Jody Stecher – Going Up On The Mountain
As though more evidence were needed, this reissue makes plain the fascinating consequences of the folk revival. Jody Stecher came of age during the second-wave revival of the ’60s, taking Ralph Rinzler’s slot as mandolinist in the Greenbrier Boys and then joining David Grisman in the New York Ramblers, before lighting out and meeting his wife and longtime musical companion Kate Brislin (their Heart Song is an essential collection of Utah Phillips tunes).
Grisman remembers Stecher as that “13 year old kid who, rumor had it, plays and sings better than Bill Monroe.” The hyperbole suggests Stecher’s style: a high, hotly honed voice, sometimes cutting through melodies like a scythe, sometimes unfolding like fine old velvet, warm and worn just right, beyond his years. His guitar, fiddle and mandolin playing are the stuff for which the critical cliches “soulful” and “masterful” were invented.
The Joycean-titled Snake Baked A Hoecake (1974) and Going Up On A Mountain (1977) have been surprisingly influential: Peter Rowan, David Grisman, Martin Simpson and Laurie Lewis, among others, have found material and aesthetic here. Recorded in living rooms and a tiny studio in the Bay Area, Stecher’s first albums demonstrate just what’s so damn special about his old-time music: rather than soup things up with rock attitude, or worse, studied purism, Stecher settles on timeless songs: “Wild Bill Jones”, “Black Waters”, and “Oh The Wind And Rain” (also called “Two Sisters”, the fodder for Dylan’s “Percy’s Song”).
Stecher’s fascination with Indian classical music appears full-blown in his elegiac version of Bob McDill’s “Amanda” and on “Leela”, which combines Hindu chant with steel guitar, tabla and mandolin. The two versions of what sounds like an authorless, eternal folk gem, “The Hills Of Isle Au Haut” (actually written by Gordon Bok), are Stecher’s masterpieces. Singing like the ghost of himself, lost in the foggy ruins of time and dreams, Stecher lands the most elusive catch of all — the truth.