Five Favorite Instruments of Mine (That Aren't Tenor Banjo)

I play music for fun as a hobby. The instrument I use to do so is the 4-string tenor banjo. In my case I tune it GDAE (low to high) which is one octave lower than a mandolin/violin. The tenor banjo allows me to pluck instrumental melodies to songs or tunes, similar to what someone is doing when they are whistling. Each evening around the house, during the same free time that someone else might choose to watch TV or play Pokemon, I play my musical instrument of choice: the tenor banjo.

Despite being my favorite instrument to play (and the only instrument I play), I wouldn't necessarily say that tenor banjo is my favorite instrument. In fact, I can think of at least 5 other instruments that I would place ahead of it, even though I don't play any of them. These include...

Marimba

The marimba is a tuned percussion instrument with wooden bars laid out in a similar way to a piano keyboard. The wooden bars are struck with mallets to produce musical tones. Resonators suspended underneath the bars amplify their sound. The marimba was developed in Central America and is the national instrument of Guatemala. It is like a xylophone although it is pitched an octave lower and produces a richer sound.

Why I Haven't Played the Marimba Yet: Cost, size and playing style. I haven't done a whole lot of research but beginner/student level marimbas seem to start at over $1,000. That's a pretty steep investment. Also, marimbas are pretty big and would take up a lot of room in the house. I don't really have the space for one. My last excuse is that the proper playing style involves holding more than one mallet in each hand and I don't really see myself wanting to do that. I'd probably just want to hold one mallet per hand and try to bang out single-line melodies. I might still get one in the next year or two.

Melodica
The melodica is a free-reed instrument similar to the pump organ and harmonica. It has a musical keyboard on top and is played by blowing air through a mouthpiece that fits into a hole in the side of the instrument. Pressing a key opens a hole, allowing air to flow through a reed. It produces sound only exhaling into not inhaling. Melodicas have a rectangular shape and they are held with one hand (a handle is located underneath most of the instruments) while the keyboard is played with the other hand. The keyboard is usually two or three octaves long. Melodicas are small, light, and portable, and inexpensive. The modern form of the instrument was invented by Hohner in the 1950s.

Why I Haven't Played Melodica Yet: This is simple...spit! Although I like the sound of a melodica I don't want to play any instrument that you have to use your mouth to play because the idea that moisture gathers into the instrument is just unappealing to me. This probably also rules out another favorite of mine, the clarinet.

Appalachian Dulcimer
The Appalachian dulcimer (or mountain dulcimer) is a member of the zither family. The dulcimer has a drone similar to the bagpipe, reminiscent of the early settlers of the Appalachians whose music helped shaped the beginnings of bluegrass and early country music. The hourglass shaped body extends the length of the fingerboard and its fretting is generally diatonic. It was originally used as an instrument to accompany ballad singing. Traditional players use a wooden noter, or dowel, to fret single melody notes, while others prefer the more modern approach of chording as both accompaniment and lead. It is unrelated to the hammered dulcimer.

Why I Haven't Played Dulcimer Yet: Tuning limitations. Due to the diatonic fret pattern and various tunings the dulcimer isn't versatile enough to cover every possible melody or scale. From what I understand the most common tuning facilitates playing in the Ionian mode, and then you have to re-tune and/or use a capo to play in other modes. I don't want to play any instrument that you have to re-tune for certain keys, etc.

The Upright Bass (AKA "Double Bass")
The acoustic upright bass is the largest and lowest-pitched instrument in the violin (or viol?) family, but it is tuned in 4ths rather than 5ths like the violin, viola and cello. The bass is used in a range of genres, such as classical, jazz, rock, blues, tango, bluegrass. You're probably familiar with it already so I don't need to go into much detail. When I think of upright bass players I think of people like Charles Mingus, Chris Wood, Mark Schatz and Stephan Crump.

Why I Haven't Played Upright Bass Yet: Well, they take up a lot of room and I suspect that they are expensive. But the main reason is that the bass is an accompaniment instrument and I simply like playing lead melodies. I would like to perhaps get a bass some day to learn more about harmony and chord theory, but I probably wouldn't choose an upright bass simply because of its size. I would probably go with a shorter scaled electric bass just to learn the concept of bass playing.

The Electric Guitar
Do I even need to describe the electric guitar? We all know what it is. It's a guitar that uses a magnetic pickup to convert the vibration of the plucked strings into electrical impulses that can be heard when the guitar is plugged into an amplifier. The electric guitar was invented invented in the early 1930s and quickly adopted by jazz guitarists who sought to be able to be heard in big band ensembles. During the 1950s and 1960s, the electric guitar became the most important instrument in pop music, serving as a major component in the development of electric blues, rock and more. I was going to make the last instrument on this list the accordion, but most of my favorite musicians are electric guitar players (Jerry Garcia, Trey Anastasio, Bill Frisell, Mary Halvorson, Dean Ween, Derek Bailey) so it would be disingenuous not to include electric guitar in the top five.

Why I Have't Played Electric Guitar Yet: I dunno, too common? (I actually did have a left-handed electric guitar once). The guitar checks all the boxes in terms of versatility and repertoire but for some reason I'm not drawn to it as an instrument I want to play for my own enjoyment. Any melody I can whistle can be played on the guitar in any key. However, I can also do that same thing on my chosen instrument, the tenor banjo, and still feel like I'm doing something fairly original (AKA self-indulgent). There are just too many awesome guitar players. I would feel like a poser if trying to play it. The bar has been set too high. If you played guitar there would be constant reminders of how you're not ever going to be as good as Hendrix or Zappa or Jerry. Whereas with tenor banjo I can play whatever I want on it and feel like I'm the only person in the world doing it. I've never once questioned the decision to play tenor banjo even though I'm always wondering what to play on it.

Honorable mention instruments: accordion, clarinet and steel guitar.

  

Bill Frisell: An Anthology - Song Book

Until this past weekend I didn’t know there was a published book of Bill Frisell compositions but there is! It’s called Bill Frisell: An Anthology. If I had known about this book prior to now I would have bought it years ago. Soon I will have a copy though.

An Anthology was first published in 2001 so it only includes Frisell's work up through that year’s Blues Dream album, but it still contains over 80 pieces dating all the way back to Throughout from 1983’s In Line. Other tunes include Amarillo Barbados, Lookout for Hope, Rag, Strange Meeting, Egg Radio, Verona, Monroe, Poem for Eva and Ron Carter. The full contents are below.

In the preface Frisell says “I’d rather not try to explain too much about how any of this music might be approached, but let the notes speak for themselves. When I’ve played these pieces over the years with my various groups, they’ve been a jumping off place – hopefully with something new happening each time. There’s no real set way to approach them. I hope that anyone else playing them will try to find her own way – changing the tempo, orchestration, whatever. They’re not really meant to be played just like the record. I hope the music in this book will be of interest not only to guitar players. Some of it was written with guitar in mind, but much of it is presented like a score and could be arranged in any number of ways, for any instrument(s).”

On writing, Frisell says, “I’m not a fisherman, but writing for me is something like what I imagine fishing to be. There’s this huge ocean of music surrounding us, moving by us all the time, and if we’re patient, quiet, and sit there long enough, a melody will come along”.

Bill Frisell: An Anthology contents 1 of 2

Bill Frisell: An Anthology contents 2 of 2

Recently I’ve been trying to play along with some of Frisell’s more approachable single-line melodies, such as We All Love Neil Young/Song for Lana Weeks from Big Sur and Farmer/I Am Not A Farmer/Small Town from Disfarmer. Hopefully we are due for An Anthology Volume 2 because arguably Bill’s best work has come in the 15 years since this initial collection was published.

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Jerry Garcia Guitar Solos

If you want to plunge into Jerry Garcia's guitar playing, spring 1977 is a good place to base this study.  Jerry's playing was about as pristine, inspired and melodic as it ever got during this period.  Many of the Grateful Dead's best songs were already written by '77 and in the active repertoire.  Last Saturday I put together an ear-training playlist consisting of just the Jerry solo breaks from live recordings of over 30 Grateful Dead songs.  The idea is to have something to listen to, learn from, and play along with.

Jerry Garcia 1977 - photo by Rob Bleestein

The melodies to these Grateful Dead songs are very familiar to me and each one is distinctive and instantly recognizable.  Sometimes I slowed down these snippets to 85% of the speed but didn't change the key.  With a little bit of work I feel as though I could figure out the basic melodies to pretty much any of them, and then start to fill in around that based on things I might take away from what I hear Jerry doing.  The way Jerry fills out an otherwise sparse melody is of great interest to me.
I limited my sources to what is on Spotify with my focus on shows from May 1977.

From the 5/19/77 at the Fox Theater in Atlanta, GA I used China Doll, Looks Like Rain, Loser, Peggy-O, Ramble on Rose, Row Jimmy, and Terrapin Station (the instrumental part after "strategy was his strength and not disaster").  From 5/21/77 at Lakeland Civic Center in Lakeland, FL comes Bertha, Brown Eyed Women, Comes A Time, Fire on the Mountain, Jackaroe, Scarlet Begonias, and St. Stephen (intro).  The 4/30/77 show at the Palladium yielded Deal, GDTRFB and Stella Blue.  By poking around on Spotify I found a few other stragglers such as Franklin's Tower (5/22/77), Friend of the Devil (5/18/77), It Must Have Been the Roses (11/5/77), and Uncle John's Band (9/29/77).

After all that there were some more songs I was looking for that I couldn't find on the 1977 shows available (some weren't written yet) so I had to expand the search.  These include Been All Around this World (1980), Black Muddy River (1989), Crazy Fingers (1975), Deep Elem Blues (1982), Dire Wolf (1973), High Time (1980), Mission in the Rain (1976), Ship of Fools (1974), Sing Me Back Home (1972), Stagger Lee (1978), Standing on the Moon (1989) and To Lay Me Down (1974).

The uniting thing about each of the solos is that they are loose, melodic breaks based on the structure of the songs.  Some of them are traditional songs that the Grateful Dead added their unique touch to, and the rest are originals that seem directly evolved out of traditional music - like taking the same basic folk music concepts and adding one or two new levels to it.  This gives me another option when playing tenor banjo.

Getting Excited About Seeing Phish In Chicago

I've started to get that feeling again.  You know, that feeling of anticipation that comes when a Phish show is looming on the horizon just a few weeks or days out.  I've seen Phish 54 times over the last 22 years and it's always been like this.  The excitement builds until it's showtime and the band comes on stage for that first set.

The upcoming shows in Chicago at Wrigley Field later this month will be numbers 55 and 56 for me.  Chicago is definitely a city I would like to visit but never had the impetus to do so until now.  This should be especially cool because it's a destination event.  I'm not really expecting Phish at a major league baseball stadium to be all that mind blowing in and of itself.  The setup certainly won't be as conducive to a concert experience as a theater or outdoor music venue.  But it's more than that.

For one thing it's at Wrigley Field in Chicago.  That is exciting, unique and historic.  It's also a downtown setting meaning that you can walk from your accommodations to the concert while bar hopping along the way.  In my case, nobody has to worry about driving or working on the days of the concerts.  You're basically on holiday in a new city where the only thing for sure happening for two evenings in a row is Phish is playing.  We'll probably also go to breweries, Irish pubs, some jazz clubs, a few dive bars and ethnic restaurants.  Maybe an art gallery.  Who knows?

In a lot of ways this is like the perfect way to see Phish at this point in my life (short of the unbelievably awesome Riviera Maya trip earlier this year).  It inspires me to get a quick glimpse of a classic American city I haven't really been to yet.  This isn't a camping/festival situation, so you get to sleep as late as you want in a comfortable bed, if you are lucky enough to do so, with easy access to bathroom/showers.  Plus there are oodles of bars, restaurants, museums and other sights to check out.  In other words, "culture".  It won't be like Hampton Coliseum for example where, although the venue and music is almost guaranteed good, the environs are bland suburbia.

Basically you get to be a tourist and see Phish at the same time.  I can see myself doing more of this in the future -- integrating travel and Phish.  One thing I'm wondering is how much will a beer at Wrigley Field cost?

Tenner: Ten Years Playing Tenor Banjo

It was almost ten years ago to this day - Memorial Day Weekend 2006 - that I began playing tenor banjo.  Even though I had never played an instrument before, I decided out of the blue at age 32 that I was going to begin playing 4-string tenor banjo.

Ever since I received that first banjo and had it set up left-handed with new tuners in the "Irish" GDAE tuning, I have rarely wavered in thinking that the tenor banjo is the instrument for me.  What I have struggled with is finding the right music to play on it.  My favorite music to listen to at that time - John Prine, Neil Young, Ween, Phish, Grateful Dead - either wasn't fun to play or was too advanced harmonically to translate into single-note tenor banjo plucking.

I soon learned that I wanted to play instrumental melodies -- not strum and sing.  Irish music made the most sense: an endless repertoire of tunes - no chording required - in a style of music where the instrument I held in my hands was commonly used.  Delving in to Irish and old-time fiddle tunes forced me to learn about tenor banjo "flatpicking" and also a little bit about music theory due to my curiosity about the modes and scales.

Fast forward to now...it's taken me about ten years but I finally think I've cobbled together a personal repertoire of tunes that I endlessly enjoy playing.  I like to think of it as an "East/West" repertoire.  East being music with an Eastern European sound, and West being music with origins in the West Indies and therefore a more Caribbean sound.

The core of the "Western" repertoire is the music from an album called Bonne Humeur by The Etcetera String Band.  Around 1990, this ragtime string band from Kansas City recorded an album of early Caribbean music - dance tunes and other melodies from the 19th and 20th centuries.  The lead instrument is a banjo-mandolin.  My favorites from this CD include:  Aurore Bradaire, Bad Woman, Carnaval En Margarita, Dessan Mouillage, La Douceur, Lisette, and many more.  The majority of the 18 tracks, actually.

The core of the "Eastern" repertoire are the faux ethnic original tunes recorded by the band Camper Van Beethoven, primarily those from their 1985 debut album Telephone Free Landslide Victory.  My favorites are Balalaika Gap, Border Ska, Mao Reminisces About His Days In Southern China, Payed Vacation: Greece, Skinhead Stomp, Tina and Yanqui Go Home.

  

Add in a few other East or West type tunes from these and other sources and there are well over 40 tunes I'm trying to keep up with!

Camper Van Beethoven's Russian-Flavored Ska Tunes

Telephone Free Landslide Victory

Camper Van Beethoven’s brilliant 1985 debut album Telephone Free Landslide Victory contains 9 or 10 sprightly instrumental tunes - purposely faux approximations of ethnic folk music with a ska beat. There’s Tex-Mex/Norteña (Border Ska, the almost instrumental Tina), Islandy Surf (Yanqui Go Home, Opi Rides Again), Eastern European (Balalaika Gap, Skinhead Stomp, Vladivostok, bonus reissue track Atkuda), Middle Eastern (Payed Vacation: Greece) and vaguely Oriental (Mao Reminisces About His Days in Southern China).

After Telephone Free Landslide Victory CVB became a little more song-oriented and/or the instrumentals were more sprawling and psychedelic. However the Camper tunes L’Aguardiente and RNR Uzbekistan are also in this pseudo-ethnic instrumental category.

The best of these types of tunes might be the minor-key polka Balalaika Gap, which could actually pass for a traditional Balkan or Ukranian melody. On their Facebook page, CVB recently shared an inquiry they received about this tune from a college student.

Message: Hi, my name is xxxxxx. My dad is a huge fan and I grew up listening to your music. I am in a college World Music class and I want to write a paper on your song 'Balalaika Gap'. Which member played the Balalaika, and why were you inspired to write this song? Thank you so much for your time!

(violinist Jonathan Segel replies) Hi. I’m sorry to say, nobody played the balalaika. In fact, what was used in its stead was a mandolin. The song itself came from a period of Camper Van Beethoven writing wherein we were purposely trying to make false representations of foreign musics, “ethnographic forgeries” as Holger Czukay called such things in his band Can. Our inspiration was the basic universality of popular culture, where things were heard and then played back from different perspectives, such as pretty much all music does; people try to make what they have heard with what they have. For example, there are stories of the origins of “Dub” style mixing in rock steady and reggae where they say that they heard the hits on the radio coming over the ocean from America to Jamaica and there were radio drop outs, so they tried to emulate that. In our case, we grew up in the 1960s and 70s and LA television had its own idea of what “ethnic” music sounded like, we took that as much as the real thing into account when we merged the idea of eastern European melody with ska backbeats. Ska, as a back beat, of course, is much the same as polkas and so many other folk musics anyway. Our intention was to hit punk rockers with punk rock, that is to say, not to fit into any sort of dogmatic idea of genre, but go to punk rock shows and play whatever we thought was a punk attitude to play, which included annoying the skinheads. They liked the beat, regardless of the pseudo-ethnic melodies (and I have to say, there was a sort of kick of putting klezmer-ish melodies to back beats that potentially Nazi skinheads would dance to, back in the beginning.) --Jonathan

CVB in 1985 - photo by Jock Hamilton

In a former post to his blog, CVB front man David Lowery explained how these fast Russian-flavored ska tunes were an important part of their live set.

Many of these songs came from two of the earlier post punk collaborations I had with Chris Molla. One was Sitting Duck the other was the Estonian Gauchos. Sitting Duck often played with punk bands at The Ritz - the short lived punk venue in The Inland Empire (an area east of greater Los Angeles). If you unearth tapes of these bands I’m NOT the guy with the fake English accent. These two bands were like Camper, they were not punk rock but needed to be understood in the context of punk rock. In Southern California there two thing the hardcore punks and skinheads would tolerate other than punk rock. Surf (hence Agent Orange) and Ska. In order to get away with playing in front of these audiences we would pepper our set with fast surf like or ska-like instrumentals so the punks and skinheads could commence to skanking.
As the bands evolved into Camper Van Beethoven these songs took on a distinctly Eastern European sound. Especially once Jonathan Segel joined the band in 1984.
Camper Van Beethoven often found themselves in actual physical danger playing in front of sometimes hostile hardcore punk audiences.
Camper Van Beethoven were fake hippies (maybe not Jonathan… he might have been a real hippy, but it doesn’t mean he wasn’t any less brave). We grew our hair out long. We wore thrift store ponchos, beads, carried those hippy shoulder bags and wore clogs. Anything punk rockers would not like. Despite this some of the punk bands took a real liking to CVB. (So did Maximum Rock n Roll, the bible of west coast punk). One early vocal supporter was Jello Biafra from The Dead Kennedys. He invited us to do a few shows with the Dead Kennedys shortly after the release of our first record. One of the shows was at an American Legion or VFW in Chico, California.
In the big cities there were enough irony-enabled punk rockers that the audience would quickly get that we were more or less one of them and at least tolerate our set. Here in Chico that day in front of 800 hardcore punkers and skinheads that did not seem like it was gonna happen. Usually when we launched into one of our country-hippy-folk versions of a classic hardcore song, something like Black Flag’s Wasted, the punkers began to warm to us. This audience did not. When we launched into Wasted the audience stood there motionless and the skinheads right in front of me became very hostile. I watched a little knot of them as their eyes began to fill with white hot hate. This was like the early days of CVB back in the Inland Empire except instead of an audience of 50 it was 800 and we weren’t on our home turf. We had no homeys in the audience to protect us. After the song, the littlest of the knot of skinheads right in front of me points at me and says something like “fucking hippy, we’re gonna fuck you up”. BTW it’s always the little guy who says shit like this AND actually means it. I looked over at Jonathan I think because Jonathan grew up not far from Chico in the Central Valley. Fittingly Jonathan is chewing tobacco and spitting back into a beer bottle. He stares right back at me. He’s got this look on his face that says “Dude, I knew all along there was a 50/50 chance we were gonna get our asses kicked after the gig. Did you really just figure that out?”
We knew we had only one hope. I’m not sure if this is how we ended the show but it’s pretty much how we avoided getting our asses kicked. We played 3 or 4 fast Russian ska songs in a row, then played Take The Skinheads Bowling. Like the scene in the Blues Brothers, when they play Rawhide for the rednecks, somehow this little mini-set of ska and Skinheads Bowling converted a large portion of the crowd to our side. I don’t really remember if they were all skanking happily at the end of the show but we didn’t get the shit kicked out of us with steel toed Doc Martens. That’s as close as it gets to a happy ending.
To this day there is always an little echo of this gig in our sets.--David Lowery

Whatever the reason for their existence these CVB instrumentals are great tunes! Every bit as good as the actual Russian folk melodies like Korobochka and Katyusha that they are reminiscent of. I'm in the process of learning some of these, starting with Balalaika Gap, Opi Rides Again, Mao Reminisces, and RNR Uzbekistan.

Lionel Belasco's Song of the Jumbies and Back Down to the Tropics (as recorded by Nick DiSebastian)

BTL Music Notes chart for Song of the Jumbies

In 2013 I hired musician Nick DiSebastian of Built To Last Music Notes to transcribe all 18 tracks from the rare, out-of-print Bonne Humeur album by The Etcetera String Band.  I sent him mp3s from the CD (early string band music of the Caribbean: Creole Louisiana, Haiti, Trinidad, Martinique, Venezuela and the Virgin Islands) and Nick transcribed the music, sending back pdfs containing chords, notation and mandolin tab, per my request.

BTL Music Notes chart for Back Down to the Tropics

The tunes from that CD have become some of my favorite music to play.  One discovery made via this Bonne Humeur CD was orchestra leader and composer Lionel Belasco.  Born around 1882, Belasco grew up in Venezuela and Trinidad. He was classically trained, but composed indigenous pieces such as joropos, paseos and danzas.  I learned from the Bonne Humeur liner notes that a couple collections of his music were published over 70 years ago.

Recently I was able to obtain a copy of one of those volumes: the 1944 booklet Calypso Rhythm Songs: Authentic Tropical Novelty Melodies by Lionel Belasco and Leighla Whipper.  The booklet contains fifteen "authenticated West Indian calypsos".

I like to have audio and sheet music when learning a new song.  In this case I had the sheet music but no audio, so I asked Nick if he could make source recordings of a couple of the pieces from this collection and he said yes.  Sort of a transcription in reverse!  I sent Nick copies of the sheet music and not only did he make professional sounding overdubbed recordings for me (adding some embellishments and arpeggios where it fit), but he also created his own charts with some minor revisions to the chords and melody where it seemed to make sense.

Below are the recordings Nick made for me.  I have his permission to share them here.

I think these sound great!  Now I have clean sounding basic recordings featuring lead melody plus rhythm backup to get the sound of the tune into my head.  Without this I would be relying on my own somewhat unreliable reading skills and sense of timing.  If you have a similar need I encourage you to reach out to Nick to see if he can help.

See below for the original images that Nick had to work with.

Song of the Jumbies page 1 of 2

Song of the Jumbies page 2 of 2

Back Down to the Tropics page 1 of 3

Back Down to the Tropics page 2 of 3

Back Down to the Tropics page 3 of 3

Calypso Rhythm Songs front cover

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