by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Holiday Affair
Charles and I watched a KPBS telecast on the Live at the Belly Up series — the Belly Up being the legendary tavern in
Solana Beach that’s been a major showcase for live music, mostly folk and rock,
in San Diego since the early 1980’s (a pity that I’ve never been there and, due
to the transportation issues involved, probably never will!) — featuring a band
called the Punch Brothers. The Punch Brothers were a neo-bluegrass group formed
by mandolin virtuoso Chris Thile following the “indefinite hiatus” his previous
(and better-known) band Nickel Creek announced in 2007 — though Nickel Creek
announced a reunion in 2014 and has just released a new album, with Thile
dividing his attention between both bands. The other members of Punch Brothers
are Gabe Witcher (violin), Noam Pikelny (banjo), Chris Eldridge (rhythm guitar)
and Paul Kowart (bass) — no drums (which was the country tradition for decades
— it was not until 1959 that the Grand Ole Opry allowed drums on its stage;
until then bands that had drummers weren’t allowed to use them at the Opry) and
no electric instruments, though one of the songs they performed had a haunting
sound that came off something like a synthesizer but was really created by Gabe
Witcher doing some very close, tight bowing of his violin strings. We missed
the opening minute or so of this show so I didn’t get the title of the first
song — it was a vocal number and the line that stuck in my head as my best
guess for the title was “Did She Ever Raise Her Voice?” Blessedly, we got all
the other titles since the producers of Live at the Belly Up routinely run chyrons at the beginning of each song
telling you what it’s called — a practice more music shows on TV (including the
otherwise wonderful Austin City Limits) should follow.
The Punch Brothers’ second song was called “New York
City” but was only incidentally about it, and then they played two
instrumentals, “Watch at Breakdawn” and “Three Dots and a Dash,” which Thile
explained he puts on their albums as breaks from the more openly personal —
and, on the latest album, political — songs. He said he hadn’t been especially
political until the events of 2016, and though he didn’t say the T-word it was
obvious what he meant by that. Then he was suddenly inspired to write political
songs, though the one they performed last night, “Jumbo,” was clearly about
Donald Trump but also had an elliptical quality and savaged him with wit rather
than anger. Indeed, though Mose Allison used a completely different
instrumentation — he was a jazz singer and pianist who usually played with only
bass and drums behind him — “Jumbo” sounded like the kind of song Allison would
have written about Trump if he’d lived more than a few months into the Trump
presidency. Chris Thile has a light, thin voice reminiscent of the young
Allison’s, and “Jumbo” in particular has a lightly swinging beat and a sense of
sophisticated wit in the lyrics that reminded me very much of Allison. The
Punch Brothers also did songs called “Another New World” (which at least
started out as a comment against climate change — it’s about a ship which finds
a new world to explore as soon as the Arctic ice cap melts — though it veered
into weirder poetic territory after the first chorus or two), “All Ashore” (the
title of the most recent Punch Brothers album, which Thile introduced as a
mother-and-child song from the point of view of the child — I really didn’t get
that but I liked the piece anyway), “It’s All Part of the Plan” (which starts
out as a gospel song but once again veers off into less straightforward
writing) and “Like It’s Going Out of Style,” which he played without a break
from “It’s All Part of the Plan.”
The set closed with a song called “Rye
Whiskey,” but not the traditional
one I was expecting when I saw the chyron (“Rye whiskey, rye whiskey, rye
whiskey I cry/If I don’t get rye whiskey I think I shall die”) — instead it was
a typical bit of Punch Brothers soul-searching that brought the set to a
rousing but ambiguous close. Charles is convinced we’ve heard the Punch
Brothers before somewhere, but I
can’t recall them — still, I liked them on this go-round and was glad to have
the chance to see and hear an hour of their sophisticated bluegrass-rock act.
Charles also said he thought bluegrass bands used the violin the way 1920’s and
1930’s jazz bands used reeds, though if there’s a jazz analogue to the Punch
Brothers I think it’s the original Quintet of the Hot Club of France, with
virtually the same instrumentation (mandolin replacing guitar as the lead
instrument, one of the two rhythm guitars replaced by a banjo, but still
basically the same all-strings lineup) and Thile’s blistering virtuosity on
mandolin taking Django Reinhardt’s role while Gabe Witcher takes Stéphane
Grappelli’s role on the same instrument.
