Nickel Creek "Nickel Creek" (2000)

Nickel Creek

Distinguished by their youth and eclectic taste, Nickel Creek became a word-of-mouth sensation on the progressive bluegrass scene and soon found their appeal spreading beyond the genre's core audience. Guitarist Sean Watkins, fiddler Sara Watkins (his younger sister), and mandolin/banjo/bouzouki player Chris Thile first started performing together in 1989, when all three were preteens and taking music lessons in their native San Diego. They met while watching the local band Bluegrass Etc., which put on weekly performances in a pizza parlor. A bluegrass promoter liked the idea of such a young band, and thus Nickel Creek was formed, with Thile's father Scott joining them on bass. Nickel Creek were regulars on the festival circuit through most of the '90s, and during that time, Thile recorded two solo albums, 1994's Leading Off... and 1997's Stealing Second. In 1998, with help from Alison Krauss, Nickel Creek landed a record deal with the roots music label Sugar Hill. Krauss produced their self-titled debut album, which was released in 2000; with the kids apparently all right, Scott subsequently retired from the band. Though it was decidedly a bluegrass record, Nickel Creek boasted elements of classical, jazz, and rock & roll both classic and alternative; naturally, the influence of progressive bluegrass figures like Krauss, Edgar Meyer, and Béla Fleck was also apparent. Perhaps aided by the success of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which brought traditional roots music to a whole new collegiate audience, Nickel Creek became a slow-building hit; by early 2002, it had gone gold, climbed into the country Top 20, and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Bluegrass Album. Meanwhile, Sean released his solo debut, Let It Fall, in 2001, and Thile followed suit with Not All Who Wander Are Lost. Nickel Creek released their sophomore set, This Side, in 2002; it debuted in the Top 20 of the pop charts and went all the way to number two on the country listings. Even more eclectic than its predecessor, the Krauss-produced album turned indie rock fans' heads with a cover of Pavement's "Spit on a Stranger." This Side won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album in early 2003, after which Sean issued his second solo album, 26 Miles. In 2005, the group worked with producers Tony Berg and Eric Valentine (the latter had worked with Smash Mouth and Queens of the Stone Age) to produce Why Should the Fire Die?, a dark and introspective collection of new material that found the trio steering even further away from their bluegrass beginnings. In mid-2006, Nickel Creek announced it would be taking an indefinite hiatus following a scheduled tour the next year, so its members could concentrate on solo work. Thile eventually formed Punch Brothers, releasing a debut album, Punch, on Nonesuch in 2009. Sara Watkins also released an album on Nonesuch in 2009, the self-titled Sara Watkins, which was produced by John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin fame. Sean Watkins, who had formed Fiction Family with Jon Foreman (of Switchfoot), also released an album in 2009, the duo's self-titled Fiction Family from ATO Records. Meanwhile, siblings Sara and Sean continued to host a monthly revue called the Watkins Family Hour at Hollywood's Largo club, playing free form and impromptu sets with the wide array of musicians who might be in town for the evening, including at different times Gabe Witcher, Benmont Tench, Greg Leisz, Jon Brion, Michael Witcher, Jackson Browne, Glen Phillips, Mark O'Connor, Ethan Johns, Matt Chamberlain, Tim O'Brien, and Tom Brosseau, among others.

Source: All Music.com.

Joshua Bell & Edgar Meyer, with Sam Bush and Mike Marshall "Short trip home" (1999)

Joshua Bell

JOSHUA BELL has enchanted audiences worldwide with his breathtaking virtuosity and tone of rare beauty. His restless curiosity and multifaceted musical interests have taken him in exciting new directions which have earned him the rare title of “classical music superstar.” Often referred to as the poet of the violin, Bell is the recipient of the Avery Fisher Prize and is the newly named Music Director of The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. Bell first came to national attention at the age of 14 in a highly acclaimed orchestral debut with Riccardo Muti and the Philadelphia Orchestra. His Carnegie Hall debut and a recording contract further confirmed his presence in the music world. Today he is equally at home as a soloist, chamber musician, orchestra leader and composer who performs his own cadenzas to several of the major concerto repertoire. “Bell, Gramophone stated simply, is dazzling.”
Bell’s 2011 festival appearances include Ravinia, Tanglewood, Verbier and Mostly Mozart. He will perform with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Montreal, Dallas, Colorado, Atlanta, and National Symphony orchestras, in San Francisco, as part of the Symphony’s 100th anniversary celebration in recital, with the orchestra, and as leader and soloist with The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. Fall highlights include a recital at Carnegie Hall, appearances with the New York Philharmonic and extensive tours through Europe including cities such as Munich, Berlin, Vienna and Paris.
2012 highlights include a 15-city US tour with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, and a North American recital tour with pianist Sam Haywood. In Europe, Bell will tour with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Vladimir Jurowski and in recital with Jeremy Denk in cities to include London, Paris and Berlin.
Bell records exclusively for Sony Classical, a MASTERWORKS label. French Impressions, his new album with Jeremy Denk will be released in January 2012 and is Bell’s first sonata recording for Sony Classical. The disc will include repertoire by Ravel, Saint Saëns and Franck.
Since his first LP recording at age 18, Bell has recorded more than 36 CDs. Recent releases include the soundtrack to For Colored Girls, At Home With Friends, featuring Chris Botti, Sting, Josh Groban, Regina Spektor, Tiempo Libre and others, the Defiance soundtrack, Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, The Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with the Berlin Philharmonic, The Red Violin Concerto, The Essential Joshua Bell, Voice of the Violin and Romance of the Violin which Billboard named the 2004 Classical CD of the Year, and Bell the Classical Artist of the Year. He has also recorded critically acclaimed recordings of Sibelius and Goldmark as well as Beethoven and Mendelssohn concertos both featuring his own cadenzas, and the Grammy Award winning Nicholas Maw concerto. His Grammy-nominated recording Gershwin Fantasy premiered a new work for violin and orchestra based on themes from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Its success led to a Grammy-nominated all-Bernstein recording that included the premiere of the West Side Story Suite as well as a new recording of the composer’s Serenade. With the composer and double bass virtuoso Edgar Meyer, Bell appeared on the Grammy-nominated crossover recording Short Trip Home and a disc of concert works by Meyer and the 19th-century composer Giovanni Bottesini. Bell also collaborated with Wynton Marsalis on the Grammy-winning spoken word children’s album, Listen to the Storyteller and Bela Fleck’s Grammy Award winning Perpetual Motion. Sony Classical film soundtracks on which Bell has performed also include The Red Violin, which won the Oscar for Best Original Score, the Classical Brit-nominated Ladies in Lavender and Academy Award-winning film Iris.
Bell has premiered new works by composers Nicholas Maw, John Corigliano, Aaron Jay Kernis, Edgar Meyer, Behzad Ranjbaran and Jay Greenberg.
Bell and his two sisters grew up on a farm in Bloomington, Indiana. As a child, he indulged in many passions outside of music, becoming an avid computer game player and a competitive athlete. He placed fourth in a national tennis tournament at age 10 without having taken a single lesson, and still keeps his racquet close by. Bell received his first violin at age four after his parents, both mental health professionals, noticed him plucking tunes with rubber bands he had stretched around the handles of his dresser drawers. By 12 he was serious about the instrument, thanks in large part to the inspiration of renowned violinist and pedagogue Josef Gingold, who had become his beloved teacher and mentor.
Millions of people are just as likely to have seen Bell on The Tonight Show as Tavis Smiley, Charlie Rose, or CBS Sunday Morning. In 2010 Bell starred in his fifth Live From Lincoln Center Presents broadcast titled: Joshua Bell with Friends@ The Penthouse. Other PBS shows include Great Performances – Joshua Bell: West Side Story Suite from Central Park, Memorial Day Concert performed on the lawn of the United States Capitol, Sesame Street and A&E’s Biography. He has twice performed on the Grammy Awards telecast, performing music from Short Trip Home and West Side Story Suite. He was one of the first classical artists to have a music video air on VH1, he has been the subject of a BBC Omnibus documentary and he appeared as himself in the film Music of the Heart starring Meryl Streep. Bell has been profiled in publications ranging from The New York Times and Newsweek to People Magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People issue, Gramophone and USA Today.
Stated Strad: “Joshua Bell will be the one remembered in 50 years time.”
In 1989, Bell received an Artist Diploma in Violin Performance from Indiana University. His alma mater honored him with a Distinguished Alumni Service Award only two years after his graduation. He has been named an “Indiana Living Legend” and has received the Indiana Governor’s Arts Award.
Bell was named 2010 Instrumentalist of the Year by Musical America Bell, he is an inductee of the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame, recognized as a young global leader by the World Economic Forum, serves on the artist committee of the Kennedy Center Honors and is on the Board of Directors of the NewYork Philharmonic. He is the recipient of the Humanitarian Award from Seton Hall University; was honored by Education Through Music for his dedication to sharing his love of classical music with disadvantaged youth and received the Academy of Achievement Award for exceptional accomplishment in the arts.
In 2009 he performed at Ford’s Theatre before President Obama which was followed by an invitation from the President and Mrs. Obama to perform at the White House.
Bell performs on the 1713 Gibson ex Huberman Stradivarius violin and uses a late18th century French bow by Francois Tourte.

Source: Joshua Bell.com.

Jerry Douglas, Russ Barenberg & Edgar Meyer "Skip, hop and wobble" (1993)

Russ Barenberg & Edgar Meyer

Russ Barenberg (acoustic guitar) & Edgar Meyer (double bass)

RUSS BARENBERG

Acoustic guitarist Russ Barenberg is known as one of the most melodic instrumentalists in contemporary acoustic music, and his compositions are among the finest the genre has to offer. He got his start in 1970 with the groundbreaking bluegrass band Country Cooking and since then has been a member of a variety of highly influential groups, most notably his collaboration from 1989 to 2001 in a trio with dobro master Jerry Douglas and bassist Edgar Meyer. Barenberg’s 1979 debut solo album Cowboy Calypso showcased his sophisticated playing and immediately established him as one of the premier composers and arrangers in the emerging new acoustic scene. His work since then, including his most recent collection, When at Last (2007), reflects an ever-deepening musicality with continuing dedication to vibrant, roots-based melodies and ensemble interplay. “Little Monk,” the opening track from When at Last, was nominated for the 2008 GRAMMY for Best Country Instrumental Performance.

Barenberg began playing guitar at the age of 13 in Chester County, Pennsylvania, west of Philadelphia. He took lessons from Alan Miller, the older brother of future band mate, guitarist John Miller, and was inspired early on by guitarists Doc Watson, Mississippi John Hurt, and Clarence White along with a wide range of old-time, bluegrass and contemporary folk and blues artists.
While attending Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, in 1970, Barenberg joined with Peter Wernick, Tony Trischka, Kenny Kosek and John Miller to form Country Cooking. During the four years that Country Cooking was together, the group recorded two influential albums, Country Cooking: 14 Bluegrass Instrumentals and Barrel of Fun and accompanied mandolinist Frank Wakefield on a third album. Barenberg also played on a number of Trischka’s solo albums throughout the 1970’s.
After Country Cooking disbanded in 1975, Barenberg temporarily switched to electric guitar and performed with a jazz-rock band, Carried Away. In 1977 he moved to New York and, together with Trischka, Miller, and fiddler Matt Glaser, formed the eclectic string band, Heartlands. Heartlands backed Barenberg on many of the cuts on Cowboy Calypso.
Moving to Boston in 1979, he joined Glaser and fiddler/mandolinist Jay Ungar in the triple-fiddle band Fiddle Fever, recording two albums with the group. Fiddle Fever’s recording of “Ashokan Farewell” was later used as the centerpiece for the soundtrack to Ken Burns’ celebrated documentary, The Civil War. Barenberg played on the soundtracks for several other Burns’ films as well, including The Brooklyn Bridge, The Shakers and Huey Long. During this time, he also worked with Glaser and mandolinist Andy Statman in the experimental bluegrass-jazz band Laughing Hands. Barenberg recorded his second solo album, Behind the Melodies, in 1983. That album, along with his appearance on Jerry Douglas’s 1982 release, Fluxedo, marked the beginnings of an ongoing series of collaborations between the two musicians. While in Boston, Barenberg was also active in the vibrant contradance scene, playing frequently for dances. He played on fiddler Rodney Miller’s recording, Airplang, which was seminal to the development of contradance music in the late 80’s and 90’s. A number of Barenberg’s own tunes have since become popular standards in the contradance repertoire.
Barenberg moved to Nashville in 1986 and has lived there since. Along with Douglas, he worked for several years accompanying Irish singer, Maura O’Connell, and in 1988 recorded his third solo album, Moving Pictures, another beautiful collection of original instrumentals featuring Douglas, Meyer, banjoist Bela Fleck, and fiddlers Mark O’Connor and Stuart Duncan, among others. The previously mentioned trio with Douglas and Meyer, active throughout the 1990’s, was a highly original ensemble that further reshaped the direction of acoustic music. Their popular 1993 recording, Skip, Hop & Wobble, has been extremely influential with the a new generation of acoustic instrumentalists. In 1996 Barenberg worked with Douglas, fiddler Darol Anger and Los Angeles-based music producer Snuffy Walden to create the soundtrack for Homecoming, a film starring Anne Bancroft.
Barenberg has performed and recorded with many other top acoustic and country music artists including Randy Travis, Emmy Lou Harris, Ricky Skaggs, Tim O’Brien, Sam Bush, Paul Brady, Darryl Scott, Joan Osborne, Bryan Sutton, Aly Bain, Phil Cunningham, Eddi Reader, Natalie McMaster and Sharon Shannon. Many of these musical associations came about through his ongoing work on The Transatlantic Sessions, a series of television shows produced in Scotland beginning in 1994 that bring together top acoustic musicians from the British Isles and the United States for collaborative performances. The fourth and most recent group of Transatlantic Sessions was filmed in March 2009.

Known widely as an exceptional teacher and author of instructional materials, Barenberg is regularly in demand at workshops and music camps throughout the country. He has been on staff at the Telluride and Rocky Grass Academies in Colorado, Steve Kaufman's camp in Tennessee, The Puget Sound Guitar Workshop in Washington, Augusta Heritage in West Virginia, Pinewoods in Massachusetts, and Fiddle and Dance at Ashokan in New York state.
Barenberg currently freelances in Nashville and performs with his own group--The Russ Barenberg Quartet. His 2007 release on Compass Records is described well by music writer Jon Weisberger:  “…while ensemble interplay is the foundation of When at Last, its heart and soul ultimately is to be found in Barenberg’s tunes—some dating back to the early 90s, others composed shortly before recording began—and in his glistening playing. Few guitarists so perfectly blend a mastery of roots music traditions with melodic originality, or so finely balance muscularity with delicacy, and each moment of the album is shaped by these artistic dualities…”

EDGAR MEYER

Edgar Meyer (born November 24, 1960) is a prominent contemporary bassist and composer. His styles include classical, bluegrass, newgrass, and jazz. Meyer has worked as a session musician in Nashville, part of various chamber groups, a composer, and an arranger. His collaborators have spanned a wide range of musical styles and talents; among them are Joshua Bell, Yo-Yo Ma, Béla Fleck, Zakir Hussain, Sam Bush, James Taylor, Chris Thile, Mike Marshall, Mark O'Connor, Alison Krauss, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and the trio Nickel Creek.

Meyer grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He learned to play the double bass from his father, the late Edgar Meyer, Sr., who directed the string orchestra program for the local public school system. Meyer later went on to Indiana University to study with Stuart Sankey.
Meyer is noted for achieving virtuosity on an instrument of unusual technical difficulty. Following in the footsteps of other bass players like Gary Karr and Mark Bernat before him, he has tried a hand at performing music originally composed for other instruments, such as Bach's unaccompanied cello suites.
Meyer has also composed a number of works, including two double bass concertos, a string quintet, a double concerto for bass and cello, and a violin concerto in 1999 composed specifically for Hilary Hahn.
In 2000, he won the Avery Fisher Prize, given once every few years to classical instrumentalists for outstanding achievement. In 2002, he was named a MacArthur Fellow. Meyer's collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma and Mark O'Connor on the widely acclaimed Sony Classical disc Appalachia Waltz reached the top of the United States pop charts for 16 weeks when it was released. Meyer collaborated again with Yo-Yo Ma and Mark O'Connor on Appalachian Journey, that earned a Grammy Award for Best Classical Crossover Album.
On Meyer's self-titled 2006 Sony Classical release, he performs accompanied only by himself on a wide variety of instruments besides his usual piano and double bass, including guitar, banjo, viola da gamba, mandolin and dobro.
Meyer is Adjunct Associate Professor of Double Bass at Vanderbilt University's Blair School of Music, as well as at the Curtis Institute.

Sources: Russ Barenberg.com and Wikipedia.

Jerry Douglas "The best kept secret" (2005)

Jerry Douglas "Lookout for hope" (2002)

Jerry Douglas "Restless on the farm" (1998)

Jerry Douglas "Under the wire" (1986)

Jerry Douglas

A man walks into a diner. He looks familiar with the place but still a little lonely and detached. He sits down and orders, and as he waits he becomes aware of the voices of the other customers. He listens to those voices, and his expression changes from detachment to attentiveness. The meanings of the words he overhears dwindle away, and the man begins to discern in them instead nonverbal tones and patterns. Phrasing, counterpoint, arpeggios, voices as “instruments” with distinctive qualities. Finally, for the man who is sitting there alone, the diner’s babble is transformed into a kind of music. He smiles.
    The man is actor Colm Feore, portraying the great Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, in one of the short films from the movie “Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould.” This quirky, montage-like Canadian work, made in 1993, was not a huge commercial success, but it did win some prestigious awards and has a cult following to this day. It was based, at least numerically, on Bach’s marvelous piano composition “The Goldberg Variations”—of which there are—uh, thirty-two.
   Jerry Douglas is doing some deep-breathing exercises prior to his appearance. That rhythmic clapping from the balcony doesn’t help. If you think this preamble is pretentious, it might be good to remember that “Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould” was parodied as “Twenty Two Short Films About Springfield” by “The Simpsons.”
    The diner scene from this movie shows a great musician allowing himself—almost willing himself—to hear spoken language a) pre-verbally, as if he were a baby and didn’t know what words mean, even what they are, and b) hearing it as if it were simply notes—notes in which, taken together, because he is in fact a brilliant artist, he discovers a sort of spontaneous, improvised musical composition. He responds to what he hears in a very primal, almost infantile way and then with his adult genius imposes order and feeling upon it.
    Jerry Douglas is now checking to make sure that his shirt is not tucked in. He’ll be here any second. Please quit the stomping. 
    This movie’s  “Concerto for Ten or Fifteen Unrelated Diner Voices and Clinking Silverware,” as one might think of it, conveys not only child-like auditory experience and the creative mind at work but also humor and authority--and an example of a huge talent for drawing inspiration from many different sources and synthesizing them. That’s JD’s cue, and here he is at last. You may applaud. 
    Jerry Douglas, who stands center stage before you now in the form of this new, masterful, and wide-ranging album, started his professional career when he was sixteen, the son of a steelworker, living in Warren, Ohio, and playing his instrument of choice, the Dobro, in bars. He has--like Glenn Gould as portrayed in the Concerto Diner--absorbed the sights and sounds around him and transmuted them into his own unique art by developing an eclectic style of playing and composing for the Dobro and other subspecies of resonator and slide guitars. His most clearly audible source is bluegrass—the genre in which he started and over which, if you ask me, he now presides. He has also conscripted and deployed: jazz, with its imperative to improvise; the raw emotion and twang of country music; the plaintive ragas of Indian sitars; Native American modal melodies; the sonata-allegro structures of classical music; Hawaiian music, with its sunny harmonies and marine swells; the note-packed virtuosities of Celtic tunes; woebegone New Orleans funeral marches; Dixieland's brassiness; gospel; and the blues. In a word or three, just about everything. You will also find folded into Douglas's music a great many other ingredients, among them rain, children's games, rivers, and a large amount of weeping—to say nothing of hogs, the war in Iraq, locomotives, confetti, bourbon, machine guns, and the entire cosmos.
    For all this variegation of influences and interests, two constants pervade Douglas's performances and compositions, and they are, as he has said in a recent conversation, “in some tension.” These creatively conflicting constants underlie all of the arts; one is discipline and the other is playfulness. “I always try to stay loose when I perform and when I record,” he says, “but I always worry that if I get too far away from the main idea, the whole thing will fall apart.” He wants his audience to embrace this paradox as well. “I want the music I play to be challenging, but I don't want it to sound that way.” We start “messing around” randomly when we're young children, and in many ways to grow up is to become more orderly, but in the course of that process we often tend to lose the delight of messing around. Successful art—and, in particular, music of any real texture—picks up what's lying around, musically and otherwise, and creates designs from it (again like Glenn Gould in the Lyric Café) and then leads us back through and by means of formal design to a kind of exalted play, in which order is at once questioned and maintained. It's no accident that the same simple verb applies to musical instruments and to games.
    You can think of Jerry Douglas's artistic development, from his earliest, pure-bluegrass days to this newest CD as a continuing maturation—an ever-increasing instrumental mastery, a broadening of scope, a wider range of emotion, an expanding openness and generosity. He just keeps growing up. The origins of the pieces on “Glide” show all these qualities. In his own composition “Sway,” for example, you can hear the bereft sound of a Bourbon Street funeral procession interrupted by an upbeat Dixieland interlude—as those marches often are. “I wanted the slow section to sound as if it was about to fall apart,” he says with a laugh—“to be on the edge of breaking down. Katrina is in there somewhere. Then the faster section is defiant and joyful.” Douglas wrote “Trouble On Alum”—a Scottish-sounding jig bookended by a more serene melody, to illustrate the river painting of William Matthews, the American artist of nature and the West. (Alum is the name of a creek in West Virginia.) When asked about the whirlwind-fast, downward-spiraling Dobro licks in the up-tempo part, Douglas says, laughing again, “They're like signatures. They're like signing my name with some flourishes.”
    The laughter interspersing these quotes is perhaps more nearly the point of citing them than the quotes themselves. For Douglas has great fun with his music. He says, “I enjoy what I'm doing so much that after performing I sometimes say to myself, 'I'm getting paid for that?'” His laughter and pleasure recall the smile on the face of Glenn Gould in that diner, and the people who join in this fun with Douglas are similarly playful and accomplished—Douglas's talented band and guests like his friend Edgar Meyer, the great bass player; Sam Bush, mandolinista supreme; Travis Tritt, the rough-and-tumble, truck-driver-voiced country singer with a surprisingly pretty falsetto; banjo pioneer/giant Earl Scruggs, about whom, simply, the more said the better; and Rodney Crowell, one of our best singer/songwriters. The whole recording at first seems like a cross between a jam session and something stricter—a recital. But if you consider the sense of play and the musical authority that, with a tributary of social consciousness, run beneath the songs here like powerful underground watercourses, you'll understand that it's not only wonderfully complex but also clearly of a piece.
Oh yes—and not only global but also profoundly American.

Source: Jerry Douglas.com.