Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article on Alison Brown and her company, Compass Records, that also includes brief interviews with three Compass artists who have recent releases – Dale Ann Bradley, Missy Raines, and Brown herself.

The article – The Sisterhood of Bluegrass by Barry Mazor – discusses how the bluegrass/acoustic world has warmed of late to female-headed bands, and how these three all find themselves on Compass at this point in their careers.

“It’s a kind of sisterhood, really,” Ms. Brown notes, and she should know. She’s not only a widely admired banjo virtuoso, and in 1991 the first woman to win the International Bluegrass Music Association’s banjo player of the year award, after a stint playing with Alison Krauss. She’s also a former investment banker who co-founded and heads Compass Records along with her husband and bandmate, Gary West. While the three 40-something bandleaders on Compass are different musically, Ms. Brown stresses their common history.

“We’re all about the same age,” she said in an interview at Compass’s Music Row offices, “and all three of us have seen change and what women can do in the field. When I was playing festivals growing up, people always felt compelled to say ‘you’re really good — for a girl,’ and it wasn’t even meant as an insult. But you don’t hear that so much any more; women are leading the charge with the most interesting bluegrass.”

You can read the full piece online, complete with audio tracks from the Brown, Bradley and Raines CDs.

Rejoice all you Del-heads! McCoury Music is preparing to release a 5 disc, definitive collection of the music of Del McCoury on May 12.

Celebrating 50 Years Of Del McCoury will include 50 tracks marking Del’s five decades in bluegrass, plus a 12 page color booklet.

All of the music was recorded with The Del McCoury Band, the bulk of it in a recent set of marathon sessions. These involved recutting better than 30 songs from the first 40 years of Del’s long career, coupled with 18 top tracks from his recent recordings.

The box set will retail for $49.95, or as Chris Harris with McCoury Music put it, “50 years/50 songs/50 dollars.” This is one every McCoury fan will want to own, and any serious collector of bluegrass music should have in their library.

Track listing follows:

The booklet is said to contain photos from the McCoury family archives, many of which have never been published.

Performing on the set are Del McCoury on guitar and lead vocals, Ronnie McCoury on mandolin, Rob McCoury on banjo, Jason Carter on fiddle, and both Alan Bartram and Mike Bub on bass.

This post (and photos) is a contribution from David Hollender, Professor at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Dave has been a member of the ensemble department for several years, and teaching upright bass. He also teaches banjo for students following the Acoustic String Principal, where banjo, mandolin, acoustic guitar or fiddle players can pursue a degree at Berklee.

The Punch Brothers made a return visit to Berklee College of Music last week (4/7) when they were in Boston to play at The Museum of Fine Arts. About 150 students filled David Friend Recital Hall at Berklee to greet Chris Thile, Chris “Critter” Eldridge, Greg Garrison, Noam Pikelny, Gabe Witcher on their second visit to Berklee during the past twelve months. The acoustics and size of the room allowed the band to play completely acoustically once again. This put the detail and delicacy of the band’s sound in a setting that I wish everyone could experience. Hearing these guys’ 100% pure acoustic tone in a small room is something special.

The band opened things up right away for requests. Along with music from their albums, Punch and How To Grow A Woman From The Ground, they played unrehearsed bluegrass standards ‚Äì Sittin’ On Top Of The World, Ninety-nine Years, Sled Riding ‚Äì and tunes from Chris’ solo albums ‚Äì Song For A Young Queen and Jessamyn’s Reel.

The students asked great questions about the compositional and creative process that went into the recent album and heard highly articulate answers that gave them a good sense of how much careful thought and preparation went into the music the band is playing these days. Other questions focused on instrumental sound and technique. It was amazing and inspiring to hear a player like Chris, who most people would say possesses about the most fluid and musical sound of any mandolin player to have lived, speak in terms that suggest that he still considers his instrumental technique to still be a work-in-progress. Noam and Critter echoed this with their thoughts about tone, volume, speed, etc.

It all added up to a concentrated dose of education and inspiration from a group that is breaking new ground and setting new standards of musicianship for bluegrass-rooted players and composers. I’d like to personally express my appreciation to Chris, Noam, Critter, Gabe and Greg for the generosity they showed by spending their free time visiting Berklee again.

        

        

Today (2/26) marks the widely-anticipated release of Punch, the debut recording of Chris Thile’s touring band, Punch Brothers. Of course he recorded once before with this same unit on his How To Grow A Woman From The Ground CD, but they were then known as How To Grow A Band.

With Punch, the band has a new name, a new label (Nonesuch) and a new raison d’?™tre, to wit, Chris’ lengthy composition in four movements, The Blind Leaving The Blind, which forms the major portion of this new project.

We’ve written a good bit about this project on The Bluegrass Blog, including Brance’s recent three part interview with both Chris Thile and guitarist Chris Eldridge. Today, we celebrate the release of Punch in an interview with banjoist Noam Pikelny. Noam talks some more about the recording process and about performing this challenging material live.

You can hear two full pieces from Punch on the Nonesuch web site, audio samples from all 8 tracks on iTunes, and extended selections from each of the four movements of The Blind Leaving The Blind on Thile’s MySpace page. Chris and the Brothers will also be appearing on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on Friday (2/29).

Here’s Noam on recording this CD…

We recorded at Legacy studio A509 in Manhattan. Our producer Steve Epstein suggested the room for the project. Once he signed on to the project he felt very strongly about having us in that room. And looking back on it all, I can see why. It’s absolutely beautiful. It’s quite large, but has amazing natural reverb and is a big part of the overall sound of Punch.We sat in a horse shoe type of shape, with [fiddler] Gabe [Wichter] and I opposite Critter [Chris Eldridge] and Thile, with [bassist] Greg [Garrison]at the bass of the “U”. We used no headphones and relied mainly on a 3 microphone tree about 10 feet above us. There were spot mics on each vocal and instrument that were used for balancing out the mix.

We recorded for about 5-6 days, from noon to 8 pm. We did multiple takes of everything on the record, but no overdubs. We played everything live in the room with no headphones. Typically we’d play a movement 5 or 6 times until Steve and the rest of us were confident we had everything we needed. At times we’d isolate certain sections and do several takes of them. (more…)