Resonations

(Note: This is an old music review I wrote. I saw Douglas perform approximately a year ago.)

Jerry Douglas is almost inarguably the greatest dobro player who ever lived, with the possible exception of Josh Graves (who was, interestingly enough, Douglas' dobro mentor), though "ever lived" is not quite so grand of an accolade when you consider that the dobro has been around for less than a century. Last night he rocked a full house at the Emerson Cultural Center with his maniacal dobro skills and impeccable band, bringing a caliber of musicianship that is rarely seen in Bozeman.

The opening act, a local group called ThermalGrass, was driven out of the audience's mind by the main show, but they were certainly competent musicians in their own right. Their 19-year-old guitar player, named Ian Fleming, is incredibly good. Not only does he have the skill to play blinding flurries of notes up and down the neck of the guitar, but he has the musical taste to mix in bends, pauses, bluesy riffs, and double stops. I predict that he will go on to great things. The other musicians were very good as well, including Tom Murphy, bluegrass aficionado and owner of Norris Hot Springs, where various bluegrass acts are brought in to entertain the soakers. The bass was up way too loud at the beginning, and they turned it down slightly, though not enough. The songs they selected were interesting, either bluegrass standards (Red Haired Boy, Cherokee Shuffle) which were tweaked somehow, or unfamiliar tunes brought into the bluegrass enclave. Then we got to the main attraction.

The Jerry Douglas band, consisting of dobro, fiddle, guitar, upright electric bass, and drums, played about an hour and a half to two hours of entirely instrumental tunes of various genres, generally running six or eight minutes each. Because of Douglas' musical ability to do anything he wants, he also reserves the right to play whatever he wants, be it bluegrass, rock, jazz, Cajun, blues, honky-tonk, or anything else. Though his foundations are in bluegrass, he has stretched and broken the barriers of bluegrass and spilled over into other genres, most notably jazz. He sampled these genres throughout the night, and none of the tunes had quite the same feel to them, which is a good thing considering the monotony of the dobro as a lead instrument and the lack of vocals.

All of the tunes had complex arrangements, with various instruments moving in and out of each other in a precisely orchestrated fashion, a Tool-like fondness for changing time signatures, a total dearth of conventional chord progressions, and frequent changes in speed or groove during one song. The musicians accomplished this without a trace of effort, and in fact the whole concert had a mood of "another night, another show" until maybe halfway through: the musicians seemed, well, not exactly bored, but casual in their playing. Nobody jumped around very much or felt obliged to headbang or rock out (except the drummer, of course, and even he was rather restrained); the musicians stayed fairly static, with Douglas occasionally moseying around during somebody else's break. For himself, he never got too worked up even when playing the most difficult-looking material, preferring to let his hands speak for themselves.

On their first number, I thought the rhythm section was too intrusive and even drowned out the lead instruments to some degree, but either they fixed the levels (which they were tweaking slightly all night) or I got used to it, because as time went on they seemed to settle into it more. Also as the night went on, they progressed from the more thoughtful, jazzy numbers to the more straightforward, though still trippy, bluegrass numbers, which was a good idea since starting with the faster stuff and moving to the more melodically complex stuff could easily have made the audience restless. The bass player had a few solos, the drummer had one, and the fiddler and guitarist had one in almost every song. The whole sound, too, seemed to change as the night went on: initially the backup emitted a sort of constant hum, probably from the lingering bass, and the rhythm seemed not so much to pulsate or rollick as to sort of ooze, though this straightened out eventually. Or, again, maybe I just got used to it. The band's sound struck me as one great resonation, like everyone was imitating the resonator guitar: the fiddle's agonizingly pure tone that sometimes provided a little too much resonance for the mikes to handle, the bass's lingering hum, even the blasting cymbals- and of course the warbling, bulbous sound of the dobro.

The rhythm was so precise as to provide practically metronomic consistency, and all of the instrumental breaks were delivered with the same spirit of total clarity and precision. Visualizing this precise sound does not give me an image of many single precise points, however- more one of rolling hills, perhaps because the points were played with such dizzying clarity that they all meshed together into one great resonation.

Many things about the Jerry Douglas Band reminded me of another highly recommended bluegrass/jazz act: Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. Aside from the fact that Douglas has recorded many times with Fleck and also claims to be responsible for giving the Flecktones' drummer ("Future Man") his moniker, they have many musical similarities: no vocals, instead having the bandleader fill the part of vocalist with his banjo or dobro; stylistic affinities, such as the vast range of genres which both bands encompass and the contempt of static time signatures; analogous instrumentation, like banjo=dobro, bass guitar player who plays a lot of solos=upright electric bass player who plays a lot of solos, drum guitar dude=drummer, and especially fiddler=saxophonist, because many of the chillingly clear, 6th and 9th based, higher-string adventures which Douglas' fiddle player (Luke Bulla, who has previously ranked 2nd at Grand Masters') embarked on reminded me a lot of Jeff Coffin's sax wizardry; and the same sort of background hum which I mentioned before. Fleck and Douglas also write a lot of their own stuff, much of which has no hummable melody and seems purely experimental.

Having the authority to play and write whatever sort of music he wanted, Douglas didn't seem particularly concerned with showboating, but was more interested in pushing the limits of what could still be conceivably called "bluegrass" and the tonal limits of his chosen instrument. The dobro is pretty basic in terms of what tones it can produce, but Douglas is determined to coerce the instrument to produce every different tone it is capable of. Some of the tunes were laidback and mellow, some punchy and sparkling, some tense and pulsating. Then, about halfway through, the rest of the band departed the stage, and Douglas and his dobro went to work in a long, powerful, variegated, heavily-fermataed medley of particularly bluesy bluegrass tunes. It was the awesomest thing I've heard in a while, as if he was forcefully reminding the doubters that "Yeah, I really am the best ever."