Album Review: Keller & The Keels, "Grass" (SCI Fidelity)

Jam band darling Keller Williams is at our throats again, but this time, he has a little help from his friends - Larry and Jenny Keel, featured on guitar and bass. As the title suggests, Grass is a bluegrass album (not another type of grass you may have been wondering about), and a very fun one at that.

Grass gives the listener a glimpse at some of the stylistic influences that have been a part of Keller's guitar virtuosity all these years, as well as a peek into his newest experiment - standard rock mixed with improvisation. With only two guitars and a bass - not the typical bluegrass instrumentation which includes banjo, mandolin and fiddle - Grass is a more palatable introduction to the genre for newcomers than its twangy, "pure" version.

Like any other Keller Williams album, Grass has its own individual, quirky vitality. However, this particular release lets die hard fans down with its lack of Keller originals. Grass is dominated by bluegrass covers of an atypical variety of songs, far removed in origin from bluegrass (i.e. Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" and Tom Petty's "Mary Jane's Last Dance" transposed into "Mary Jane's Last Breakdown").

The originality of the material Keller infuses into the covers keeps the songs from becoming stale too soon, but with a 3:7 original to cover ratio, the album leaves its listener wanting more of Keller's own songwriting touch. Especially in wake of his hit concert DVD Sight released last summer, which showed Keller at his best - thriving in a live full-house setting, the album settled itself below expectations in terms of vibrancy. All in all, the studio effort of Grass, although competent, is much more pale than Keller's previous livelier work.


*****
Originally Published Mar 30, 2006, Buzz Weekly (Champaign-Urbana, Illinois)
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Album Review: The Essential Earl Scruggs

Whether you know it or not, you have heard his playing before. At nearly 80 years old, Earl Scruggs, the Paganini of the banjo, has had a successful career in music for the past 60 years, and his remarkably virtuosic bluegrass style has become associated with the genre itself, an indelible part of the American soundscape that has inspired and entertained for as long as it has been heard.

Disc One of this compilation features recordings from the earlier part of Scruggs' career, including "Foggy Mountain Breakdown," an effervescent instrumental from the start of Scruggs' 20-year-plus collaboration with guitarist-vocalist Lester Flatt, and "Heavy Traffic Ahead," an early track from his time as a musician with "the father of bluegrass" Bill Monroe and his band.

The second disc highlights Scruggs' more recent work, including fusiony ventures into rock- and blues-influenced bluegrass, only some of which are as aesthetically successful as the other tracks in the collection, though all are interesting. The haunting beauty of "Nashville Blues" alone makes this disc worth hearing.

Some of my favorite tracks are the purely instrumental ones; it is in the nonvocal realm that Scruggs' musical voice can be heard most clearly, and where the individual and collective talents of the musicians shine. The recordings all have a very clean sound quality, even the very early stuff from the 1940s is crisp and clear, making it hard to believe some of the tracks are as old as they are.

This recording serves as a decent retrospective of Scruggs' prolific and extensive career, and also as an excellent introduction to bluegrass (the bebop of country music) in the past 50-plus years. The music has an incredible amount of heart and spirit, and I defy anyone to listen to this without at least cracking a smile.

By the way, in case you are still stumped about where you've heard Scruggs' music before, it is his banjo that you hear in the theme song to the television series The Beverly Hillbillies.

*****
Originally Published Jan 6, 2005, Buzz Weekly (Champaign-Urbana, Illinois)
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