When you finish listening to Cherryholmes live on WFDU.org, you can point your browser over to WDVX.com and hear Missy Raines & The New Hip perform on Blue Plate Special. They will be performing live before a studio audience between noon and 1:00 p.m. this afternoon (2/29).

The New Hip is Missy’s musical youth movement, featuring a quartet of talented string musicians. Megan McCormick is on guitars and vocals, Michael Witcher on resonator guitar and vocals, Ethan Ballinger on mandolin and guitar, Lee Holland on percussion and Raines on bass.

Missy has spent her career as a bassist with a number of successful acts (most notably Claire Lynch) and has been named Bass Player of the Year seven times by the IBMA. This marks her first excursion as a band leader, with a group of eager co-conspirators in pursuing new sonic horizons.

WDVX broadcasts on a number of FM frequencies in East Tennessee, and online at WDVX.com.

This morning (2/29) on Lonesome Pine RFD, Cherryholmes will join Carol Beaugard from 11:00 a.m. until noon for some live music and discussion. The show is broadcast on WFDU at 89.1 FM in the New York City metro market, and online via live streaming.

The Cherryholmes segment will also be recorded for a later broadcast on the Open Mic show on WAMU-HD in the DC market and BluegrassCountry.org.

This review was written by John McGann, Associate Professor of Strings at the Berklee College Of Music in Boston, MA.

A wise friend of mine once observed that "people spend a lot of energy looking for what something isn’t, rather than what something is." Punch is an adventurous listener’s paradise and an acoustic music lover’s dream. Led by composer/mandolinist/lead vocalist Chris Thile with Chris Eldridge (guitar/vocal), Noam Pikelny (banjo/vocal), Gabe Wichter (fiddle/vocal) and Greg Garrison (bass/vocal), the Punch Brothers deliver an astonishing range of styles and moods with relaxed virtuosity across three songs, an instrumental, and an innovative 40 minute four movement suite.

The touchstones of established styles on this recording span many genres: a classical range of tone colors and dynamics, from quiet filigree to ominous thunder; a jazz sense of adventure, harmonic daring and "sound of surprise;" the blue grass drive and commitment to the groove; the pop songwriter’s flare for melody, and the progressive rock musician’s restless penchant for shifting textures and colors. While echoes of the above styles combine with and extend the groundbreaking New Acoustic work of the Trischka-Grisman-Flecktones-Newgrass vectors, it is fair to say that the band is breaking new ground and creating its own unique idiom. It is not merely "chamber music" played with bluegrass instrumentation, but music conceived to take advantage of the traditional bluegrass band instrumentation as presented to the world by Bill Monroe in 1945, albeit in ways Mr. Monroe may never have imagined.

Compositionally, there are definite parallels with classical music in the "through composed" long form style of composition (particularly in the four movement suite The Blind Leaving The Blind) rather than the more typical verse/chorus song form’s repeated sections. The creative use of counterpoint and counter melodies as well as contrasts and combinations of instrumental colors between musical lines are more the stuff of the classical orchestrator, rather than the bluegrass arranger. Independent rhythmic interplay creates clockwork-like textures at various times that mesh like a bluegrass band, dixieland group, and chamber orchestra (and sometimes all three at once!). Of course, along with the carefully composed mosaics of counter lines, we find improvisational passages that depend on the unique personalities of each band member to be realized, much in the way that jazz legend Duke Ellington relied on his stable of players to create the music’s character. (more…)