Tony Trischka - Earl Jam 2

Tony Trischka returns to Bluegrass Jam Along to talk about his new record Earl Jam 2, the follow up to the first volume of a fascinating project that began when Tony was sent a thumb drive of recordings of Earl Scruggs and John Hartford jamming together at home.

Volume 2 also has a great line up of special guests, including Billy Strings, Bruce Molsky, Molly Tuttle, Del McCoury, Sierra Ferrell and Sister Sadie.

Tony tells the fascinating story of how Farayi Malek ended up adding vocals to one tune, after Alison Krauss had done the scratch vocal but wasn't well and couldn't record the final vocal.

As with volume 1 it's a great record, full of variety and superb performances.

You can hear more in my conversation with Tony about Earl Jam Volume 1 

For more info on Tony and to buy both records, visit www.tonytrischka.com

Thanks to Sore Fingers bluegrass and old time camp for inviting me down to record this interview while Tony was there teaching banjo!

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:27

His stuff is just deceptively hard. You think it's easy, but it's he's always thinking in different ways. And I thought I knew how it roll played until I started really digging into these recordings and I know nothing. He's just he could do so much stuff just on the just you know, at the spur of the moment, just like go off in some crazy direction.

Matt 0:46

Hi, this is Matt, and you're listening to Bluegrass Jam Along the podcast for anyone and everyone who loves bluegrass. Hey everybody, welcome back to Bluegrass Jamalong. This is the second of three episodes recorded at this year's Sawfingers, which is a great bluegrass camp over here in the UK. Um, a couple of days ago I put out an interview with Michael Daves chatting about the duo record he's got out with Jacob Jolliffe that celebrates Jim and Jesse. Um in a couple days more I'm going to put out an episode celebrating Sawfingers itself, chatting to the staff, the students, and the tutors there. But today what I've got for you is a really cool chat with Tony Trishka. Um as lots of you will know, Tony's been working on a project called Earl Jam. Um volume one came out a year or so ago, volume two is out now, and I chatted to him about volume one when it came out, so I'll stick a link in the show notes if you want to go and dig into that. But I caught up them at Sawfingers where he was one of the banjo tutors to chat about volume two. Um there's a bunch of new stuff on there, part of the same project, but just it's such a fascinating thing. It is a really interesting project in terms of the history and the genesis of it, but it also has just resulted in two albums of really, really cool music, which is the main thing. Um so yeah, you're gonna hear me chat to Tony all about that. Um, as I say, there's a link in the show notes to the first episode if you want to go back and catch up on volume one. Um, and I'll put links into where you can go and find the music um and learn more about the project. But that's it, pretty simple one. Um have a listen to Tony Trishka telling me all about volume two of L Jam. Tony Trishka, welcome back to Bluegrass Jamalong. Great to see you again. Good to be here, Matt. Thank you for having me. And I'm excited to talk about volume two of L Jam. We talked about the first volume a year or so ago, um, a record that I love, as is this one. For people who maybe didn't hear that episode or that record, can you give us a quick recap about the project?

SPEAKER_01 2:47

Uh yes. Uh I was working on a there are two Earl Scruggs books out there, and the second one uh was uh transcribed by guitar players instead of banjo players for some reason, and there was a lot of inaccuracy in it. In fact, a whole lot of it was inaccurate. So I was approached by a guy named Bob Peakle, who lives in Syracuse, New York, to uh help work on this book and correct, do correct, uh make corrections for the third edition. And the two of us and this other banjo player worked on it. And in the midst of this, uh, this guy Bob Peakel would send me a recording of Earl Scruggs and John Hartford jamming, you know, like on one tune, and then a couple days would go by and he'd send another one. And I'd go, what is this stuff? And it turns out that Bob had been at these jam sessions at John Hartford's house or Earl's house, depending a few times. Uh and there were these jam sessions between right around 1987 through 1996, I think it was. Uh Earl had Earl Scruggs had decided he was maybe going to get out of the business. He'd had a family tragedy, and uh he'd been he'd been on the road for years, since you know the mid-early to mid-40s, and he was thinking of of giving it up, and I guess he talked to John Hartford about this, and John wasn't gonna have that happen, so he said so John said, Hey Earl, let's pick, let's let's jam. And I guess John instigated a whole bunch of jams that lasted for all those years, and sometimes it'd be again at John's house or Earl's house, and sometimes it was just the two of them jamming, but anyway, um this guy, Bob Peakle, had been in some of these jams, and he told me that John Hartford reached out to him one time and said, uh, if my house burns down, then all this all these recordings will be lost because John had recorded just about every jam with this cheap cassette machine. So the quality is not like high quality, but you know, you can hear it. And so uh he so John sent all copies of all the tapes to Bob Peakel, who then in more recent times digitized them. And after teasing me with two or three of these tunes just by themselves, he sent me a thumb drive of over 200 songs, everything he had from the jams that he'd gotten from John Hartford. And sometimes, again, it's just the two of them, sometimes the two of them and a bass player. Sometimes you can hear Sam Bush in there or Del McCurry, folks like that, Mac Wiseman. And uh it's just this priceless collection of tunes, many of which we'd never heard them play before, like Here Comes the Bride, uh and some Elvis songs, things like that. Uh and then Earl is playing it's Earl Unleashed, as I like to say, because uh on a regular recording he would just get one solo, maybe two, uh, if it wasn't an instrumental. And here we can take two or three solos in a row. It's just and he's just relaxed and just playing what comes to mind. And a lot of really great stuff comes to mind. Like he plays Cripple Creek and it's like with with blues licks in it, like, what? There are no blues in Cripple Creek, it's just a straight-head fiddle tune. And he would just do that because he felt it. So um just a totally exciting and eye-opening experience. And I've transcribed maybe 40 or 45 of these tunes th thus far out of 200. And uh and I go back to the well every, you know, once a month I'll go back and find some other cool thing that he did. So uh it's it's this just endless treasure trove of of music to go through.

Matt 6:12

And it's and it's really cool, kind of, you know, you mentioned Sam Bush occasionally there, and and Sam plays on this record, and John Hartford is there kind of as a as a presence and a songwriter through some of the materials. It's lovely to have that that thread through it. And did you record this bunch of stuff at the same time as Volume One, or was this definitely a two-stage thing?

SPEAKER_01 6:31

Aaron Powell It was there was a certain a certain amount from uh the first recording sessions. In other words, with Billy Strings, he came in and we did two songs. Browns Ferry Blues is on the first one and Gentle on My Mind is on the second, but that was done at the same time as the as I was recording for the first album. And the same with Del McCurry. Uh I've got um Columbus Stockade Blues on this album, and I had two other tunes on the first album, but it was from those sessions. And the same with Molly Toddle, those are recorded at the same time that I was working on the first album. But then there are other folks like Sister Sadie specifically recorded for this was much later, and we did it for the second album along with the Steel Drivers as well. So uh there are some things that are new or newly recorded for the specifically for the second album.

Matt 7:19

One of the things I really love about both volumes is you know, there's this this idea of taking something, transcribing it, and putting it out into the world, but at the same time, then that just being the starting point for something. It's not kind of just do this the way I'll did it and that's that. And there's and that track Billy Sings Gentle on My Mind is is a wonderful example of that. And just the the kind of the intro and the outro of that and the little journey that song goes on. It's got a whole life of its own, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 7:47

Right. Yeah, um Bailey Fleck produced both of the tunes that that um that Billy did, the Billy Strings did, and he had just great ideas for both of them. So uh for Gentle on My Mind, he started with this cool fiddle thing playing against against the chords in a certain way. And then he said, Okay, at the end of this, at the end of Gentle on My Mind, let's do a slap bass thing, and then go into s space music, you know, just free associating. And at the very end, Billy started bending the string in a certain way, it sounded like a bird call or something, and we all started doing it kind of found the same notes. And then it ends in a very discordant shave and a haircut, two bits. Uh so it was just a lot of fun stuff, just really loose kind of fun stuff going on in that particular tune, especially in the second half of it. So I I think Baylor for those production ideas, uh, that that was really fun making that happen. So yeah.

Matt 8:47

And there's um there's a bunch of people on this record that aren't on the first volume. There's somebody that I haven't heard, Farriat Malek, who it was not a name I knew, not a voice I knew, and what a what a glorious thing that is.

SPEAKER_01 8:57

Aaron Ross Powell Yeah, her name is actually pronounced Farai. It's spelled F-A-R-A-Y-I, but it's pronounced Farrai Malik. And what happened is uh it's a song called Mom and Dad Waltz. And I had recorded, I wanted to record well, I did record it with Alison Krause for the first album, because I've been friendly with Alison since she was a teenager, you know, and I was on her first album. So we've we've gone back a long way and we're really friendly, and she's really fun to talk to. And um so she said, Can you send me some tunes for me to listen to from these jams so I can decide what I want? And I think I had to send I sent her like five, and she said, Nothing's really striking me. Send me some more. I ended up sending her like 20 tunes, and finally she heard one that she thought would fit her voice. And it was Mom and Dad Waltz, a lefty Frizzelle tune that he recorded in the 50s and wrote for his parents. Uh anyway, so we went into the studio and Sam Bush is on there, and Jerry Douglas, and Jason uh Carter's playing fiddle, and uh Todd Phillips on bass, and uh Allison sang it, but she before she went in, we were talking, she said, I'm having some ear ear troubles, I'm not hearing notes quite right. Something in her Eustacean tubes or something, I don't remember, or her hammer anvil and stirrups in her ear. I'm getting all medical here. Uh anyway, so she sang the tune, a scratch vocal, which means it's you know, not the final vocal, but something that'll serve as a you know, so you get the idea of what it sounds like. And it was just gloriously beautiful. You can't even you know, you'd it was a very much of a heart song, and you'd be in tears. It was very old-fashioned, but the way she sang it, it could be contemporary. But Alison is a perfectionist and she just didn't feel like it was as good as she could do. And so she said, Um, you know, I'm gonna try to record it at my studio, her own studio. So she went back and spent a decent amount of money trying to get the vocal the way she liked it, and she just never could get it because she was having these troubles. So she finally just gave up on it, which is like, oh, too bad. Because the original vocal, her scratch vocal, was like crazy good. Anyway, so I figured, okay, well, that's that. Uh for the second album, I'm not sure what I'll do. I'll figure something out. And Ken Irwin, who runs my record, one of three people that runs my record company, Down the Road Records, Unbeknownst to Me got a hold of the basic track that Allison had sung across from my engineer. Again, I knew nothing about this. And uh Ken lives near Boston, and Farai Malik is living in Boston and teaches at the Berkeley College of Music. And so Unbeknownst to Me, Ken got a hold of the basic track, talked to my engineer, and added triple vocals on it, just saying the basic melody, and then added harmony parts and gave it back to Ken, and Ken sent Ken sent it to me. What do you think of this? And here's this tune that Allison was on that was supposed to be on the first album. Here's this other incredible voice doing three-part harmony and all all by herself, you know, overdubbed. And I said, Wow, okay, I'll use her. But then we went into the studio and she did it officially. And uh, even though the scratch vocal would have served just as well. So, yeah. And so we're doing some gigs with her now. She opens up for us and then she sits in with us and we do songs like D Poor Tee by Woody Guthrie, which is we need more things like that these days in our country. But anyway, so that's uh how how she came into my orbit, as it were, or me into her orbit.

Matt 12:29

And well, there can't be that many people who've been called in to replace an Allison Crest scratch vocal over the years.

SPEAKER_01 12:35

Yeah, exactly.

Matt 12:36

And there's a there's a whole bunch of really nice stuff on this. And it's w what I like about it is there's there's lightness of touch as well as just absolute quality. And I love the fact that you don't shy away from keeping the banjo parts where Earl would have played them, but moving things around to suit people's voices, and you know, did that with Sierra Farrell on the first record and Billy on this record, and just popping a keychain in. And it's the kind of thing that could feel clunky and just doesn't. It just feels absolutely natural, like it's always been that way.

SPEAKER_01 13:07

Yeah, I I'm not sure how it worked out that way. It just did. Yeah, I everything feels nothing feels strained to me. You know, I I don't sit around and listen to my own music hardly at all, but uh I've listened to this album a number of times since it came out. Because yeah, I was never listening to it all the way through from beginning to end in order. And uh I it's been a long enough time now that I feel disassociated from it. And I can just listen to it as a third person, like it's not even my music, and it's like, oh, this is really nice. Because there's so much variety in it. Like Farai's got her whole this triple fidple fiddle, triple vocal thing, and Del's got this just really straight down the line killer wonderful bluegrass sound, and Billy's got this, it's not more progressive, but a little more progressive kind of sad, and then the crazy stuff at the end. And then there are two solo things that uh I found I think there were so far I found three things where Earl's just playing solo banjo. And uh he does um Boilem Cabbage Down on the on the latest one, which is that I've got that, and I've got uh actually Chicken Reel, I think didn't make it on there. But anyway, a couple of things of him playing solo, which is glorious to hear what he does just did solo. But uh yeah, I think everything does feel kind of natural. And someone was saying it was reminding them of um Circle Be Unbroken album by the nitty-gritty dirt pan, just getting a whole bunch of different people in and letting them do what they do best, which is not w what I was thinking about. I just wanted to have different people interpret these songs. And uh which I haven't mentioned yet that every note that I'm playing is note for note what Earl played in these jam sessions. I just transcribed what he played, and then when it came time to uh record them, I just had to had the tablature on the on the music stand and I'm playing note for note what he played, none of my own stuff. Which at times w would make it hard because I just it's his stuff is just deceptively hard. You think it's easy, but it's he's always thinking in different ways. And I saw it I knew how it role played until I started really digging into these recordings and I know nothing. He's just he can do so much stuff just on the s you know, at the spur of the moment, just like go off in some crazy direction. Uh so anyway.

Matt 15:20

Yeah. And what glorious things we've spent so much time with somebody's music and still be finding things in it at this stage.

SPEAKER_01 15:26

Oh, always. Yeah. Little subtle things. Like when you do backup on the banjo, you're always hitting the offbeat like one and two and one and two and like you might have your thumb on the just hitting the first note with the thumb and then pinching uh three strings for the upbeat, boom, ching, dung, chink, ding, ching. Just to you know, fill out the sound and have a little upbeat thing going on, the offbeat. And then I was just casually listening to this recording of Earl and John together, and uh I suddenly noticed that Earl had done like two or three measures of just hitting downbeats with a pinch, so it's stronger than the upbeat. And everything else I'd ever heard Earl do was with the with the upbeat tune ching, and here he's going ching tune ching tune, kind of reversing it. And it was like, you're not supposed to do that. Oh, well, you're Earl, you can do whatever you want. So yeah, it was funny. And there's a lot of stuff like that, just unexpected stuff you just wouldn't imagine.

Matt 16:25

And just and just the variety of things are on here. You know, you've got the the classic sort of fiddle tunes and the songs you'd expect, but there's just a range of stuff because they're not expecting anybody else to hear it, and they're just playing, and you end up with uh, you know, something like Here Comes the Bride, which is a bit of music from a Wagner opera kind of translated through lots of people's weddings and now on into this.

SPEAKER_01 16:46

Yeah. Yeah, that was a fun tune. Again, I was going down the list of tunes that were in these um thumb drives or in this thumb drive, and I get down into the H's and Here Comes the Bride, what? I hadn't noticed it the first for the first album, or I would have put it on there. So, oh we gotta do this. So I worked up Earl's solo and got Michael Cleveland to play the fiddle part. He's kind of okay. Like ridiculously amazing. And then um anyway, yeah. Just uh in the recording, you got uh John and Earl jamming and you got John Hartford doing a dance. He would do it on the play with board with gigs. And you know, people love to see you know, people love to see people dance and sing and play the fiddle at the same time. Uh but here's just Earl and John, just the two of them. They're not on stage, and John just felt like dancing, so he did. He's playing the fiddle and dancing, and Earl's backing him up. And so this was during the session uh that this guy Mark Shatz was on Who's to Play with the Bela, but uh he was on the session and uh and so I it was I had him dance and the fiddle was by Michael Cleveland, who is ridiculous. So we did a version of that and recreated the you know, right down to having uh the dancing going on also, which was really it was just fun, a really fun tune to do.

Matt 18:05

And then there's a lovely moment um at the end with the track with Bruce Molsky, Wish We Had Our Time Again, is a really sort of lovely reflective way to end it.

SPEAKER_01 18:15

Yeah. Yeah. It's it's another John tune, John Hartford tune. Because I didn't have any John Hartford tunes on the first album, but now I've got John Talon in my mind in this one. And uh because Bruce is so deep with fiddle tunes and things like that, and he was friendly with John Hartford himself. So he knew that what John would do is he would take uh an instrumental and then turn it into a song. So he took Wish We Had Our Time Again, but he based that, but he but uh turns out he that John borrowed that from Wish I Had My Time Again. And then he just changed the word put words to it and changed it to Wish I Had My Time Again. Uh or Wish We Had Our Time Again. And so uh I have him record Wish We Had Our Time Again the way John sang it. And then from the at the end we go into a fiddle tune which is Wish I Had My Time Again, and it becomes a fiddle thing that I just back up with a rolling banjo. So yeah.

Matt 19:08

Yeah, it's a beautiful record, it's a lovely way to end it. Um and it's you know, I enjoyed the first record so much, and it's always interesting approaching a volume two of something that you've enjoyed that much, and it's I mean, every bit is good. I've loved this one too. And it's been absolute joy to get to talk to you again.

SPEAKER_01 19:24

Well, the same here, Matt. Thank you. I really appreciate it.