The Nashville Sessions - Reviews
Ink 19
Leftover Salmon
The Nashville Sessions
Leftover Salmon is one of several of a new breed of bluegrass-oriented bands that are seeking to redefine what bluegrass can be. This new breed, anchored in the Rocky Mountains and the Telluride festivals (as opposed to the Appalachians and the Ralph Stanley/Bean Blossom/Merlefest Festivals) represent a fusion of styles that would not be accepted as real bluegrass by the traditionalists. These bands are not as rigid as the traditionalists, and they are more than willing to deconstruct the bluegrass foundation and rebuild it by adding non-traditional instruments and taking it off into new uncharted directions.
The influences and styles of some of these bands are generally pretty eclectic, and often incorporate jazz, rock, and even Afro-Caribbean influences in their rhythms, often resulting in a final product that might be more accurately described as a form of alt-country, or even sometimes delving into the World Music arena, with some of the bands becoming "jam bands," due to their tendency to sometimes drift off into long, improvisational pieces.
The Nashville Sessions , which is by no means traditional bluegrass through-and-through, takes this band back a little closer to tradition. The excellent production by Randy Scruggs, and the guesting contributions by his father Earl Scruggs and some of Nashville's finest session men, including Jerry Douglas, Sam Bush, Sally Van Meter, and John Cowan, along with the Salmon, provide the base for a solid piece of work that wanders in and out of several genres.
The great Del McCoury and son Ronnie provide excellent support in the lead-off tune, "Midnight Blues." Taj Mahal and Sally Van Meter follow with a bluegrass-tinged re-working of Taj's "Lovin in My Baby's Eyes." Bela Fleck adds his own unique style to a couple of cuts, and ol' Waylon himself, accompanied by Randy Scruggs, Sally Van Meter and Sam Bush, breathes new life into his old standard "Are You Sure Hank Done it This Way." Ex-Stevie Ray Vaughn keyboardist Reese Wynans and John Popper add a little more blues flavor with their contribution to "Another Way to Turn." While this record is packed with some solid turns, my favorite has to be the Louisiana-flavored Lucinda Williams/Jo-El Sonnier rendering of "Lines Around Your Eyes." All-in-all this is a mighty fine piece of work and it should win the Leftover Salmon some new converts. It might even make a Salmon-Head outta me.
--David Whited
BREAKING THROUGH:
LEFTOVER SALMON, "THE NASHVILLE SESSIONS"
(1999: Hollywood Records)
from Pause Record
Music fans love the festival for a number of reasons. It's a place to hear a wide variety of genres. Where artists can sit in with each other's bands. Most of all, it's fun, a space to kick back for a time with no worries and just groove.No band is more thoroughly associated with the idea of the festival than Leftover Salmon. The Colorado five piece plays several different genres of music: Poly-ethnic Cajun Slamgrass includes bluegrass, rock, country-fried things, Bayou and Caribbean sounds, and more. The band delights in inviting guests to sit in and pick with them, at festival time or during their own shows. And most of all, Leftover Salmon is fun. More fun then you're really allowed to have, in fact. Leftover Salmon makes every show a festival even when it's only them playing.
Leftover Salmon has taken that festival ethic into the studio, inviting a slew of different guests to make "The Nashville Sessions." In the process they created an honest-to-goodness pop masterpiece.
"The Nashville Sessions" opens with one of the band's strongest roots, bluegrass. After all, multi-instrumentalist, vocalist and song-writer Drew Emmitt and banjoist Marc Vann were playing together in the progressive bluegrass band the Left Hand String Band before Leftover Salmon was born, in a quartet strong enough to have made it onto the stage at Telluride on its own. On this CD they invited bluegrass masters Del & Ronnie McCoury to sit for "Midnight Blues," an acoustic workout that sets the tone for the project. This is world class music, in which Drew Emmitt proves that he is musically and vocally a match with the masters. Similarly, when Earl and Randy Scruggs sit in on the instrumental "Five Alive" Marc Vann demonstrates the same thing, that he belongs with these masters and they with him.
But grass is not all there is to Leftover Salmon. "Dance On Your Head" is a fast-paced, samba inspired number, in which vocalist Vince Herman urges listeners to blow up their TVs and join the festival. On John Hartford's "Up On The Hill Where We Do The Boogie" offers more grooves to cut serious rug to. On both tracks Bela Fleck contributes some fine banjo, while Flecktones' sax player Jeff Coffin offers up some fine soprano sax on "Dance." But wait, there's more. Leftover Salmon can be more than a tad country at times, in the best ways. The band offers alt.country, honky-tonk pop on "It's Your World," which also features Randy Scruggs and former Double Trouble keyboardist Reese Wynans. But even more than alt.country, Leftover Salmon is full-on outlaw country. Just check out "Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way," with none other than Waylon Jennings on the vocals for proof of that score.
There is also a bayou romp in the form of Lucinda Williams' "The Lines Around Your Eyes," which she sings here, offering proof that Leftover Salmon could also be considered a great studio back-up band, and some Delta shuffle when Taj Mahal sings his sexy "Lovin' In My Baby's Arms."
Drummer Jeff Sipe, who comes to Leftover Salmon by way of the Aquarium Rescue Unit and Jazz Is Dead is like several drummers rolled into one. He can play quietly with brushes on the acoustic numbers, which frees the mandolins from keeping time, or can lay it down thick for the rockers. The fact that he does everything in between as well, placing wonderful fills into the sounds but never overplaying, marks him off as one of the best drummers on the so-called jam band circuit.
And wait, there's still more. Before you get the idea that Leftover Salmon is just a good studio band, check out their originals. "On The Other Side" featuring John Popper on harmonica would be the sure bet for rock radio single if it didn't face such strong competition from "Another Way To Turn," featuring Big Head Todd Park Mohr. Bassist Tye North offers some subtle but powerful playing on this track. "Breakin' Thru" seems to tell the story of this CD, as Emmitt sings of watching "these circles start to come around...." That's what's happening here, as generations of musicians, friends and heros of LoS get together with them on their best record to date. This is a great song with a lot of radio potential itself. Jerry Douglas offers some dobro leads here that are stellar. And "Troubled Times," while too long for commercial radio at over eight minutes, is classic Leftover Salmon, uniting elements revealing the blues in grass, Southern rock, and even some reggae flavorings. Sam Bush and John Cowan, both of the seminal Newgrass Revival, add a lot to this track, as they do to several others as well.
And then we leave the festival. There are musicians on an old wooden front porch. The humidity borders on oppressive, but whatever was in the ancient, two-tone, earthenware jug labeled only "XXX" has taken the sting out of things. The jug is almost empty; sinnin' has redemption on their minds. They begin to play strictly acoustic instruments at an almost mournful pace. "It's nobody's fault but mine," Widespread Panic's John Bell sings. "If I don't read and sing my soul will get lost...." We've been through a lot by the time we arrived at this point. We've been through an excellent CD. A masterwork. This is a festival town. Kick back and groove.
From: The Music Box:
Leftover Salmon
The Nashville Sessions
(Hollywood)
Written by John Metzger
Since their debut, Leftover Salmon has dubbed their style of music "Polyethnic Cajun Slamgrass." However, as time has passed, the band has turned more or less to a straightforward blend of country, bluegrass, and rock, which culminates with their latest outing The Nashville Sessions.
Make no mistake, there are still glimmers of the band's past goofiness on songs like Dance on Your Head and Up on the Hill Where We Do the Boogie. Despite this, Leftover Salmon does indeed seem to be maturing, and their lyrics are beginning to carry more weight and meaning. That's certainly a good thing -- these guys have far too much talent to waste on ridiculous stage antics that go nowhere and grow old quickly.
Yes -- this is Leftover Salmon's crowning achievement to date, and for a disc so bloated with guest musicians, they manage to turn The Nashville Sessions into a stunning and seamless masterpiece. What helps this work is that the band is more than gracious about sharing the spotlight with their friends, making this a phenomenally cohesive collaborative effort. In other words, they gave up a little bit of the spotlight, but got back a lot more in return.
The disc kicks off with Del and Ronnie McCoury joining in for a romp through Midnight Blues, and it ends with Widespread Panic's John Bell adding his smoky vocals and slide guitar to the slow blues groove of Nobody's Fault But Mine. In between is everything that you could expect from a line-up that includes Lucinda Williams, Double Trouble keyboardist Reese Wynans, Taj Mahal, Béla Fleck, Earl and Randy Scruggs, dobro king Jerry Douglas, John Popper, and Sam Bush. Lovin' in My Baby's Eyes bounces with glee; Breakin' Through soars over its lyrics of optimism, hope, and survival; and Troubled Times fully explores its blues-based beat, allowing the band to turn the song into an impassioned jam session with Bush and Douglas.
Leftover Salmon has long been one of the premier jam bands touring the country, and their sterling musicianship has garnered them rave reviews among fans of that genre. The Nashville Sessions gives them an opportunity to crossover into a new market, and they've pulled it off with astounding precision. Where the band heads next is anyone's guess, but for now, it just doesn't get much better than this. Four and a &Mac184; Stars (out of five)
From Music Moniter:
November 1999
Leftover Salmon
The Nashville Sessions
(Hollywood)
by Bruce Winkworth
Eclectic hardly begins to describe Leftover Salmon, but if you were forced to choose one overworked and wholly inadequate word to describe this band from Boulder, Col., eclectic would probably have to do. The band describes their music as polyethnic Cajun slamgrass, and that works much better. Leftover Salmon was pieced together in 1990 from the remnants of two Colorado-based bands, The Salmon Heads, a cajun, calypso jug band, and Left Hand String Bass, a progressive bluegrass unit.
For their third album, Leftover Salmon decided that playing every type of roots music known to humankind was not enough. And so they came east to Nashville and producer Randy Scruggs, who called on an impressive array of Nashville cats to lend a hand.
The final product sounds like a who's who of Nashville's finest, and the diverse mix of Leftover Salmon's music adds some traditional country to its already tasty recipe. The album kicks off in full bluegrass splendor with Del and Ronnie McCoury on "Midnight Blues" and then moves right into perhaps the best track on the album, Taj Mahal's "Lovin' In My Baby's Eyes."
Next up is one of Leftover Salmon's concert staples, the ultra-lively "Dance On Your Head," with Jeff Coffin and Bela Fleck adding their chops. The band takes a left turn after that with Waylon Jennings and Sam Bush singing Waylon's 1978 hit "Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way."And so on and so forth for almost an hour, cresting with "Up On The Hill Where We Do The Boogie," and cooling down with "Nobody's Fault But Mine" as the finale. The guest list also includes Lucinda Williams, Jerry Douglas, John Cowan, Sally Van Meter, Earl Scruggs, Jeff Hanna, Reese Wynans, Todd Park Mohr, John Popper, John Bell and Jo-El Sonnier. Hard to go wrong with a cast like that, and they don't. Leftover Salmon is anything but left over. More like fresh and sassy. |
