Chewing the Gristle with Greg Koch
Welcome to Season 5! Listen in on Greg Koch's conversations with his guitar-hero friends. Every episode Greg unleashes his fiendish humor and unique perspective as "one of the most famous unknown guitar players in the world", asking his often-famous musical friends the questions that we all want to know the answers to! Each episode is brought to you by Fishman and Wildwood Guitars
Chewing the Gristle with Greg Koch
Daniel Kimbro - From sideman to songwriter, Daniel shares his musical path
What does it take to become a musical chameleon who commands respect across diverse genres? Daniel Kimbro delivers a masterclass in musical versatility on this episode of Chewing the Gristle.
From his beginnings in a family folk band called Mountain Soul to his current status as bassist for Jerry Douglas and session player on Eric Clapton records, Daniel shares the winding path that shaped his musical identity. With disarming honesty, he reveals how growing up surrounded by Stanley Brothers, Sting, and classical music created the perfect foundation for a career that refuses categorization.
Daniel takes us deep into the heart of Appalachian musical traditions, particularly the fascinating world of murder ballads – those deceptively cheerful melodies paired with dark narratives. His own songwriting draws from this tradition, including "Loyston," a haunting tale about a town submerged underwater when the Tennessee Valley Authority built dams across the region. The conversation explores how these songs balance historical reality with creative embellishment, creating something both authentic and original.
Whether you're a musician seeking to diversify your influences or simply curious about the connections between bluegrass, jazz, and everything in between, this conversation offers rich insights into finding your authentic voice while honoring musical traditions. Check out Daniel's music and keep an eye out for The Woodshed Guitar Experience, where he serves as music director alongside world-class guitarists sharing knowledge in an unusually accessible environment.
Ladies and gentlemen, can you believe it? It's already time for season six of Chewing the Gristle with yours truly Greg Cox. So many delightful conversations to look forward to. We'll talk about music. Yeah, sure, but you know what else we're going to talk about. Anything that comes to mind, so stay tuned. We'll talk about music. Yeah, sure, but you know what else we're gonna talk about. Anything that comes to mind, so stay tuned. We got some good ones for you. Chewin' the Gristle, season six.
Speaker 1:Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for tuning in for another installment of Chewin' the Gristle with yours truly Gregory Cochrie. We've got the mighty Daniel Kimbrough, a buddy of mine, a bass player extraordinaire. You've seen him with Jerry Douglas. He's on Clapton Records. The guy gets all over the place, but he's also a very talented singer-songwriter in the Appalachian tradition. He corrected me, I used to say Appalachian, but it's Appalachian. You know that. Ladies and gentlemen, this week Chewing the Gristle with Daniel Kimbrough. Come on, ladies and gentlemen, it's time for yet another season of Chewing the Gristle and I'm honored and pleased to have our first guest of this season be the majestic Daniel Kimbrough, musician, extraordinaire, double bass thumping, angelic singing, cool songwriting, doggone it, and just a cool cat in general. You've seen him with Jerry Douglas. He's on everything from you, just name it. He's even on the latest Eric Clapton record. It's crazy, it's crazy, it you just name it.
Speaker 1:He's even on the latest Eric Clapton record it's crazy, it's crazy, it's just it's crazy. But here we are communicating via the inner Google.
Speaker 2:Daniel, how the heck are you? I am fine. I have had only a couple of existential crises this morning. So for a Monday in the year of our Greg 2024, that's pretty good.
Speaker 1:Yes, I like it yeah, man.
Speaker 2:Um, I'm just lamenting how much cooler your lighting and studio scene is in our. I guess your podcast isn't necessarily video-y, but I'm looking at it via the internet, as you said we like to tease people with, uh, having to use their imaginations. I think that I think that's for the best, I think so too.
Speaker 1:You know they're spoiled. They get to see everything all the time, and for this podcast they can only imagine what is transpiring. A hundred percent Now. Where are you this morning? Now, do you live in Knoxville proper? I do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I am in North Knoxville, tennessee, in my house, which is just fine with me. Yes, yeah, you know, you and I spend a lot of time in hotels and in airplanes and it's nice to have some time at home, buddy.
Speaker 1:It is indeed Now. Are you home for the remainder of the year through the holidays?
Speaker 2:More or less. I have a few Christmas gigs with an esteemed colleague, another, andy. You and I have some Andy friends in common we do. This guy is an incredible fiddler and mandol-er and he's in the bluegrass scene and his name is Andy Leftwich and he plays with Ricky Skaggs and myriad other killers of the acoustic ilk, and so I am joining him for a few Christmas gigs with his bluegrass outfit and that'll be really, really fun. And then, yeah, I'm home until late December. Excuse me, it is December. I'm home until late January. Pretty much. There's a few things here and there, but no touring per se until later in January.
Speaker 1:It sounds like we have similar things, to look forward to the gig here and there until the end of January, when the road beckons again Totally.
Speaker 2:It happens.
Speaker 1:So you've been up to all kinds of activities this year, not to mention or not, the least of which is this new record of yours where you're singing, of course, your glorious pristine voice Aw shucks, and very cool. Your turn of phrase is most delightful, my friend.
Speaker 2:Oh man, well, that means you've listened to it, which humbles me to no end.
Speaker 1:Thanks, greg, I have indeed, I listened to it when I was in Europe, cool, and then, in preparation for our gathering here again, I also listened to it once again, thank you and I enjoyed it immensely, as well as the record you did with Martin Harley, which has some nice stuff on it as well.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Yeah, so Martin Harley is a slide guitar cat from England. He's actually Welsh, but he and another friend of ours, sam Lewis, and myself have worked quite a lot together. Friend of ours, sam Lewis and myself have worked quite a lot together and, uh, martin and Sam have become dear friends of mine and have been really, really encouraging of my efforts.
Speaker 2:Um, away from the the the side person thing. Uh, you know, uh, I grew up in a family folk band and and so songwriting was always, um, I don't know, we just we talked about it a lot on car rides or around meals and stuff like that. We were talking about folks like Bob Dylan and Townes Van Zandt and numerous other luminaries Warren Zevon, steve Earle, whomever and so there are all of that sort of what would now today be called Americana, and I always sort of had one foot in in the Appalachian derived musics and then one foot in the rock and roll or kind of other side of the family tree. It's all. It's all the same sort of blues derived stuff.
Speaker 2:You know, I'm not telling you anything. And then going to school, but I always had had buddies who were really into progressive rock and stuff like that too. So I just, I don't know man, I don't think there's any rules. I don't try to stay in any lanes, I just try to do, do the thing that sounds fun and try to use that to pay the utility bill at the end of the month or the beginning or whenever the hell that comes indeed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so the lyric matter on this, on this latest record of yours uh, how much is autobiographical and how much is? Just uh observing from uh a rarefied vantage point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would say mostly the latter, greg. But to contextualize for the listener, a lot of murder ballads are happening here and that is something very much within the Appalachian vernacular Scotch-Irish music. We tend to apply happy melodies to very dire circumstances and a lot of times those circumstances are telling of unrequited love. Yeah, and so when I wrote the songs for this record, I was just in kind of this mode of of of honing in on those kinds of things. And there's some historical stuff in there too.
Speaker 2:The first, the first track, which is called Loyston L-O-Y-S-T-O-N is, is a favorite of a lot of folks which is really humbling, and actually it's on the new Cherry Douglas Band record as well, and that is a true story. It's about one of the inundated towns. We have the Tennessee Valley Authority, lakes around here around East Tennessee and lakes all over the world. When we build dams, towns go underwater a lot of times, and so that's what that song is about. And then other ones are more or less just embellishments of my imagination, yes, and the comment I get most when folks listen to it is like wow, these are really cool songs, are you okay? Which you know, I think. Films are written and poems are written and paintings are painted and it's just a space that you're in at the time. I would take this opportunity to publicly say I harbor no one any ill will. It's just you know where I grew up and the kind of music that I grew up playing.
Speaker 1:Yes, the second tune, keep On Livin, yeah, which is the one where you uh grab the title of the record from. If I'm not mistaken, that's right damn, you really listen to this.
Speaker 2:That's incredible.
Speaker 1:Thanks, greg, my pleasure um that one might be someone might think is a little autobiographical. Yeah, so my mom and dad their first.
Speaker 2:Their first concert. My mom and dad, born in really rural places in east tennessee and their first concert my mom and dad, born in really rural places in east tennessee and their first concert was a van halen concert. They they skipped church one night and drove up to knoxville um from points east and and caught van halen and their last. Their marriage lasted about as long as the first iteration of van halen did, so that's pretty cool. Um, so that that is a heavily embellished um, uh, uh tale. I got you, yeah, but you know that's. That's the thing we get to do, isn't it? Uh, it's the same thing as when you're taking a solo. You know it's. It's like you. You get to manipulate the plot however you want to, you know as long as you're intentional about it, it all counts, it's all valid.
Speaker 2:So so, um, uh, I guess you could say um, what is that? That? Uh, that disclaimer that you see in films all the time? You know the names of the? Uh, the characters have been changed to protect the innocent yeah yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So it's kind of like that, you know, but it's semi autobiographical for or, excuse me, semi biographical from the vantage point of my folks. So, yeah, yes, yeah, I don't know how many, how many songwriter folks you really have on. I mean, I've listened to a lot of your, your gristle casts, but I don't really know how many folks you have on that are, that are songwriter. It's really cool of you to to take such an interest in the subject matter man.
Speaker 1:Well, it's uh, it, uh, it fluctuates. You know, I I've always talked to people like my my son is is less inclined, uh, just because of his tastes and so on and so forth, like when I talked to him about how I like Bob Dylan and so on and so forth. You're talking about Dylan, your son, yeah, yeah, talking about Bob Dylan with my son, dylan Cool, and I always describe how, when you have someone who has that connectivity with lyrical contact and the delivery which I was experiencing when I was listening to your stuff same thrill out of connecting with that intention and delivery as I do with a great improvisational thing on guitar or whatever the instrument might be.
Speaker 1:Totally You're taking in and that doesn't happen all the time because a lot of times you know especially and this is just my personal take, but with Americana stuff it kind of gets muddled a little bit. Where it's not, I'm not being taken. Uh, with the um, the lyrics in the same way as in the music doesn't quite entrance me the same way you know what I mean.
Speaker 1:It's kind of a weird thing for me personally, um, but there is a thing where you get taken in and and you have have that experience and um and uh, yours definitely took me into that, oh man.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much. That's a high praise, thank you, I agree a hundred percent. I when, when, when you're improvising, you're spontaneously composing. And that thing that I was saying about, about the plot, I was touring last year with an incredible songwriter and also an incredible instrumentalist. Her name is Sarah Jarose, she's from Texas and she was talking, I was saying, after the gig.
Speaker 2:You know how, after a gig, you get back to the green room and everybody's on that adrenaline wave, but at the same time you're extolling all of the musical virtue, virtues of your bandmates while at the same time just shitting all over your own and and. And I was just like, oh, my god, sorry about that chord that I played the wrong, complete wrong note in the 89th measure of the 14th song of the third whatever, and and sarah was saying, oh, I said to her, god, that was a great, great solo on whatever the tune was. And, uh, she said, oh, man, I wasn't sure, like I felt like I lost the plot, you know, and I thought that was such a cool comment and it's like, yeah, when you're, when you're really in it, when you're in this moment, this moment, right here, with a neck of an instrument in your hands you're zoomed out in a way that allows you to marionette the strings, as it were, and with intent, and that's the whole goal are the kinds of things we talk about a lot of times with the campers at Andy Wood's guitar camp, where you and I met. You know like you can talk about different grips and different shapes and different scale, chord relationships and all those kinds of things, but at the end of the day you have to you know that Charlie Parker thing, you know forget all that and just play, but ideally lyrically, melodically, thematically.
Speaker 2:You have a larger Google Earth vantage point that you're really trying to maintain through the whole thing and I try really hard when I'm writing, whether I'm writing prose kind of things for folks on my email list, or whether I'm writing music, and that can be instrumental or lyrical I'm trying to maintain that vantage point and that's something that I definitely hear in your playing, when you're playing solos, when you're playing, you know your music is instrumental mostly, I assume you know, having heard the Cock Marshall Trio often, like you, toby and Dylan there is such a respect for whoever the person with the microphone, as it were, is at the moment. There's such a profound emphasis on building an arc and I just see all of that stuff as plot lines and character arcs. Man, and that's the lifetime goal is hopefully you set your look what I can do aside and you use what you can do as fodder for those character arcs, as opposed to just a showcase of technique. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Exactly correct. So you grew up in a musical family? Yes, and you actually had. So the name of the band was Mountain Soul, if.
Speaker 2:I'm not mistaken. Yeah, man, my mom and dad, my dad was the real driver behind the the ambitional is ambitional a word behind the ambitional um aspects of that group. In other words, he was running the website and booking the gigs and driving the winnebago, as it were, and and mom and I and dad too, I don't know it was just always an opportunity to listen to music together and then we would try to sing songs together and stuff. And I started out as a guitar player and I just eventually realized that the cover band I was playing in as a middle school kid and as a high school kid, that the bass playing was an opportunity to mitigate some of the skill gaps that I had on the six string neck, and so I grew up doing that. But I was also really an active band kid.
Speaker 2:I got into the school band in the fifth grade and was playing trombone in the fifth grade and was playing trombone, which was fortuitous because we shared the same sort of range for the most part as the electric bass. I taught myself where the E's were on the electric bass and then started teaching myself to read the bass clef. And then I saw the double bass professor from the University of Tennessee. They were doing an outreach program and they came to a local community center and I saw them play. And I saw Rusty Holloway, who would become my eventual bass teacher, play the upright bass and I thought, whoa, that's a whole nother paradigm. And then I witnessed Edgar Meyer play with a bow and sort of do very bluegrass, fiddly kinds of things.
Speaker 2:And then that opened my mind to the classical realm, because I think this happens with a lot of us, where you check out someone's playing, or maybe you're checking out the liner notes, and then you want to know what else that cat played on, and then it turns out you're listening to a thing that you wouldn't have otherwise picked out of the CD bin. Maybe I'm dating myself here, but you wouldn't have chosen to maybe check that album out had that cat not been on that record, and it's a really great vehicle for discovery. So, yeah, the musical family in the folk realm really ended up pushing me into really unique places, and I think that's one of the cool things about acoustic music is that it can lead you down some really interesting branches of different trees. You know that you didn't, yeah, you know to abuse the wood analogy.
Speaker 1:So then, growing up in that musical family, it was not unusual, obviously, to think of that as a viable livelihood and something that you would go in.
Speaker 2:Or was it?
Speaker 1:kind of a little bit of both.
Speaker 2:It wasn't. My folks were just never, ever discouraging or like caution flag waving. It was never that. It was always like, yeah, okay, that's what you want to do. Cool, you know, we'll try to figure out a way to buy the slightly nicer trombone. We'll try to find a better electric bass, because this one has action inches high and and, um, you know, and and dad was really good, like if we were.
Speaker 2:I remember one time in particular we went to play a local radio station which had a daily. It was a bluegrass-y kind of folk, very small low end of the radio dial in the 80s kind of radio station in the, the 89.9 wdvx, uh, and they were based in a camper in clinton, tennessee, and and so you would go in and you would play local licks at six was the show and uh, uh, we would play our, our songs, some of which were original and some were bluegrass and and folk classics, and then, um, if we were around oxoxville a lot of times, dad would would sort of parlay that into taking us somewhere. One time he took us straight from there to a, a concert down here at the world's uh, excuse me, at the, the uh chill howie park where the state fair is always held in knoxville, and it was uh, susan tedeschi, susan tedeschichi, opening up for Buddy Guy. And then the main act was BB King and I was like.
Speaker 2:I remember having this moment. Then I was like this is cool, I just played a bluegrass gig in a camper and I was in high school. I just played a bluegrass gig in a camper and now I'm checking out this person who I didn't know at the time, in Susan Susan, and then of course, buddy Guy and of course BB King, and it was just wild. And then another concert we were checking out Bela Fleck and Tony Rice after you know what I mean them a lot of credit for being really deliberate about exposing us to music, me and my two younger brothers, without saying this is good and this is bad or this is valid and this is not, uh, hip enough. You know what I mean? Because they were just.
Speaker 2:They were just such listeny folks from mom was always blasting whatever sting had just done, or old police stuff, or she was, she was just at hilariously loud volumes pumping classical music through the house, and then and then, and then dad would come home and it would switch over to the Stanley brothers or flattened Scruggs, you know, or or or, or whatever, and and so it was just that kind of thing. And they were professional and are professional musicians at different points of their lives, but for the most part they had other means of income and I was kind of the next generation that tried to figure out how to actually make that thing. Be the whole thrust. Yeah, yeah, I'll let you know how it's going. Figure it out, be the whole, the whole thrust. Yeah, yeah, I'll let you know how it's going.
Speaker 1:Figure it out. Well, as far as the bluegrass thing is concerned, I've been always fascinated by this because, um, when you grow up in that, at least exposed to that school of playing, yeah, um, there there is a songbook, am I right? There's? There's like a group of standards, what, what would you ask? You know, uh, the quantity of these tunes and what you know what I mean it's like? What is the? What is the bluegrass songbook like in terms of learning curve and quantity of tunes, and what are the tunes that, if someone wanted to, you know, enter the realm, yeah, of, of bluegrass? What would you suggest as, like this, uh, a quantity of standards to start off with yeah, totally.
Speaker 2:I think it's very similar to when you start learning blues or jazz. We have, we have these certain I don't know half dozen tunes that you're really expected Like. Anybody can call them at any time and you would know them. The nice thing about from a music I guess you could say from a composition or a theory point of view is that bluegrass stuff is really approachable because it's pretty bluesy in the way that it's 1-4 chord kind of oriented. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:And so, um, and and and a lot of that is because that there's so much crossover between blues music and country music and bluegrass music and those kind of, uh, inner, inner weave, um, but you know, like I'm thinking like if you, if you took any of the stanley brothers lexicon catalog, or flattened scrugs and like a little girl of mine in tennessee, or salty dog blues, or hot corn, cold corn, or um, you know, uh, you, you start to, you start to know these songs and there are so many instrumentals that are expected to be known, like, on the guitar side, blackberry Blossom and on the fiddle side, or Billy in the low ground, or, or, um, red haired boy, and then, uh, you know, daybreak and Dixie on the banjo side or foggy mountain breakdown come on you know, or even the, the, the theme song from the Beverly hillbillies.
Speaker 1:You know what I mean. These are.
Speaker 2:these are all things that are really really pillar pieces in the bluegrass lexicon. So there are myriad resources online. It's not unlike jazz stuff. There are playalongs all over YouTube. There are bluegrass playlists on whatever digital platform you choose to stream from, uh, for which we will not be paid. Well, and anyway you, uh, you can find these things, and there are far more qualified listers um than than I am, but it's very accessible and it's a lovely primer for anyone who wants to try to get into music that is maybe more harmonically or melodically advanced and I'm speaking of jazz here now.
Speaker 2:And it's just because when you get these, you know, at a bluegrass jam it's not uncommon for someone to maybe not know this particular version of this particular song, or maybe someone adds a chord change in that, someone else doesn't, and so you hear numbers called a lot Right.
Speaker 2:Go to the four there instead of the six, go to the four there instead of the six, or go to the two there instead of the four, or go to the minor two instead of the five, or it's a minor two, five, one in something like a David Grissman tune or whatever. And so suddenly, because of an experiential learning situation where you're at a jam session and it's presented in a fun way, you're suddenly familiar with how maybe a little bit of a number system with music works. Right, then next thing you know you understand what a two, five one is. And then someone's teaching you, um, take the a train, and suddenly that's not all that different from another Flatt Scruggs tune. Or like you're doing a 6-2-5-1, which is Salty Dog Blues, or Don't Let your Deal Go Down from the Flatt Scruggs catalog. And then suddenly you're thinking about, oh wait, what is a dominant seventh chord and what is a minor two chord? And then next thing you know you're playing the jazz music, the jazz music.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So anyway, I feel like I feel like it's a really great vehicle for understanding those kinds of things. And I think you can look at players like gosh, jerry Reed or Chet Atkins you had one of my favorite episodes of yours of the podcast with Steve Warner, oh yeah, and these you know, tommy Emanuel, my friend, these certified official guitarists, you know these cats are all heavily schooled, and maybe even primarily schooled in that kind of country roots music. And even Bill Monroe I mean Bill Monroe's mandolin licks are so Robert Johnson-y it's not even funny, man Right. Even Chuck Berry stuff you hear that in mandolin playing all the time Sure.
Speaker 2:So I just feel like the bluegrass thing is such a great primer for so many different kinds of music, especially if you play an instrument that is in the rhythm section, like a rhythm guitar would be in bluegrass or the bass would be.
Speaker 2:And I think there's probably no better example of that than, like our mutual friend, how we met Andy Wood. You know he's an incredible bluegrass mandolin player and acoustic guitar player and that was really how he's from Western North Carolina, that's how that cat got introduced to music, and the melodic and harmonic concepts of that music are presented in such a casual way that it sort of demystifies and unscarifies music in a way that is really really approachable, and I think that's a healthy, healthy thing for young brains. And so I just encourage anybody who wants to try to get a handle on melody against a chord sound to check out bluegrass music. You know those fiddle tunes and those guitar tunes and what does the melody sound like and why do you play that chord with that melody note? And next thing you know you're playing giant steps and next thing, you know you're playing Giant Steps.
Speaker 1:Yes, well, speaking of kind of the transition to learning more sophisticated musical concepts and so on and so forth I'm interested in. You know, you did go to university, went to University of Tennessee, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I did.
Speaker 1:That's right. Yeah, great jazz school there. So I was curious as to that transition, because it might be interesting for folk to kind of get their mind around someone who is already from a family background already kind of doing music as a living. Yeah, and I'm sure most of the people that you went to school with were not from that. That's true Rarified vantage point I've used that twice now in our conversation. So I'm interested is how you got your mind around that in terms of saying, okay, well, I want to learn a little bit more about what's going on here, because what was your goal at that point? Because you were already kind of doing what most of those people, let's be honest, that are going to music school will never end up doing uh, a lot of them, right, because that's just the way the business works, it's a good point.
Speaker 2:I haven't really ever thought of it that way, Greg.
Speaker 1:So, um, how was that transition and what were your goals going to that school? Um, what did you want to get out of it?
Speaker 2:I think much in the same way we were talking about how a name on a liner note can lead you down a new rabbit hole. It was the same way for me with music school, in that when I saw Rusty Holloway playing the upright bass at the age that I was which was maybe, like I don't know, a junior in high school that instrument seemed so unwieldy and weird and unapproachable from like a just oh well, I'd played guitar before and it's like, okay, well, the electric bass neck makes sense, but this vertically oriented, fretless bass neck that is, you know, feet long in in in scale, seems so weird. And and we got one and started messing around on it and and it was like, okay, it kind of makes sense, but this hurts, and like they're like how do you play this thing consistently in tune once you start venturing up the neck and and and and um. So really learning to play the double bass I had never really seen it happen before, apart from in some videos and and seeing you know the cat on the lawrence welk show or whatever on PBS playing one. So that was the vehicle to go to music school, because I knew that teacher and I knew that I was supposed to go to college and get the hell out of Morristown, tennessee somehow. So it was just that simple.
Speaker 2:It didn't ever occur to me that there were already music schools that were teaching roots music and bluegrass, and there were fiddle camps and guitar camps and mandolin camps and even even bass camps. I didn't know that those things existed and so it was just like this is my way to immerse myself in this and figure out how this unwieldy instrument can be better. And if I'm gonna make a living as a bass player, surely I'm gonna have to be able to do more than one thing pretty well. And so when I started studying with Rusty, he was really adamant about that. He's like you're going to double major in the symphonic musics and in the jazz stuff and you're going to work on the electric bass as though it were the double bass as far as a pedagogical technical approach. It were the double bass as far as a pedagogical technical approach, and you're going to apply the grid electric bass system to the upright bass. And so it was just honestly, the whole impetus behind music school was to really get my head around the things I didn't understand intrinsically about how the double bass worked and about how jazz worked and how you know like, uh, you know like, you get to a point in bluegrass music or in folk music where a minor two to a dominant, five to a one chord makes sense. But like, yeah, but there's something spicy in that one chord. It's like oh, it was a major seven, oh, it's a major seven with the. There's a sharp 11 in there too. You're getting a nice lydian sound in there. Man, whoa, you know. And then you start getting some altered sounds and it's like oh, my gosh, that we're speaking a whole, a whole new accent of the same old language here. Uh, and and and anyway.
Speaker 2:So it it became a vehicle to incur ass loads of financial debt while learning a lot. It's just an opportunity to for me. I didn't do college in the traditional sense. It took me forever to graduate because I took no core classes. I just took so many music hours. I get that. Core classes, I just took so many music hours. I get that. I mean, I just immersed myself. I played in every ensemble that I could so that I would not have to practice by myself as often as I should have done, but anyway, maybe that's a long-winded, convoluted answer to the question, but it's the same thing as the liner notes, greg.
Speaker 2:Like, okay, if I'm going to do this base thing, I'm going all the way in as far as I know how to go in in my current circumstances here in East Tennessee, I'm going to Knoxville and I'm studying the base, and that's why you know Right. And so you did get a degree. I did Right. Before I finished school they stopped awarding two degrees for the amount of hours in the different courses that I took. So I'm a little bitter about that still these many years on. But yeah, I have a degree in strings music with an emphasis in studio music and jazz. Oh nice.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, which is, I can tell you exactly how much it's worth actually.
Speaker 1:But I'm not going to yes, Well luckily I went to college in a time where it was pretty doggone cheap, which is good, cool, that's cool, that's great Greg. Times have changed a little bit, but hey, what are you going to do?
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I mean, as you say, there are so many more ways Experiential learning is. You can't put a financial value on that. Getting out, being in the circumstance, going to a jam session, going on the road and playing the same licks over and over, listening to the same albums over and over until you can't stand it anymore and it just becomes a part of your musical DNA. Those are crucial things to do, and that's what you did. That's what I continue to try to do. Yeah, this is the way, as the Mandalorian might say.
Speaker 1:We interrupt this regularly scheduled gristle infested conversation to give a special shout out to our friends at fishman transducers, makers of the greg caulk signature fluence gristle tone pickup set can you dig that? And our friends at wildwood guitars of lewisville, colorado, bringing the heat in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains. Now let me ask you this You're living in the mighty Knoxville. That's pretty doggone close to Nashville and through your experiences with who you've all played with, there's probably not the necessity to relocate to more of a quote-unquote music town.
Speaker 2:But would you agree with that? To an extent I agree with that. There's definitely some FOMO. Sometimes that comes up and rears its ugly head in my subconscious, but the world is smaller than it used to be in terms of travel logistics and in terms of recording technology. I mean, for example, we're doing this, of course, over the internet, as you said, uh, doing this interview, but, um, nashville is, depending upon what part of town, between two and a half hours and three hours away for me and I, uh, I gain an hour across the time zones, and so it just has become this work commute. I, I consider myself based out of Nashville and I live in Knoxville. That's how often I'm there two or three times a month, usually. Um, it'll go over again next week, uh, for a quick, quick recording session with some, some killers, uh and um, some killers. And it's funny. I used to be really in my head about not having tried Nashville, but it turned out that our family life started earlier than we intended it to.
Speaker 2:My wife is an educator. She is a school teacher of 20-some years here in Knoxville. She teaches band. Actually, she teaches beginning band. Oh, no, kidding, bless her. Yeah, yeah, she's incredible. She's an incredible educator and she does lots of clinics where she's hired to go to different places, different cities, and educate kids who have auditioned for maybe like an honor band or something like that, and so she had a good thing going, and then we had our daughter, and then we had our son and it was just like you know what, knoxville is a more effective place to live for our family lifestyle, and so we're going to do it here, and people give me credit for figuring out how to make it work, which is really, really sweet, but I honestly just feel like I just said yes to as many things as possible.
Speaker 1:Yes, I've said those words myself.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so I live here. I do quite a few remote recording sessions here at my house on electric bass or on upright bass, especially double bass, doghouse bullfiddle. And then, yeah, I get on airplanes and tour buses in Nashville and that's the way it is, and away you go and away I go.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about the balance between obviously playing with Jerry Douglas it's, it's an awesome thing. I mean, it's a musically outstanding. You know he's obviously got legendary status and so on and so forth. But now you find yourself doing this more original material, yeah and um. And I'm wondering do you always foresee the necessity of being the sideman, or are you at some point going you know what, I'm going to do my own thing and no matter what that takes, I'm interested if that's entered your thought processes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't think I consider those things proprietary. I don't sort them into those two piles. I just see it all as feeding the music portfolio. I think a music career in 2020, whatever must be a diverse one, where you say yes to as many things as you can until it becomes time to say no to the correct things, and that saying of no is informed by things like, of course, logistics I am booked, I am not booked but it's also by mental health, and by which I mean not just exhaustion or mitigation thereof. But am I into this and does it suit me creatively and does it allow me to put my best feet forward as an accompanist or as a performer in a more featured context? And so ideally for me? Let's be real. The bottom line is how much does it pay and can I afford not to do it? But there are things that we do that pay absolute nothing and we go do them, or maybe they pay, but they wash out after you factor in the cost of the travel or whatever that you know. So many of us, we work and work and work to get to the point to where we get to the gigs that we really want to do, and most of the time we don't make any money on those particular gigs, but we go do them because of the people that we want to play with, and that happens to me a lot in Nashville. You go do a bar gig in Nashville because I can't wait to play with Jordan Pearlson or with Matt Alger or with my friend Sam Lewis or whatever, and those are really really fun to do and they feed you creatively. And then you try to balance that against you know. Yeah, well, god, okay, a three-week tour. Here we go. I don't feel like being gone for three weeks and losing that much sleep between time zones, but it's going to be really really cool to be on stage every night with Jerry Douglas and Tommy Emanuel. So let's go. You know what I mean. And so I guess the answer to your question is I try at this point in my life to really find does that boost me creatively and is it worth my time financially? And if as many of my yes boxes are checked as possible, if I can check those boxes, then I can go do it, and that's about it.
Speaker 2:I think that right now I do feel more motivated to put my own songwritery thing out there, and that's due in no small part to a lot of the affirmations that I've received from some heroes and peers like Jerry and Tommy. Jerry Douglas and I there's the Jerry Douglas Band, which is four of us myself and the incredible Mike Seal on electric guitar and the incredible Christian Settlemyer on the violin and we go do our thing. But sometimes that's not as logistically possible, and so Jerry and Tommy are under the same music management umbrella, got it? And so there was this idea hey, what if Jerry opens with his thing for Tommy Emanuel and then plays with Tommy? But how can we make that? They've done that before. How can we up the ante of that tour?
Speaker 2:And it was like hey, daniel, would you consider doing this? And the answer was yes. And Jerry was like hey, I've heard some of your songs, why don't we do some of them on that tour? And so that was an opportunity to push aside the fear guy and say you know what Hell? Yeah, let's go try a couple of these songs in front of these folks and see what happens.
Speaker 2:And people loved it. And Jerry was like these are good songs, man, and he's produced enough songwriters to where I can take his word for it. And I can tell the imposter syndrome-y guy to shut up for a minute and listen to the guy who's won 16 Grammy Awards, right, and sometimes it takes this isn't meant to sound kind of like braggadocious and name-droppy, but it takes that to get above yourself sometimes and get that Google Earth view of your own creative thing. You know what I mean. And so it's like when someone like Greg Hawk or Andy Timmons comes up to you when you've just sung some bluegrass songs at a little music camp and they say dude, this is good, you should do this more often. It's a nice thing to hear.
Speaker 2:And so I guess the long ass winded answer to your question is is I try to balance all of it. To balance all of it If there's enough accompanist opportunity that gives me an opportunity to see someone like Sarah Jaroz work a room and compose a set list. And how does that work? How do I address the audience and keep them engaged? And then how do I get to see an instrumental person like Tommy Emanuel build his set and interface with an audience? And what is that experience like versus what it's like when I am listening to one of his recorded pieces and it's like, oh, he did this differently live and I bet I know why it lands differently in front of people than it does in front of just a microphone in a sterile studio. And then I guess all the decisions inform, all the decisions is is the answer, you know.
Speaker 2:And so I, I don't try to be, I don't try to exclude any musical experience, and maybe that sounds woo, but I really don't. It's like I just I wanted, I want to be the music director at Andy Wood's Guitar Camp and try to play Tom Coyle Fusion, and then I want to walk down the hill and sing Rocky Top, you know, or whatever you know, and then I want to go sing my murder ballads, and I don't know if I don't focus on any one of those things too much. Maybe that's not ideal, maybe I would be more of a specialist and I could be a little more virtuosic, but I like to wear this jack-of-all-trades hat and I'm certainly a master of none of them. But the learning experience at each of these junctures is just too rich to deprive myself of. I can dig it all.
Speaker 1:Yeah, man, yeah, I was going to ask you about the. Um, the bluegrass vocal thing has always been fascinating to me because there's just such a there's just it's. There's a purity of voice and the pitch totally there's never like swooping up to the pitch, it's just just there. And I'm just wondering how does that happen?
Speaker 2:Well, if you find out, if you'd let me know, I would really appreciate it, because that is something that I struggle with. I keep thinking like one of these days I'm going to get out from behind my own shadow and take some vocal lessons from someone who is really good at it, like it is that thing. I think it's if I put my ethnomusicological hat on and I think about how mountain singing works here in the Smoky Mountains, for example, or how field haulers work, or even the Gaelic and Gaelic traditions in Scotland and Ireland. It's just the way, and a lot of times and I could be totally off base here, no pun intended, but I think a lot of these songs were, or the styles of these songs, the style of singing, occurred in historical places where they were accompanying tasks, and so it wasn't a performative thing as much as it was a recitation.
Speaker 2:And whenever you recite something, you do so in a plainer speech until you start to take ownership of those words, and then you begin to embellish it, and when you're reading a poem that you really care about or that really speaks to you, you start to incorporate what can only be defined as musical elements. There are pitch rises and falls, there are dynamics, there are softer, there are louder. There are different ways that you emote within the context of a recitation and I think that that is probably why Appalachian musics are so honest in their delivery and I try to do that. There are people who do it with so much more nuance and skill than I do, but what I do try to bring to it is as honest a vocal sound and intent as I possibly can. And you're right, there's just not a lot of melisma, little turny embellishments, but when they are, they're very, very clean, clear and deliberate. There aren't a lot of scoops.
Speaker 2:Unless there are scoops, it's just a very intentional way of being unintentional. Almost it's really hard to qualify the sound of Appalachian singing. Well it's interesting.
Speaker 1:You're getting at that effortlessness, yes, and that was one of the things for me it's like thinking about when I would listen to when I was a young'un I was exposed to once I got to college, you know, jimmy Bryant, oh God, yeah. And Joe Maphis, yes, and just that alternate picking Totally, you know, and they and just that, uh, alternate picking Totally, you know, and they were just clean as a whistle.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it wasn't until and I was like, how could the cause? Every time I did I would tense up. You know, when I was doing my blues, playing or whatnot, I was, everything was loosey, goosey, body language, everything loose, you know, no problem. And then as soon as I was going to do this other stuff that was not necessarily my original wheelhouse I would tense up, you know, and there would be this, you know, tensing up both left and right hand. And it wasn't until I saw those guys on YouTube of all things, when you could actually look these guys up and see what. And they're playing at some old black and white television program and the look, the body language couldn't have been more laid back.
Speaker 2:Oh, I know.
Speaker 1:There was program and the look, the body language couldn't have been more laid back and there was no tense. Tenseness and I think it's the same thing as you're talking about with because of this recitation aspect of some of those. There's just an effortlessness, because it's just like, oh, this is what I'm doing now, this is what I've always done, and not to say that there wasn't practice to get to that point, but I think it never came from a position of overthinking. It maybe Does that make sense.
Speaker 2:No, it makes perfect sense. And I think that's one of the great failings of musical academia. When you codify and this is not meant to throw anyone under any bus, but you know you have the ABCs of jazz method, you know you have a David Baker, jamie Aebersold and the late great Knoxvillian Jerry Coker, these sort of really structured ways of codifying what is primarily an improvised music are very, very useful to teach it, but they're not necessarily useful to install it in an innate way and it becomes really, really difficult this is the struggle that all of us music educators eventually encounter it becomes really really difficult to encourage that looseness and encourage that playfulness and relaxation. And so when it is presented to you at such a young age and all of the great grassers that I know, all of them encountered the style of singing, the style of playing at such an early age, and I'm not saying that there's no hope for those of us who try to mutate ourselves later on in life. I still do that with the claw, hammer, banjo and Jesus, greg. If you could hear how terrible I am at playing away in a manger on the piano, literally, the book is right there behind my two, behind my bases over there. It's, I'm serious, it's one, three, five left-hand first position and see way in a manger. Seriously, I'm so bad at piano and it breaks my heart. It's like, why didn't I do this when I was a kid? But anyway, um, yeah, if it was.
Speaker 2:One of the things that I hope we figure out one day, as as a, as a species, is is how to install the freedom while we install the rules, right, right, and I don't know the answer to it, man, but, um, I don't know it. I think it's the same, I think, when we study other kinds of music that are non-western. I think that really helps too. I mean, god, listen to Derek Trucks play and you're like, dude, your microtonal bends that you use if you're using a tremolo bar or if you're using your fingers, yeah, to manipulate string bends in such specific ways. There is, you eventually get to a freedom when you get so specific, I think and I don't know how to do it yet and I'll let you know if I figure it out, but I know what you're saying. I have no idea. I have no idea what I just said. That was such a terrible answer. No, that's good. That's good.
Speaker 1:But this whole idea of you know, of of effort and it's really a hard thing to convey to people because you know you say, well, just take it easy and not try so hard, but in order to get to that point you've tried unbelievably hard, totally man, I know, I know, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, it is like that.
Speaker 2:I think it's really important to have other vocations outside of music, because I think sometimes those can give you permission to be a little more playful with music and try hard in new ways. For me that's like fly fishing, Like more effort with a fly fishing cast or more effort with a golf swing in no way results in a better thing. It does not produce a better result, right? Right, Because what you do is you start to introduce some sort of herky-jerky thing that interrupts the whole transfer of energy, either to a ball or to a fly line, and I haven't figured out the right combinations of words that would describe that in a musical way, but I think the same principles are there. It's probably all been written by George Lucas somewhere in Frank Oz's Yoda voice, but it is that there is no try kind of thing and there is a thing that happens. I'm sure many listeners have done the same thing that I have done and gone down like Troy Grady, YouTube plunges, you know, and watched you know, like picking techniques. And I've watched the Eric Johnson video like 90 times and I love it so much and it's mostly just because I love the alchemy of whoa. These are really simple five and six note pentatonic patterns of whoa. These are really simple five and six note pentatonic patterns, but God, when you play them at speed, live in concert. The alchemy of that. It sounds like such a thing. It's so much richer than it is whenever it's stripped down and into its constituent parts. The sound is it's like eating a great piece of sourdough bread. You know the ingredients and you know the process, but, God, you still have these explosions in your mind from your taste buds. And so there's something about when you distill emotion down to its purest iteration. You can find freedom in there eventually, and I guess repetition factors into that somehow. But surely the fastest way to get it is to watch a master of it as often as possible. That's the best thing I can recommend to Tim when you're seeking for, when you're seeking that kind of fluidity, yes, yes, I don't think there are very many better examples of it, especially in an improvisational context, than the person sitting opposite me on this Zoom transmission. I mean it. I love at the Woodshed when we do our artist concert. I always like it when you and Toby and Dylan go first, because it gets me so fired up and I watched you guys and I watched the abandon with which you perform and it makes me so much less scared about messing up one of mark letary's grooves or so much less scared about singing something or forgetting the third b section, which is totally different from the other two. In one of Andy Wood's songs tunes Right, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2:Like you get out of the way of the result and you get into the process, and that is the only way to be free is to be a process-oriented person. I think you focus on the process and then the result takes care of itself. It's the same thing I tell students. It's the same thing I tell my teenage kids. You know, I'm teaching my kid to mow the yard. It's like, don't worry about what it looks like at the end of it, Just keep the wheels in line with the line that you made the last time. Right, right, right. It becomes a meditative thing. You know what I mean. Anyway, yeah, Anyway, yeah. My opinions only folks, my opinions only. Don't tell.
Speaker 1:Jeff Berlin, I said any of this. Well, I hope we get to do some playing again this year. I was in Europe this year when you guys did the camp, so we'll see what happens this year.
Speaker 1:I don't know, my schedule with the ensemble has been a little crazy, but it's been a blast. I mean the reason why I asked earlier. Of course you're a younger fellow than I am and my kids are older, and once your kids get old enough, where they're they're kind of out and about and doing their own thing then you get a little bit more wiggle room to go. Well, maybe I just want to do my own thing. You know what I mean, and um and so as a result, it's like I'm realizing so many things of being on the road doing my own thing and that you just don't know unless you've really immersed it. And I don't regret any of the things I did to get to this point, because I wouldn't be able to do what I'm doing now.
Speaker 2:Exactly Regret is a useless emotion.
Speaker 1:Exactly, and I'm grateful for all those opportunities. But, good God, it's fun just going out and playing your own thing, you know it's totally totally it's. You know, we're having fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Having said all that bullshit I did about you know, I try to keep a balance, man, and I'd like to I get it.
Speaker 1:Believe me, I've cause. I know exactly.
Speaker 2:It's like, honestly, what I want to do is I just want to go sing my own songs in places where the fly fishing is incredible. So if anybody you know figures out, exactly I just get to go to like montana. Montana and wyoming all the time during the summer hit me up and you never know you, you may indeed manifest it, my good, I'm trying, I'm trying, we should, we should, uh, actually properly talk just for a second, if you don't mind.
Speaker 2:Great, we, we did. You and I did meet at andy wood's woodshed Guitar Camp.
Speaker 2:That's correct, andy Wood has been a friend of mine. He lives here in Knoxville. He's another bluegrass kid along. We're 40-year-old bluegrass kids now. But Andy has a guitar camp that happens yearly in Crossville, tennessee. Excuse me, and I am now the music director for that. I stepped into Adam Nitti's incredibly, huge, incredible shoes because he couldn't do the second year of the camp and I succeeded him in the bass playing position and that camp is still very young and we're figuring out lots of different ways to improve it each year. And you have been a featured clinician there every year, except for maybe the last one, and we have folks like the regular clinicians include, of course, andy and yourself and Andy Timmons and Mark Letary and Brent Mason is there every year and Brent Mason. Brent Mason is there every year and we've had Tom Quayle a couple of times and Ben Eller, who a lot of folks will know from his incredible YouTube channel. Right.
Speaker 1:I need to get Ben on this program as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, talk about a great music educator. Ben is really great at codifying principles. Codifying principles right, without rigidity, without installing rigidity at the same time. You know what I mean?
Speaker 2:uh, and then, like we've had featured folks like joe bonamassa and robin forge and eric johnson, and we just had steve morse this last year and, and the setting is incredible, it's a lot beside this pastoral lake that I fish in the mornings and then we go teach and rehearse in the afternoons. And it is not a guitar camp, greg, it's a music camp. And that's one thing Steve Moore said. He said I've never been to a place where cats were just like talking about how to make the song better as opposed to how to make the shred better. Right, right right right.
Speaker 2:And I love that. How to make the shred better, right, right, right, right. And I love that. And we all sit and we eat dinner together with the campers and it's just a really approachable, cool thing. So if you're interested in that, just Google the Woodshed Guitar Experience, correct. And we're really like we have conversations after that camp every year. I just had one with Randy, one of the primary financial movers and shakers with that camp every year. We just I just had one with Randy, one of the one of the primary financial um movers and shakers with that camp, and he's like well, what do we what from your vantage point, daniel? What do we need to do differently next year? And I love that. That's such a lovely, lovely approach, again, a process based approach to putting on a really unique thing. And so, um, I just want to I know there's a lot of guitar players hanging out- oh, yeah, absolutely and listening.
Speaker 2:So please check out the woodshed.
Speaker 1:It's really really cool it's good times and the food's good too, which is it's good it is, and and it, yeah, it's cool yeah, and I think that one one thing especially great, in addition to all the things you just mentioned, is the fact that, uh, in some of these other camps there is really kind of a us and them mentality, with the clinician slash artist versus the peeps, and I mean there's always some good interaction in all the camps, but this camp in particular, you're just hanging out with people all the time, which is great.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I mean, boundaries are good. Right, you need to have a, you need to have time to compose yourself, maybe before or after a performance, or you need to have time when you can just let your hair down and and scream at somebody about how frustrated you are about the way you just played Tom Quayle's song and maybe maybe you don't want the person who just paid a significant amount of money to be there. You don't want them to hear that because you don't want them to feel like their experience has not been a pristine one. But at the same time, like you just said, the accessibility for the folks that are there to learn and I always learn just ass loads every time I'm there, you know, in watching my peers work and in watching the folks who attend the camp as campers. They are watching their own explosions go off, their own eureka moments. It's rewarding for everybody there, you know Right, and it's a good thing.
Speaker 1:It is a good thing and there's a Bucky's right's right at the off-ramp at Crossville, you can get some delicious cuisines.
Speaker 2:Speaking of Martin Harley, can you imagine he came over for a US tour and I took him to a Buc-ee's. Can you imagine a person from the UK experiencing pulling into a Buc-ee's the first time when Tom Quayle first?
Speaker 1:arrived the first year he came in, we had just introduced ourselves.
Speaker 2:We didn't really, and me and Dylan and Toby took him in the gristle missile and we're like we're taking you someplace, and he was astounded.
Speaker 1:Now, every time I go to one, I always snap a little picture and send it to him.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, he almost tuned his guitar in fourths.
Speaker 1:I like to say it's all that's great and horrible about America in one fell swoop.
Speaker 2:Dude, that is so accurate. There is not a single thing in Buc-ee's that doesn't have sugar in it. The lettuce has sugar in it?
Speaker 1:I'm pretty sure it's incredible.
Speaker 2:Yeah, man, exactly correct. I wanted to send a hello along, uh, from roscoe beck. Uh, he was in town and uh, with eric johnson a few months ago we had dinner. Like eric was like, no, no, you got to meet roscoe you're having.
Speaker 2:He's a major hero of mine, greg roscoe's, my boy, I mean I know, I know you guys are close and that's roscoe is one of the kindest people I've ever encountered and he was immediately come here and he got me like like were open, they were going to start in like 45 minutes and he's like on stage, he turns his rig on, he's like play this, play this, check this out, cause I you know, yeah, I'm going to play a Roscoe Beck bass the original Fender version of it.
Speaker 2:You know I used to lust after in the Fender catalog by the lamp light when I was in high school and he was just so, so kind and sweet and we sent text messages back and forth, the same with Eric and anyway, it's been so great to get to know more of the folks in the community that folks like you and Timmons and Andy Wood you guys really really like fan the flames of collaborative music exchange and I think that's really really cool. So thanks for me you didn't know that I was, but I was dropping your name real hard and that outcome I got to have dinner with Roscoe Beck, one of the reasons anyway. So I appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm glad that turned out. Yeah, he's a gentleman and a scholar, oh my God. Well, I'm glad that turned out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he's a gentleman and a scholar.
Speaker 1:Oh, my God, as are you, my good man. It was an absolute pleasure getting to talk with you today. Likewise, I'm honored Everything that you do and it's always fun hanging out with you and I hope we get to do that again in person and do some music in the not-too-distant future.
Speaker 2:I'm so flattered to be among the mighty gristles. Grist to be among the mighty um gristles, gristlers, gristlers, yes, gristlin, gristlin through the great whistle. I'm trying to find whistle analogies.
Speaker 1:I like it.
Speaker 2:I like them all yeah, alright, my friend.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much. You have a good uh, christmas is coming up, you have a great holiday season and let the good times roll, and hopefully I will see you in the not-too-distant future here in 2025.
Speaker 2:Thanks, greg, appreciate you man. Hi to Dylan, hi to Toby, likewise my friend.
Speaker 1:Take it easy, have a good one.
Speaker 2:See you.
Speaker 1:Bye-bye. Well, thanks for tuning in, ladies and gentlemen, to another episode of Chewing the Gristle. We certainly do appreciate you stopping by. Make sure you tell your friends all about us. I think they might enjoy themselves. So thanks again for tuning in and we'll see you next time.
