More "American Legacies" reviews in Paste, East Bay Express, and Audiophile Audition

Here's some more great reviews on the new "American Legacies" Album:

 Del McCoury and Preservation Hall Jazz Band:
American Legacies
[McCoury Music and Preservation Hall Recordings]
Album Review by Andy Whitman


When the saints go marching in the holler

The intersection of bluegrass and jazz isn’t exactly a bustling one, but the successful fusions of the past – Bela Fleck’s genre-defying albums, David Grisman’s Dawg music – have placed a heavy emphasis on improvisational interplay and breakneck solos. So the meeting of Dixieland revivalists The Preservation Hall Jazz Band and bluegrass traditionalists The Del McCoury Band is more than a little perplexing and intriguing. Both have had their forays into adventurous musical waters, but both are primarily known for their excellence in strict, formal, and relatively hidebound genres. Foggy mountain breakdown on Basin Street, anyone? Just how does that work again?

As American Legacies amply illustrates, the answer is that it works just fine. McCoury, who started his five-decade career playing with the original bluegrass iconoclast Bill Monroe, has shown an increasing elasticity and flexibility of late, touring with Phish and recording with Steve Earle, and here he seamlessly blends his bluegrass band with the brass and rhythm section of PHJB...

Full Article Here

 

Preservation Hall Jazz Band & Del McCoury Band – American Legacies – McCoury Music and Preservation Hall Recordings
On American Legacies, bluegrass and jazz come together with stellar results.

By Doug Simpson

Published on April 12, 2011

The 47-minute American Legacies album – starring the Preservation Hall Jazz Band & the Del McCoury Band – is collaboration in the truest essence of the word and a confluence of two of America’s greatest musical inventions, bluegrass and jazz. Some might believe bluegrass and jazz are miles apart but they share numerous similarities and the two genres have come together in quite a few ways over many decades. First, both styles require dazzling virtuosity, respect for the past and devotion to well-defined creative forms. Secondly, jazz and bluegrass (and thus country) have had extensive, continuing connections. Certain songs have become standards in both musical circles, while several artists have combined country/bluegrass shadings with jazzy swing, from Bob Wills to Louis Armstrong and from Chet Atkins to Herb Ellis.

American Legacies mines tradition and listeners could not ask for better interpreters than the Preservation Hall Jazz Band & the Del McCoury Band. McCoury apprenticed with Bill Monroe before starting his own band more than four decades ago and has sustained a time-honored bent ever since. The Preservation Hall Jazz Band was founded a few years after McCoury began his group and has carried forward a New Orleans-inclined heritage...   

Full Article Here

Preservation Hall Jazz Band and Del McCoury Band
American Legacies
By Lee Hildebrand

The thin line between jazz and country music has too seldom been crossed over the years, notable exceptions being Louis Armstrong's 1930 trumpet contribution to Jimmie Rodgers' "Blue Yodel #9"; the hot soloists and swinging rhythm sections in Bob Willis' and Spade Cooley's bands; Merle Haggard's 1973 LP I Love Dixie Blues; and Wynton Marsalis' recent hookups with Willie Nelson. For the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, today's most prominent purveyor of traditional New Orleans jazz, to team up with the Del McCoury Band, one of the most popular bluegrass groups on the planet, may seem odd, but both genres have firm grounding in blues and place high value on improvised instrumental virtuosity. They go together like gin and vermouth, and the combined ensembles shake it up with aplomb...

Full Article Here

Recording Reviews: 'American Legacies' (Available Now!)

Well, the new album's been available for less than 24 hours, and already folks have some great things to say about our wonderful crossover recording.  Check out some of the great reviews!


 Preservation Jazz Hall Band & Del McCoury Band
American Legacies
(McCoury Music)
Rating:
By Jon Stone April 12th, 2011 at 7:00 am
 
“The band’s in town; they come to play.”

Last year Del McCoury appeared on The Preservation Hall Jazz Band’s star-studded benefit record Preservation singing “After You’ve Gone.” Despite the spirited contributions on that release from both old and new-guard artists (Merle Haggard, Steve Earl, Jim James, Andrew Bird, etc.), McCoury’s weathered “high-and-lonesome” bluegrass voice finds immediate and arresting chemistry with the now 50-year-old Preservation Hall jazz tradition. There must have been a lightning-rod moment sometime during that session where both parties knew that an additional album project was an inevitable necessity. American Legacies is the happy result. The record elaborates on the formula that worked so well on the initial team-up, but this time brings Del McCoury’s band to the party completing the crossover circuit and proving once and for all that ideological and traditional borders between bluegrass and jazz are not only mutable but are largely imaginary.

American music is funny that way. One doesn’t have to go back very far before the faded musical familial lines between estranged cousins become undeniably distinct. In this way, when Del McCoury and his band start playing with the musicians in the Preservation Hall at New Orleans, there is an easiness to the collaboration – one due, surely, to the talent of both bands, but also with a sense of ease that sounds and feels like musical reunion...

FULL ARTICLE HERE

Good Times And Great Spirits Await With The Preservation Hall Jazz Band & The Del McCoury Band!

Grab a cold one, some great food and wonderful friends because a plethora of musical fun awaits with the American Legacies and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band & The Del McCoury Band! Separately, these musical geniuses have made it their life long objective to preserve traditional American music with tremendous skill, faith and drive within their respective genres. Now, lords of New Orleans jazz meet legends of bluegrass in one of the most compelling collaborations of 2011.

 With McCoury’s smooth and signature tenor, fresh and clean clarinets, fun and diverse fiddles and bangin’ banjos, one can clearly hear the musical magic that was created within the release.

The Preservation Hall Jazz Band & The Del McCoury Band explore common and diverse ground to bring a credible and fresh balance of bluegrass and jazz in this project. Multiple artists combine their creativity and luster into a rich musical mix of distinctive American musical forms.

Known as ambassadors of bluegrass, the Del McCoury Band is fronted by veteran Del McCoury, a legendary front man of bluegrass who has been enthralling audiences since the 1980s.

With such songs as ‘A Good Gal,’ ‘Jambalaya,’ ‘The Band’s In Town,’ and ‘I’ll Fly Away,’ one clearly hears the merging of greatness and songs that respectfully exude joy and vibrance...

FULL ARTICLE HERE

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ALBUM REVIEW: 'American Legacies' in Offbeat Magazine

PRESERVATION HALL JAZZ BAND AND DEL McCOURY BAND
AMERICAN LEGACIES
(McCoury Music)
01 April 2011 — by Brian Boyles

The evolution of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band into a conveyer of hip is one of the musical successes of post-K culture. We can no longer point to the band (or the hall) as simply a bastion of tradition; we must recognize it as an innovator of tradition. As invaluable as his father’s contributions were to our culture, Ben Jaffe is quite important to the now.

On their new collaboration with the Del McCoury Band, we find the band swinging with and around McCoury’s silky tenor. Though it’s doubtful anyone in the world was losing sleep over the dangers of mixing bluegrass with trad, this isn’t a simple suture job. Wicked mandolin runs, clarinets in skyward races with fiddles, percussive banjoes and snares—this is one mean band. Check out “Banjo Frisco” for some very new/old music.

McCoury and family have shared the stage with Phish and recorded with Steve Earle, making them as accustomed to crossover as the current Pres Hall. More importantly, we’re listening to two types of traditional music that blossomed alongside each other in the first half of the 20th Century, nurtured by two different sets of poor folks—urban African Americans and rural whites—who shared a talent to swing and a fondness for celebration and mourning. Everything comes down to blues and banjoes, after all.

The wise move here was to allow Mark Braud and Clint Maedgen to sing lead almost as often as McCoury, and thus really test out the conflagration. “The Sugar Blues” hands you a what-if question involving Bob Wills and Fats Waller, Grand Ole Opry and Preservation Hall, 1931 and 2011. Good answers abound.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE HERE

American Legacies on A Blog Supreme / NPR Jazz

Where Bluegrass Meets New Orleans Jazz
March 7, 2011
by Paul Brown

photo by Shannon Brinkman

If you're looking for credibility in either bluegrass or jazz, you'd be hard-pressed to top either the Del McCoury Band or the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. McCoury once joined the band of Bill Monroe, generally acknowledged as bluegrass' founder; he now leads his own acclaimed band. Around the time that McCoury met Monroe, Preservation Hall was founded to "nurture and perpetuate the art form of New Orleans Jazz." Many of the PHJB's charter members played with the early 20th-century pioneers of jazz, and that line of mentorship continues into today.

The Del McCoury Band and the PHJB have recorded a new album together: American Legacies is due out April 12. Bluegrass and jazz may seem odd bedfellows at first, but it's not the first time McCoury and Preservation Hall have collaborated — and there's a lot of history where that comes from. Listening to "One More 'Fore I Die," the last track on the album, it's hard to tell where the bluegrass ends and the jazz begins. We're happy to present an exclusive premiere of the song, as a free stream or download.

 CLICK HERE FOR THE DOWNLOAD! 

So why does this hybrid of American traditions work so well? We asked NPR newscaster Paul Brown, who's also an award-winning bluegrass and old-time string music documentarian, researcher and musician. He kindly sent us this thought. —Ed.

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This song works so well for one simple reason: Bluegrass, at its heart, is white rural jazz. It's old-time country or "hillbilly" music with a jazz structure and jazz motifs.
  This may not be obvious at the first casual listen, but folklorists and documenters have pointed it out many times. Bluegrass utilizes the jazz formula of establishing melodies, infusing them with blues motifs including blues scales with flatted notes, and –- most distinctively –- giving instruments and singers prominent breaks. Older styles of white country music don't feature breaks nearly so prominently, but jazz-inspired solos are an integral part of the bluegrass sound.

Bill Monroe, who had heard jazz as he developed his new band sound with the Blue Grass Boys, knew exactly what he was trying to achieve with traditional rural music. He pushed his musicians hard to realize a jazzy new take on the songs and tunes he'd learned as a kid. And he composed his own tunes and songs to fit his vision. (Bluegrass music wasn't even called by that name until the mid-1950s, well after Monroe had established the genre.)

If bluegrass and jazz have so much in common, what distinguishes them? One thing is the banjo style. The four-string banjo, derived from African instruments, is certainly a familiar sight and sound in early jazz bands. But an element that defines bluegrass specifically is the use of the three-finger five-string banjo style brought to a new level by Earl Scruggs.

Scruggs played with Monroe in the late 1940s before joining up with Lester Flatt to form the Foggy Mountain Boys. The renowned fiddler and banjo player John Hartford once told me that without the Scruggs-style banjo, there would be no bluegrass: The bluegrass bands would simply have been fairly nondescript country jazz bands. And if you listen to early Monroe recordings before Scruggs arrived, the Blue Grass Boys sounded much more like a country, jazz and blues band than what we would now think of as a bluegrass band. It's the banjo style combined with the jazz structure that really creates the bluegrass sound.

So bluegrass, with the 3-finger-style banjo, has its own sound, a mix of white and black musical streams coming out of the mountains and hollows of the Appalachians and the cities. But with this performance, we hear how much the two styles have in common, and we hear Del McCoury bringing bluegrass back to its jazz roots.

In "One More 'Fore I Die," we can also hear remnants of church-song harmonies and phrasing common to jazz and bluegrass. There's a good reason for this: Countless jazz and bluegrass performers started learning music while singing in churches, whether urban or rural. It often doesn't take much to bring bluegrass and jazz singing together.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE HERE!