michael jordan of the mandolin

By Robbie on July 22, 2009

That's the spot-on description my buddy came up with last night for Chris Thile, whom we observed under what I would call ideal conditions, jamming informally on old bluegrass tunes with the guitarist Michael Daves, somewhere south of Houston St. in Manhattan, in a small sidebar-style room with about twelve other people in it. If I stopped smiling the whole time (it may have gone on for hours - I left after 90 minutes) it was just to rest my face. Both guys' styles are mesmerizing marvels of mental speed, athleticism, quite literal ingenuity, and (in case anyone doubts it) musicality. They're dynamite singers as well; but, probably inevitably, the lyrical parts of "Molly and Tenbrooks," "20/20 Vision," "I Wish You Knew," "Why You Been Gone So Long," and the other mostly-standards they performed were marked by a feeling of suspense, as we dozen grinners stood waiting for the next outburst of picking to come round.

Michael, who had just played a solo set at a venue one door down called Rockwood Music Hall, played an archtop with a daringly unmoored right hand. During his official show, I understood this graceful, indeterminate-looking motion to be in service to an eccentric show style that playfully gathered in multiple strings and notes, fretted and muted and open and in-between, and that animated his solos' leading lines with one-man-band exuberance -- percussive chunks, glancingly caught chord fragments, and bravura flourishes of syncopation and tremolo. But playing afterward with Chris, he put a lot of that window dressing aside in favor of single lines, and the hand kept going just as implausibly as before. 

Those in the room, I believe, were divided between those who knew the pickers and a few who were just wandering through (as in the Joshua Bell DC Metro busking experiment) and either got pulled in or continued numbly onward. But Chris is markedly beyond where anyone has previously taken or thought of taking the instrument -- you don't need to know anything about bluegrass or mandolins -- and most were pulled in.

Hearing an hour and a half of someone playing that quickly, cleanly, crazily, cleverly, and well produces queer effects. You enter a state of heightened awareness as you confront and try to organize the multicolored quanta relentlessly pinging at you. You listen for the cul-de-sacs that all human instrumentalists (me particularly) get themselves into, trying to detect the seams, where the falsely-marked exits are and how he covers and gets out. (I couldn't detect them. My buddy opined that Chris spent the session trying to play himself into corners. Goddamn!) You try to think of any critical thing, one smirky little insult, to offer, and come up dry. Then, after ten or so songs, you find your discerning ear and aesthetic standards to be comfortably readjusted to the crazy-clever -- "yeah, yeah, all music sounds like this" -- and your eyes drift out the window to a sluggishly passing bus. You leave in a hurry to get to your instrument, as if the momentum of the inspiration will magically expand your vocabulary and transform your mechanics.

It's interesting how players like this (so rare -- Earl Scruggs? Art Tatum? who else?) recontextualize the other living masters of their instrument. Those of us who remember when Tony Rice came barrelling out of the forest in the mid-1970s will also remember how untoppable Doc Watson and Clarence White sounded a few years earlier. Tony's upping the ante in tone and speed, language and polish, may have dethroned his predecessors, but it also defined them more sharply and usefully. Doc's way of playing has a lot of down-home, driving showbiz in it (keep dynamic pace with the banjo, mark the pulse vigorously), shows a deep-grained love for the strong simple shapes of boogie-woogie and country blues, reflects more clearly than the styles of his successors the demands of dancers and paying customers. All this was easier to hear after Tony; and I think it shows Doc or Tony or anyone a solider appreciation, to hear them with sensitivity to their particularities, than to laud them as divinities. Naturally, no one who comes up with a good style is lorded over by anyone else in the wondrous republic of music. And, last night aside, Sam Bush still sounds fantastic (I just double-checked).