Album Reviews

Street playing string bands played some of the best music I heard at this year's SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. The Carolina Chocolate Drops out of Durham, North Carolina are one of the few African-American string bands plying the trade today. The trio plays fiddle, banjo, guitar, harmonica, bones (yes, bones) and other traditional instruments on this 10"  four tune EP. The group had a Grammy Award® winning album for "best traditional folk album" with their 2010 CD release "Genuine Negro Jig" also on Nonesuch.

Street playing string bands played some of the best music I heard at this year's SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. The Carolina Chocolate Drops out of Durham, North Carolina are one of the few African-American string bands plying the trade today. The trio plays fiddle, banjo, guitar, harmonica, bones (yes, bones) and other traditional instruments on this 10"  four tune EP. The group had a Grammy Award® winning album for "best traditional folk album" with their 2010 CD release "Genuine Negro Jig" also on Nonesuch.

Here they are joined by another string band, the Luminescent Orchestrii. The two groups met performing at the Folk Alliance festival in Memphis and after jamming together and attracting a big crowd, Joe "Bass" DeJarnette, former Wiyos bassist and a recording engineer (as well as being a roomate of Luminescent Orchestrii member Sxip Shirey) invited The Carolina Chocolate Drops to record some tunes at his place. 

They laid down two tracks here and then returned the favor down in Winston-Salem at SPOT studios, where the two groups recorded another pair of tunes. The four make up this EP and there are two things you should know: the recording is absolutely "live" and the sound quality is absolutely superb: spacious, natural, and three-dimensional. And the music combines "good-timey" and wholesome sensuality.

The two groups blend together brilliantly aided by human beat-boxer Adam Matta. I'm not going to bother with a musical analysis: none is really needed, other than to say that CCD's Rhiannon Giddens sings great and sounds hot.

You can probably find this little number (the 10" not Rhiannon) online, certainly on the Nonesuch music store site and I promise you, you will enjoy every minute of it for both the music and the sound. I figure it was recorded digitally but I'm not sure. It's slightly bright but the spaciousness and purity, probably a result of good miking and simple recording chain, more than make up for a whiff of antiseptic digititis.

I have to make a confession here: The Wiyos recorded a few albums live to analogue tape at PIE Studios in Glen Cove, and the owner/engineer Perry Margouleff sent me one of them on CD a few years ago. Maybe I wasn't in the right mood, but I just didn't "get" it. Now I do. To compound matters, he sent me an LP last year of an artist he recorded and that record got lost in the shuffle. I just unearthed it and will play it ASAP.