Who: Creaking Tree String Quartet
Where: MY Place
When: Monday, Aug. 23, 8 p.m.
It’s hard to sum up the Creaking Tree String Quartet with a just few choice words.
All I could come up with on short notice was "a sound that wakes you up to the world of sounds, and to the infinite possibilities in music."
A little poetic maybe, but after hearing the album and seeing this band live in Whistler last month it’s hard to be anything else.
It seems I’m not the only one who feels that way, either. Since their first self-titled album came out in March of 2003 reviewers have been gushing about the Creaking Tree String Quartet:
"It’s a beautiful album full of virtuosity and emotion, a lovely balance for a moment when the only activity is listening," wrote a reviewer for Umbrella Music.
"The music crackles with imaginative and sometimes manic instrumental interplay. As tight and polished as it is improvisational and exuberant," said the reviewer for Acoustic Guitar Magazine, who also voted it one of the top-five acoustic albums of the year.
Bandwith, a CBC Radio 1 show, noted: "This is organic music, presented with a wry sense of humour, and featuring some of the best up and coming musicians east of the Mississippi. The playing is just superb, these guys are fantastic."
Toronto’s NOW Magazine – an urban paper famous for not liking anything – said "Their fluency in the musical vocabulary of the Celtic, classical, bluegrass and jazz traditions makes the uncommon blend sound completely natural… unlike the Creaking Tree, relatively few (musicians) can boast inventive new compositions to match their chops."
The band also garnered a Juno nomination in the Roots and Traditional Album of the Year category, but Creaking Tree mandolin player Andrew Collins says the acclaim hasn’t gone to their heads.
"We’re ambitious, and yeah, we’re insecure like most people, and it’s always nice to be recognized and hear people say nice things about you, but for us the best part is feeling that we’re on the right track musically," he said.
"All of us are professional musicians, we play music for a living, and we’re all perfectionists in our own way. We all work hard on what we do, and to get complimented on your work is just the best feeling in the world."
Music is everything to Creaking Tree. The band, which also includes stand-up bass player Brian Kobayakawa, guitarist Brad Keller and fiddler John Showman, is made up of professional musicians with ties to more than dozen bands, ranging from traditional bluegrass to modern jazz.
Although it’s hard to pin down exactly where the Creaking Tree String Quartet fits into the wide musical spectrum, the group has never concerned itself with labels or tried to limit itself to one musical genre to make things easier for reviewers and record store clerks. Creaking Tree, says Collins, is an instrumental to music rather than a musical style – what happens when band members get together and try out new ideas.
One musician they are often favourably compared to is David Grisman, a legendary mandolin player who modernized bluegrass music back in the 1970s with the help of some of the most talented musicians of the day, including Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia. One of those musicians, Todd Phillips, is currently mixing the Creaking Tree’s second album, which is due out in a couple of weeks.
The first album was recorded by none other than Don Kerr, a musician who worked with Gordon Downie from the Tragically Hip and the Rheostatics, and was mixed by David Grisman guitarist Jim Nunally in California.
Creaking Tree only jammed together once, recording their first session together on a friend’s portable mixer, before they knew they had something. Kobayakawa sent that first session to the Canadian Council for the Arts, unknown to other members of the group, and six weeks later they were awarded an arts grant to record their first album.
"It was pretty weird. The next time we got together, the second time we played as a group, we were a quartet working on an album together," said Collins.
Each band member was asked to bring three tunes to the table, which they then worked on as a group. Some of the songs are loose arrangements, allowing the musicians to improvise solos and changes, while others were tight compositions.
"Even in those songs we left little spaces to solo and improvise, try a few things every night. As a musician it’s one of the things you live for, although I don’t think anybody in the audience would notice unless they heard the album and saw us a couple times," said Collins.
Creaking Tree is playing at Millennium Place on Monday night, which is a kind of homecoming for Collins. He lived in Whistler for two years eight years ago, tuning skis and backcountry snowboarding. It was here that he first picked up the mandolin, and got hooked. Within the year he was enrolled in a college bluegrass music program in Texas. Later he went to Humber College in Ontario for their jazz program.
He returned to Whistler for the first time a month ago after receiving an invitation to play at Black’s Pub from a fan who heard them play for the first time at the Vancouver Folk Festival. Although there wasn’t any time to promote the show, they opened to a packed house with the help of people wandering in from the village to find out where the music was coming from.
"For us playing live is the reward. We all feel really lucky to be able to play to audiences for a living, whether it’s 30 people or 3,000 people," said Collins.
With the band getting more attention south of the border, where there are bluegrass, folk and jazz festivals every week, Collins expects the band to spend a lot more time on the road in the near future. Even the International Bluegrass Music Association are fans, inviting Creaking Tree to headline their annual conference in Louisville, Kentucky this year.
Collins says that audiences are generally diverse.
"It’s a good time to play this kind of music," said Collins. "The younger generation is finally discovering acoustic music through movies and some of the bands out there.
"When Grisman got together with Jerry Garcia for Old and In the Way, it turned a whole generation of hippies onto bluegrass music. In North America, there’s also been a huge interest after the movie Oh Brother, Where Art Thou came out. It was already gaining some ground before that, but that movie really reflected the trend.
"People are now more open to live acoustic music, played on traditional instruments. It seems like less of a novelty, and more people accept it. "Before that most people thought of acoustic music as a singer-songwriter with a guitar strumming away in a bar somewhere, when there have always been these musicians out there playing acoustic guitars as fast as a heavy metal guitarist could play. It’s pretty exciting for some people.
"And if most people think of George Clooney when they hear our music, that’s fine by me. The thing has always been to get the music out there so people can hear it for themselves," said Collins.
"And I’d rather people think of George Clooney than Deliverance. That movie killed bluegrass music in a big away with the whole association with incest, drunken hillbillies and anal rape. People who aren’t all that familiar with the music still expect to hear Duelling Banjos at our shows."
Tickets to the Millennium Place show are $16 and available at Ticketmaster. For more information call 604-935-8410.
To get a sneak preview of the Creaking Tree String Quartet’s music, check out their Web site at www.creaktree.com.
