle.

Thankfully, I turned out to have a good ear, thanks to my largely unconscious obsession with solfegeing everything I hear; and with some help from the great folks at the Cantab Lounge, I soon became a fiddler.

My Repertoire (i.e. tunes I like)

• Faded Love
• Footprints in the Snow
• Orange Blossom Special
• Honeymoon Waltz
• Old Home Place
• Kentucky Waltz
• In the Pines

and surely some Stanley tunes that I'm forgetting.