Herschel Freeman Agency

Matt Glaser's Bluegrass/Jazz Ensemble


Since they last toured, several members of The Wayfaring Strangers have gone on to acclaim with new groups, including Aoife O'Donovan with Crooked Still and Ruth Ungar with The Mammals.  All have kept busy musically, but the hunger for the Wayfaring Strangers days has remained.  The sterling ensemble that recorded "This Train" has decided to do a Reunion Tour in the 2009-2010 season, and we are all the better for it.  No one had ever imagined, let alone heard the kind of bluegrass/jazz melding that Matt and his mates perfected through Wayfaring Strangers.  A banjo solo morphing into a jazz piano foray, voices equally at home cyring lonesome and scatting, it was a coming together that has not been approached before or since.  With great anticipation, we look forward to a tour that we know in advance will be memorable.

Wayfaring Strangers

The Wayfaring Strangers are a number of things: a band, an album, a project, and a new way to play American music. In their incarnation as a band, they have been called "the most potent supergroup in folk music" by the Boston Herald. The Herald goes on to praise them as "an audacious, genre-bending experiment, full of joy, sorrow, and beauty." Most importantly, the Wayfaring Strangers seek to find spiritual common ground between different styles of music: among which include jazz, bluegrass, folk, Klezmer, Celtic, and chamber music.

A collective fronted by visionary violinist Matt Glaser, the Wayfaring Strangers present a bold, successful experiment in Americana. This all-star assemblage of players and singers, whose pedigrees extend across innumerable genres, first set out years ago to seek the heart of American music in a deft blend of modern and traditional styles.

The Wayfaring Strangers
This Train
(Rounder)                                                                                                                                           
by Josef Woodard


The Wayfaring Strangers' second album makes seemingly unholy alliances sound seamless and logical. Creating a peaceful accord between swing, bluegrass, gospel, and klezmer (among other stylistic travels) is actually no small feat. Often other efforts in the "swing grass" field have been noble but swing-challenged.

The musicality trickles down from leader Matt Glaser, whom many people primarily know as the recurring talking head on Ken Burns' Jazz. His ecumenical musical vision here is quite impressive, his dazzling ensemble
including banjoist Tony Trischka and vocalists Tracy Bonham, Ruth Ungar, and Aoife O'Donovan.

The first strong whiff of imminent eclectic action comes on the second track, "Columbus Stockade Blues," as Glaser's fiddle solo moves slyly from Appalachia into the more urban turf of dissonant, extra-blue notes and jazz colors. After turning sharply into Laszlo Gardony's bona fide jazz-piano solo, with percussionist Jamey Haddad's swing pulse, the tune regains its bluegrass footing without apology.

Jazz re-harmonization redefines their brooding-waltz take on "When the Golden Leaves Begin to Fall," suddenly sounding a long way from Bill Monroe or the Blue Ridge Mountains. Or is it? That's Glaser's implicit musical question, and one persuasively argued.

 

Wayfaring Strangers find common ground

By Scott Alarik, Globe Correspondent

Kids don't like the stuff their elders like: It's one of pop culture's most cherished marketing laws. So what's up with the Wayfaring Strangers, the acclaimed jazz-grass band fired by the 47-year-old fiddler Matt Glaser and the 20-year-old singer Aoife O'Donovan.

"We have people in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s, which is really great," O'Donovan says. "There's definitely an upswing of young people playing traditional music and older musicians interested in playing with them. It's the same music, but we all come at it from different angles."

The band is the brainchild of Glaser, chairman of Berklee's string department. The idea was to assemble sophisticated roots musicians like himself -- banjo revolutionary Tony Trischka, klezmer-jazz clarinetist Andy Statman, and guitar-mandolin whiz John McGann -- to explore the common chords within American roots music and jazz.

The group's first recording, 2001's "Shifting Sands of Time," was a revelation, but it sometimes felt more like an experiment than a band. To address that, Glaser formed a more permanent group, now numbering nine members.

Their new Rounder CD, "This Train," has such a convivial ensemble vibe that its wayfaring eclecticism melts into a warm community of sound. Trischka's rolling banjo rivets tension beneath "Columbus Stockade Blues," and Statman opens "Cluck Old Hen" with a mystical solo poised in a dark, moist ether where country blues meets klezmer.

Glaser's fiddle is the glue, so fluently multilingual that it's hard to catch just when pure bluegrass bursts into cool jazz. Laszlo Gardony's elegant piano makes the most pronounced contextual departure from the folksy mood -- like finding a candelabra on a picnic table -- but his playing is too interesting to be a distraction.

O'Donovan shares vocal chores on the CD with the Mammals' singer-fiddler Ruth Ungar and local rocker Tracy Bonham, who is on tour and was replaced in Saturday's show by Jennifer Kimball.

Glaser cites O'Donovan as a perfect example of the vital new generation of traditional artists. She grew up immersed in folk music: Her father, Brian, hosts the popular WGBH-FM Saturday program "Celtic Sojourn." She has been singing a wide variety of roots music as long as she can remember, and she's a graduate of the New England Conservatory. (She also sings with the local band Crooked Still.)

"Her exposure to traditional music is kind of in vitro," Glaser says. "At a very young age, she was able to sing a wide variety of music at a very high level, with great adherence to the normative demands of each of these styles."

On "This Train," her naturalistic phrasing and effortless control belie the complex structural ideas swirling around her. In an alluring, soft-spoken husk, she sings with complete emotional credibility, whether navigating dense, jazzy slides or haunted old-timey trills.

"It's like running the three-minute mile," Glaser says of this new generation. "For years, it was impossible. Then somebody ran it, and then it became the norm. This is the kind of thing that's happening with young people in these traditional music fields. It's the norm now to be able to play jazz, classical music, bluegrass, Celtic music, all at a high level. Nobody thought like that 30 years ago; it just wasn't seen as possible. I think they call it a paradigm shift."

New digital technologies have helped enormously, making vast catalogs of music available to everyone. But the life's work of music activists such as Glaser and Brian O'Donovan is equally crucial. They grew up in a world where Celtic music was not heard on the radio, and where traditional music was not deemed worthy of study at schools such as Berklee and the New England Conservatory.

Aoife O'Donovan has never known such a world. "Young people like me just grew up immersed in all kinds of music," she says. "Over the last 20, 30 years, people have been playing traditional music in ways it was never played before. I think a lot of people around my age see it as vibrant, very much part of the modern music scene."

Sounding more like the doting professor than the master fiddler, Glaser says: "These people are young, and living on earth for a period of time is always valuable to finding your thing more. They're already amazing musicians, and they'll only grow as time goes on. It'll be a blast to stick around and watch that happen."

 

 

Press Photos

Wayfaring Strangers      

 

Tour Schedule

The Wayfaring Strangers will be doing a reunion tour in the 2009-2010 season.

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