Word: mandolin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...swaying to the country-tinged "Cocaine" and the waltz-time "Lonesome Death of Hattie Caroll." The true audience-pleaser, though, was a wonderful acoustic rendition of "Tangled Up In Blue," the most well-known song from his arguably best album, 1974's Blood On The Tracks. Embellished by the mandolin-playing of Bucky Baxter (who manned the pedal steel guitar most of the night), this favorite struck a particularly responsive chord...
DIED. BILL MONROE, 84, singer, mandolin virtuoso and father of bluegrass music; in Springfield, Tennessee. Distinguished by the mutton-chop sideburns and chiseled demeanor that gave him the aura of a patriarch from another century, Monroe was one of those rare artists who sired a musical genre. In 1938 he formed his first band, calling it the Blue Grass Boys after his home state, Kentucky. The group soon took on the bluegrass configuration of mandolin, fiddle, guitar, bass and banjo, paired with the near-falsetto harmonies that Monroe called his "high, lonesome sound." Bluegrass lives on across the country, including...
...Leave begins with an acoustic guitar dancing slowly with an accordion-like sound, before a blaring synthesizer, sounding almost like a police siren, kicks in. New Test Leper finds the band in a gentler mood. It's a soothing, meditative song that's tunefully and tastefully sweetened by a mandolin. A big rock number, Undertow, is an expansive and expressive crowd pleaser that the band played on its last concert tour...
...Grisman and Rice included string versions of such diverse tunes as the Django Reinhardt/Stephane Grapelli jazz tune "Swing '42," and the perennial Italian wedding favorite "O Sole Mio," neither of these tunes have any relation to American folk music, nor do they sound particularly interesting performed on guitar and mandolin. Sometimes a jazz tune is just plain better when played by jazz musicians on traditional jazz instruments...
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...