Sam Bush – Man with a mandolin
“The same is true of bass,” he adds. “Most electric bassists play too loud. John [Cowan], T. Michael Coleman and Byron Hill are the ones I enjoy playing with. In a string-band setting, you have to be content not standing out as much as you would in rock or jazz. It takes a person with real taste and a great sense of timing to just sit back and let the bass be the bass and not a lead instrument. Some people call me the Bass Nazi, because I played bass in high school and have definite ideas about how it should be played. Timing is everything; that’s my trip.”
If the drums and bass are going to be that understated, you might ask, why bother with them at all? Because they solve the problem of the missing bottom half of Anglo-Celtic folk music. That tradition — responsible for most of the branches of country and folk music in America — provides dizzying melodies and harmonies, but the instrumentation is all in the tenor, alto and soprano ranges. There’s nothing wrong with that, unless you’re used to hearing African-American music; then you can’t help but notice the absent lower range. Bush’s cubist solution was arrangements that allowed the European string instruments to come through clearly while fleshing out the bottom.
He refined this approach on his 1998 studio album Howlin’ At The Moon and on 2000’s Ice Caps: Peaks Of Telluride, a collection of live performances at Colorado’s Telluride Festival from throughout the 1990s. Before he could release another solo album, though, he got drawn into two projects he couldn’t resist.
The first was Short Trip Home, the name of a group and a 1999 album organized by bassist Edgar Meyer. Bush and Meyer had been part of the legendary Strength In Numbers quintet (with Fleck, Douglas and O’Connor) that took a chamber-music approach to new grass picking. Their 1989 album, The Telluride Sessions, proved the pinnacle of the new-acoustic movement. Meyer had pursued the promise of that project with Yo-Yo Ma and Mark O’Connor on Appalachian Journey, and now he wanted to do something similar with Short Trip Home — a quartet with Bush, Grisman alumnus Mike Marshall and classical violinist Joshua Bell.
“Edgar wrote those tunes to stretch me and Mike into classical music, and to stretch Josh into playing mountain fiddle tunes,” Bush observes. “Mike’s a much better guitar player than I am, so I got to play mandolin. Those tunes are written as if they were fiddle tunes but with a classical twist, and Edgar plays counterpoint to everything. I came away with an incredible respect for classical musicians and their musicianship, because I realized how hard they work. I practice, but I’ve never been a fanatic for practice the way they are.”
The second project was a long-delayed collaboration with Grisman. Bush was a wide-eyed 13-year-old kid from Bowling Green when he met Grisman, a 20-year-old New Yorker, at the 1965 Roanoke Bluegrass Festival. Ten years later, they had emerged, along with Skaggs, as the leading mandolinists in the new grass movement.
Bush and Grisman jammed whenever their paths crossed and often talked about doing an album together, but somehow never got around to it. For one thing, they promised each other it wouldn’t be one of those underwhelming albums where two veterans just vamp on a bunch of old standards. They wanted to co-write most of the material, and that required a major time investment.
“We wanted to do it for a long time,” Bush acknowledges, “but I live in the east and he lives in the west, and that makes it hard to write. We were both friends of John Hartford, though, and when he was dying, we said to each other, ‘We’ve got to get together and do this record. What if something happens to one of us? How would we feel if it were left undone?’
“So John was really the catalyst for the project, and the first tune on the record is about him. For all our differences — David is more interested in jazz, and I’m more into rock ‘n’ roll; he’s devoted to mandolin instrumentals, while I like to sing and play fiddle and guitar — it’s amazing how similar our styles are.”
When Bush finally got around to making another solo album, the new King Of My World, he wove together all the various strands of his career. The result is a kaleidoscopic array of styles that is decidedly Picassoesque.
“Bananas” is a jazzy instrumental originally intended for the Grisman album. A South African tune, “Spirit Is The Journey”, is infused with the reggae of Crucial Country. A Nash Ramblers-like version of the old-time country tune “Eight More Miles To Louisville” not only celebrates Bush’s old stomping grounds but also its writer, Grandpa Jones, a friend of Bush’s father. “Majestic” is a straightforward bluegrass tune by Ed Snodderly of the Brother Boys. “The Wizard Of Oz” is an unabashed valentine to Bush’s favorite baseball player, Ozzie Smith of the St. Louis Cardinals.
And as on a New Grass Revival record, there are string-band arrangements of singer-songwriter numbers balanced by jazz-rock jams played on bluegrass instruments. The folkish songs come from Jeff Black, Anders Osborne and Keb’ Mo’, while the instrumentals include the new-grassy “Puppies ‘N Knapsacks” and the Flecktones-like “The Mahavishnu Mountain Boys”.
Of that last title, Bush explains, “One time at a bluegrass festival in North Carolina, the New Grass Revival came off the stage, and this old boy came up to us and said, ‘Who do you think you are, the Mahavishnu Mountain Boys or something?’ I was a big John McLaughlin fan, so I thought it was a great name.
“There’s so much rock ‘n’ roll in my music that people would say, ‘Why don’t you get an electric guitar and make some money?’ But no. I loved the lifestyle of bluegrass; I loved going to the festivals and seeing all my pals; it was like a big club you belonged to. When I was younger, I would fool around with guitar and bass, but I kept coming back to the fiddle and mandolin. There’s something about those high-pitched instruments played real fast that just gets to me.”
Geoffrey Himes is just two days younger than Sam Bush and feels the same way about Cal Ripken that Bush feels about Ozzie Smith.