Grisman’s band swings at Stewart
\n<\/strong>The News and Observer
\nOwen Cordle<\/p>\n

During the past 10 years, David Grisman has been a one-man crusade for the jazz mandolin. Besides his virtuosity, he also has a compelling sense of ensemble, as his quartet’s performance Saturday night at Stewart Theater showed.<\/p>\n

The quartet itself is Mr. Grisman’s instrument as much as the mandolin and his melodic compositions. \u00a0With Dimitri Vandellos’ guitar feeding chords to Mr. Grisman and James Kerwin’s bass guitar walking in concert with the colorful intricacy of George Marsh’s drums and percussion, this group’s ability to swing is second to none.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Much of this is due to Mr. Marsh’s subtle drive. \u00a0With a flick of his brushes on a snare drum, he swings the quartet instantaneousIy; or with his left hand pounding a conga drum and his right tapping synchronized syncopation on a tom-tom, he’s the soul of Afro-Latin percussion.<\/p>\n

Many of Mr. Grisman’s newer compositions featured Latin rhythms: insinuating sambas with dark, minor key chords. \u00a0He has a knack for writing memorable minor-key melodies, some straight-ahead jazz tunes with a gypsy flavor, others more exotic. One of the best began with the brooding mysterioso of a spaghetti Western, evolved into a rockish ensemble passage and then cut to Mr. Vandellos’ unaccompanied flamenco solo on acoustic guitar<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Mr. Vandellos also played electric guitar during the concert, at times suggesting Les Paul’s reverberating electric tone and Tal Farlow’s spidery lines. \u00a0As an accompanist, he was Mr. Gris-man’s energetic shadow.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mr. Grisman’s solos included furious plunging runs, brisk tremolos, a clicking attack and rare moments of melodic sweetness. The mandolin and Mr. Grisman’s compositions are better suited to bittersweetness than to sweetness; thus this is a quartet that expertly plies the rhythmic trade as well as firm, longing melodies.<\/p>\n

Mr. Grisman did not announce all the tunes, but those he did included Fats Waller’s “Jitterbug Waltz,” Tadd Dameron’s “Good Bait.” and his own “Li’l Samba,” “Gypsy Nights,” “Mad Max” and “Dawgology.” \u00a0This last one reminded us that Mr. Grisman has chosen to call his music “dawg music.” Whatever he calls it, it swings and was superbly played by an excellent ensemble this night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With Dimitri Vandellos’ guitar feeding chords to Mr. Grisman and James Kerwin’s bass guitar walking in concert with the colorful intricacy of George Marsh’s drums and percussion, this group’s ability to swing is second to none. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/vandellos.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/vandellos.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/vandellos.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vandellos.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vandellos.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/vandellos.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/vandellos.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vandellos.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vandellos.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}