Word: grisman
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...What is generally unknown is that the long tradition of American folk instrumentalists remains well alive, albeit largely in obscurity. Out of the bluegrass and other string band music that flourished in rural America, came a national folk music of sorts. Folk music even has its stars, and David Grisman and Tony Rice are undeniably two of the largest. Unfortunately their latest collaboration, Tone Poems, shares a fundamental problem with much recorded folk music it lacks an expressive immediacy, a soul...
Tone Poems is a beautiful, generous album. Grisman and Rice have devoted themselves to preserving and documenting "the sounds of the great vintage guitars and mandolins." To that end, they each play 17 instruments, one for each of the album's tracks, with Rice on guitar and Grisman on mandolin. The care and affection for these instruments is evident in the lavish forty-page liner notes insert. Replete with more than 100 photographs, it is a mini-documentary on the craftsmanship and evolution of string instrument-manufacturing in this country. But all of this devotion takes the focus away from...
This music sparkles with clean, crisp lines, but doesn't bite. Though Grisman and Rice chose many traditional tunes, they've failed to invest them with a sense of rootedness. The songs do not seem connected to their cultural traditions, be it Appalachian string music, Irish jug band music or African-American blues. Even when they play a great tune, as in the traditional "Wildwood Flower," the solos are surprisingly tame to the point of boredom...
Rice has moved Fluidly back and forth betweenthe more traditional bluegrass featured on thisalbum and the experimental, instrumental musicoften epitomized by mandolinist David Grisman'sDawg music. Rice was the guitarist in the classicGrisman quintet of the 70s, and his own entirelyinstrumental Backwaters is one of the mostexquisitely beautiful albums ever recorded...
...mayhem ever end? Perhaps. CBS recently prepared a "violence tabulation" showing that brutality on TV has been decreasing lately. It may be a consequence of good policy and good business at work. Violence is getting boring, and some advertisers think it may not be selling their products. Says Arnold Grisman, an executive vice president of J. Walter Thompson, the world's largest ad agency: "What shocked us yesterday does not shock us today ... violence dominates our time-but at the same time we keep escalating the violence scale." Pointing out that the public was heading for a "sensory overload...