So the good news that I can bring you this morning – and are you ready to hear the good news? I truly believe you are. The good news is that we have, here at Americana UK, what we like to refer to as a gentlepersons’ agreement that here at the Tracks department, we can, on occasion, use what is quite clearly and unmistakably a video. One of the several get-outs we use is that if the video is more or less a straight-ahead, down-the-line, and true-to-the-experience performance video. And that brings us, once more, to the good news – are you ready for the good news? There are, we can tell you, banjo players, and then there’s Tony Trischka, and here’s a slice of good news, he’s been working on a follow-up album to Earl Jam and – crackerjack! It has only gone and arrived in the form of the deliciously inspired Earl Jam 2. In the same vein as the first album, this is once more a star-studded release which continues Trischka’s extraordinary mission: bringing to life previously unheard recordings of Earl Scruggs and John Hartford jamming at Scruggs’ home between 1987 and 1998.
“These recordings reveal Scruggs at his most relaxed, adventurous, and inspired,” says Trischka, who was sent the cache on a thumb drive containing hundreds of hours of music. During the pandemic, he immersed himself in the recordings, transcribing Scruggs’ banjo solos note-for-note. The result is faithful recreations that capture Scruggs’ spirit while allowing today’s finest musicians to bring the music vividly into the present. “When I started listening to these recordings, I was just mesmerized,” Trischka recalls. “Earl was unleashed—swinging for the fences and playing things I’d never heard before, even after studying his music since 1963.”
And here’s yet more good news for you all, we are going to collapse under the weight of all this good news, but what the heck, why not? Who do we find here playing Hartford’s Gentle on My Mind? Well, and it’s hard to credit that such a great band was assembled; Tony Trischka: Banjo, Billy Strings: Vocal & Guitar, Michael Cleveland: Fiddle, Sam Bush: Mandolin, Mark Schatz: Upright Bass. And, if you look very carefully at the video, you might just catch a glimpse of the producer on this song, one Béla Fleck.
What a song, what a band, what an arrangement, what a recording – this is surely one for that end-of-the-year roundup. Take a listen, it’s beautiful.
