David Grisman: Carrying the torch
by Seth Rogovoy

(WILLIAMSTOWN, August 06, 1998) -- David Grisman mines many musical traditions in search for the authentic.

While David Grisman has never achieved the status of a household name, he embodies the connective tissue attaching such seemingly disparate, well-known artists as Bill Monroe, the Grateful Dead, Duke Ellington and Bonnie Raitt. His original music draws equally from the wells of bluegrass, jazz, folk, Latin and Klezmer, and he has played in bands and made recordings in each of these genres, and others.

But Grisman doesn't merely mix and match. For the better part of three decades he has been at the forefront indeed, in some ways he is the pioneer of the movement to forge an acoustic music that draws on these disparate roots and traditions in order to come up with something new.

These days, people like Darol Anger, Mark O'Connor, Tony Rice, Matt Glaser, Bela Fleck, Tony Trischka, Jerry Douglas and Sam Bush are all exploring this new terrain. What most of them have in common is having been associated at one time or another with Grisman or with one of his musical disciples.

In a recent phone interview from his home in Mill Valley, Calif., Grisman who brings his quintet to the National Music Center in Lenox this Saturday, Aug. 8, at 8 spoke about how he developed his all-embracing approach toward music.

"I've been influenced by everything," said Grisman, 53, who began his recording career with the Even Dozen Jug Band with Maria Muldaur and John Sebastian in the early '60s. "I write tunes in different styles. Some are bluegrass-based, some are based in swing or jazz, some are based on various ethnic roots like Gypsy or Latin." When it all gets put together, it comes out as self-styled "Dawg" music, "Dawg" being the nickname with which Jerry Garcia saddled Grisman years ago.

The vehicle for many, though not all, of Grisman's musical forays for over 20 years has been the David Grisman Quintet, through which have passed many of the stars of the new-acoustic movement. As the personnel has changed over the years, so has the flavor of Dawg music subtly been spiced or enhanced.

For example, Grisman has written Latin-influenced compositions for years, but the recent addition of Argentinian guitarist Enrique Coria "makes them more authentic, or brings out their Latin," said Grisman. The quintet also includes Joe Craven on percussion and violin, Matt Eakle on flute and Jim Kerwin on bass.

These days, a typical DGQ concert runs the gamut. "I've actually stopped making up set lists, so I don't even know what I'm going to play," said Grisman. "My only criterion is I try to avoid any tunes I've played the previous night or the night before that. I try to rotate everything."

A self-described "misfit" and "non-comformist" who grew up in Passaic, N.J., Grisman was a fan of early rock 'n' roll when it was "a new form of music being created right on the radio by the masters of the idiom," he said.

"Then around '58 or '59, it all started evaporating. Buddy Holly got killed, Chuck Berry went to jail, Jerry Lee Lewis got in trouble, Elvis went into the army, Frankie Lymon OD'ed, Little Richard got religion. All of a sudden you were left with Lesley Gore. So I got kind of disenchanted with pop music.

"But then came the Kingston Trio to the rescue, and I heard something there that resonated . From the Kingston Trio it was one short step to the real deal."

The "real deal" was an entire generation of folk, blues and bluegrass performers who were being rediscovered as part of the early '60s folk revival. "People like Doc Boggs, Clarence Ashley and the first generation bluegrass masters who were all out there trying to earn a living: Bill Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs, the Stanley Brothers," said Grisman, who started traveling south to seek them out at festivals.

It was at one of these shows where Grisman met a like-minded, aspiring musician who was to become a lifelong friend and musical partner, and whose own ascending star would exert enough gravitational pull on Grisman to allow him to pursue his own muse with little regard to commercial trends.

Grisman met Jerry Garcia in 1964 at a Bill Monroe show in West Grove, Penn. "We were both out of the same musical milieu, and we struck up a friendship and stayed in touch at various points and interacted musically," said Grisman. "Also, personally, we were roughly the same age, our fathers were both musicians who died when we were young, and we had a lot of other common interests, including Hieronymous Bosch and LSD."

A few years after they first met, Garcia by then the leader of the Grateful Dead called on Grisman to lend his mandolin to some of his band's recordings, including "Friend of the Devil" and "Ripple."

Then, in 1973, Garcia and Grisman teamed with Vassar Clements and Peter Rowan for a few bluegrass dates under the group name Old and In the Way. A resulting album compiled from tapes of some of those shows became one of the all-time, best-selling bluegrass albums, pointing countless Deadheads toward the roots of the Grateful Dead's music in the songs of Bill Monroe and his colleagues.

Though they remained friends, Grisman and Garcia didn't play much music together for about a dozen years between 1975 and 1988. But in the last years of Garcia's life, the guitarist/banjoist would often come by Grisman's house to play, and the result is a trove of about 40 recording sessions of music: folk, jazz and bluegrass, including some of the last tunes that Garcia would ever record.

"Our interests were still the same," said Grisman about those final sessions. "We had spent a long time developing our own areas, and when we got back together, we both had all this background we had accumulated, but we still had a lot of things in common that we remembered back from the early days, and this was our chance to bring it all home.

"We never stopped loving bluegrass or jazz. The things we liked then we still liked. We were just more on top of our own games."

Grisman has slowly been releasing this material on his own label, Acoustic Disc www.dawgnet.com , to a public hungry for more music by Garcia. These CDs include "Shady Grove," featuring traditional folk songs and ballads, "Garcia/Grisman," featuring blues, standards and original tunes, and previously unreleased material by Old and In the Way. Next week, Acoustic Disc will unveil "So What," a collection of jazz instrumentals by Garcia and Grisman named after the Miles Davis title cut.

In spite of his wide-ranging approach which recently extends to an investigation of his own cultural roots on "Songs of Our Fathers," a duet album of Jewish melodies with mandolinist Andy Statman Grisman still gets pigeonholed as a bluegrass musician.

"A lot of people think I'm just bluegrass," said Grisman. "I love bluegrass. I play bluegrass. Somebody sent me an e-mail recently, 'Are you the bluegrass mandolin player?' And I answered, 'Sometimes.' "

If you would like to purchase David Grisman's latest CD's on-line, please click on the SoundStone logo to the right.

[This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on August 06, 1998. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1998. All rights reserved.]