By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 11, 2007
The first time Washingtonians got to see Alison Krauss and the extraordinary guitarist Tony Rice play together was Oct. 7, 1988, when the then-17-year-old fiddle player sat in with the Tony Rice Unit at the Birchmere. After a breathless version of "Nine Pound Hammer," Rice asked the audience, "That's some fiddle playing, isn't it?"
At DAR Constitution Hall on Wednesday, Krauss, who has since won more Grammys than any other female artist (20), will essentially be asking the audience, "That's some guitar playing, isn't it?"
That's because the concert, featuring Krauss, her band, Union Station, and Rice, will draw exclusively from a remarkable legacy of recordings going back three decades, in which time Rice redefined acoustic guitar and acoustic music, whether playing traditional straight-ahead bluegrass or more progressive jazz and experimental "spacegrass." With his tone, articulation, blinding speed, improvisational agility and rare blend of power and soul, Rice freed the fingers and imaginations of future generations of string musicians.
Including a young Krauss.
"My love and admiration for Tony goes back to what made me really want to play music," Krauss says, recalling recently that she heard his early records as a teenager, when she was immersed in classical violin. "My whole concept of music itself came alive because of Tony.
"The singing and the playing are so shockingly beautiful," Krauss says from her Nashville home. "But for me, more than anything, it was Tony's production of the songs that he chose to sing, and the kind of person he portrayed, and portrays, himself to be in the choices he makes musically. His records are the textbooks for me. Tony is the epitome of the kind of things that I would want to be someday -- that's my desire as a musician, to reach for that."
Krauss, of course, is known not just as a great fiddler, but as one of the great voices in bluegrass and country. There was a time when Rice, too, was considered one of the finest modern bluegrass singers. But in the mid-90s, his voice began failing because of overuse and strain, and he had to stop singing. Rice's condition is called dysphonia, and, for now, time may be the only healer of a voice that's rough and rumbling when he speaks.
Rice insists he doesn't miss singing all that much, "not as much as you might think. The only time I do is when I hear a piece of music -- a rare Gordon Lightfoot song or something by Norman Blake -- where I think, 'Boy, I wish I had a voice, because if I did, I would put my own stamp on that tune and play and record it.' "
"But those moments are probably more rare than my general listening audience might think because my first love has been the guitar."
And he has been putting his loving stamp on that for a long time.
Rice was born in Danville, Va., but grew up in Southern California. He was fascinated with guitar by age 4, thanks to his father, Herb, a "serious" amateur guitarist and fan of classic bluegrass of the '40s and '50s. Rice's older brother, Larry, a superb mandolinist who died last year, was another role model, particularly after he and Tony found inspiration in brothers Roland and Clarence White of the California-based Kentucky Colonels.
Clarence White was the most innovative flat-picker of his time and almost single-handedly elevated the acoustic guitar as a lead instrument in bluegrass from its traditional rhythm role. White's influence remains evident in his legendary 1935 Martin D-28, with its famous enlarged sound hole, acquired by Rice in 1975, two years after White was killed by a drunk driver. Rice has played it almost continuously since, and the guitar is so strongly identified with Rice that Fretboard Journal recently devoted a 22-page cover story to it.
"When I first came into prominence as a 'bluegrass' guitar player, there was only a couple of guys ahead of me -- of course Clarence, later on Doc Watson and Norman Blake -- even though he was in a different world, he was by definition a bluegrass guitar player," Rice recalls. "The next guy that came onto the scene and really turned everybody's heads would have been Dan Crary. I had the unfortunate task at the time of having to replace Dan Crary in the Bluegrass Alliance."
That was in 1970, when Rice moved to Kentucky; a few years later, he joined seminal progressive bluegrass band the New South, featuring J.D. Crowe on banjo, Ricky Skaggs on fiddle and Jerry Douglas on dobro (Douglas is now part of Krauss's Union Station). Then, in 1975, Rice quit the New South and drove to Marin County in California to join mandolinist David Grisman's Quintet, helping launch an acoustic revolution by reimagining what a string band could be.
"In terms of my own progression as a guitar player who went on to influence other people, Grisman would have been the biggest steppingstone," Rice says. "Prior to him, I was just a bluegrass guitar player and kind of a blip on the radar screen. Of course, I picked up a little bit during the years with J.D. Crowe, but the Grisman band was a different thing altogether, with the whole concept of playing music that was structured for modern jazz on bluegrass instruments and was all instrumental."
That free-spirited improvisational approach continued when Rice left Grisman in 1979 to pursue a panoply of music: straight-ahead bluegrass with the all-star Bluegrass Album Band; his own "spacegrass" ventures with the instrumental Tony Rice Unit; vocal albums focusing on contemporary songwriters (including his last vocal showcase, 1996's sterling "Sings Gordon Lightfoot"); the "Tone Poems" duo album in which he and Grisman played a variety of tunes on vintage instruments; and a series of albums with guitarist and singer Peter Rowan.
According to Rice, "The diversity of the stuff that I've done simply stems from the desire to create something different in the moment -- it's always in the moment."
"He's a true artist," Krauss says. "Those folks, they're on a journey their whole lives to discover what's around the corner and where they want to push themselves all the time, and that's what Tony has done. If you look at the paths his records have taken through the years, he's traveling to somewhere, and that's beautiful. I don't think that he ever worried what anybody was going to think about what he was doing musically -- he just brought everybody with him."
Part of Krauss's mission with the current tour is her desire to bring Rice to a new, wider audience. Bands have often addressed Rice's repertoire, sometimes with him on hand. Union Station guitarist and singer Dan Tyminski once staged a re-creation of Rice's classic 1979 album, "Manzanita," and, Krauss says, "I thought, 'Why can't we do that? I wanna do that!' I talked to [banjoist-guitarist] Ron Block at the next band meeting, and everyone was just thrilled to do it.
"Then I was [thinking], 'What if Tony doesn't wanna do it?' When he said he did, I was really glad."
As for Rice, he says he was "sort of expecting it to happen at some point -- I just didn't know when. Alison played with the Unit off and on for a year right after we met [in the '80s]. I knew her early by name and reputation -- more her fiddle playing than voice. When I called her to do dates on the road, she never refused one. When she went on to commercial success, I figured it was only a matter of time before a collaboration of some sort would be inevitable. Supposedly I'm the guy that corrupted her into all this scheme of things!"
Despite their long association, Krauss and Rice have recorded together only once, on CMT's 2004 "Flameworthy" awards show; the track, "Sawing on the Strings," is included on her new album, "A Hundred Miles or More: A Collection." Thankfully, the current tour is being filmed and recorded at the Tennessee Theater in Knoxville two nights before Wednesday's DAR Constitution Hall concert.
That concert will draw from Rice's instrumental and vocal catalogues, from a list of tunes Krauss suggested.
Rice says: "There were literally two or three that I'd never done outside of the one time that I recorded it in the studio, and some of those things go back 20 and 25 years. I had to woodshed for a little bit and think, 'Okay, now how did I do this?' "
As for Krauss, she remembers that 1988 Birchmere show and the awe she felt as a 17-year-old playing with her hero and inspiration. Funny, though. "I'm probably a little more nervous about it now," she says. "Back then, you're kind of mindless and so into playing itself -- not that I wasn't nervous by any means, but you don't let your shortcomings get in the way of your desire, and that's what I had back then.
"Now, I want to make sure that Tony's proud of what we're doing and proud of how I sing these songs. I want him to be pleased when my solo's over!"
So with dates already under the belt, what does Rice think?
"This tour with Alison is like musical heaven, which I knew it would be."
Alison Krauss & Union Station with Tony Rice
Appearing Wednesday at DAR Constitution Hall
Sounds like: Fine songs and exquisite acoustic adventures honoring Tony Rice's trailblazing career.
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