Customer Reviews

Commonwealth

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Growing up listening to my brother, Rick Hargis, one of the premier banjo players in the country, sparked my interest in bluegrass music. At age 4 I sat in a studio on Music Row in Nashville and listened to my brother cut his first album. Following him throughout his music career, I wound up at the Bluegrass Music Awards at the Opryland Hotel. There in a stack of a vendors records was NGR's "Commonwealth" album. My brother assured me that it was a great one, so I took it home. I played the record and was taken in by the tunes pouring from it. Contempory "new grass" tunes like "Deeper and Deeper", and "Sapporo" thrilled me with the uses of such instruaments as Sam Bush's electric fiddle, and traditional tunes like "Steam Powered Aereoplane", "Reach", and Bill Monroe's "Wicked Path of Sin" further deepened my love for the purest form of music on Earth.

NGR's departure from squeeky tinny banjos and nasal sounding vocals and their use of electric instruments shows what happens when you take the music past where you found it. NGR doesn't just mimic the genre, they re-invent it. It's not bluegrass, it's "New Grass"! Take for instance a song like "Nothing Without You". It isn't often you hear talents like Leon Russell playing piano on a "bluegrass" album. NGR decided to throw out the rule book and make just plain old good music.

From the group's defining statement, "Reach", to the elaborate "Sapporo", "Commonwealth" is New Grass Revival through and through. Once again, the group succeeds through their innovation, choice of material, arrangement, and artistic interpretation. This is the perfect follow-up to "Barren County", demonstrating how effectively the band has progressed as they delve deeper into the various musical artforms where bluegrass traditionalists have not dared to go. The bad news is...this is the last recording of the Bush-Cowan-Johnson-Birch era; the good news...the band was firmly entrenched and would realize even greater success with the additions of the creative and instrumentally adept Bela Fleck and Pat Flynn.

"Commonwealth" is probably the best studio album released by the New Grass Revival (although Bela Fleck fans may argue for "Hold to a Dream"). This was the last recording with founding members Curtis Burch and Courtney Johnson; by this time the line-up had been playing together for 7 years (Burch, Johnson, and Sam Bush for more than a decade) and this familiarity comes through in the tight sound of this record. This album also has by far the best production qualities of the earlier recordings. This album veers back and forth between more traditional bluegrass songs like Monroe's "Wicked Path of Sin" and newgrass tunes like "Sapporo," one of the jammingest tunes NGR ever played.

I bumped into this album (remember albums?) almost by chance in 1981, when I spent a summer in West Virginia & met a guy named Steve Brines, who co-wrote a # of tunes w Sam Bush, & who exposed me to this brilliant band. This is, in my opinion, by far the best of the Courtney/Curtis era. In particular "Reach" and "Nothing without you" shine like beacons. "Sapporo" stretches to the limits of the imagination of these incredible musicians - which is to say, quite a fer distance. Best production values of any album for this era of NGR. The band would go on to achieve still greater heights after a brief hiatus, after which Bela Fleck & Pat Flynn joined the band. If your only exposure to this band is through Bela, great, but pick this one up & see how brilliant they USED to be.

The condition of the CD and the delivery time were so good!!

All the best.


markus