CD Review - Baby's got a brand new bow!

by Jeff Trippe

Years back, I remember seeing an ad on a music store bulletin board:  “Wanted:  serious mandolin player.”  And I remember thinking:  That’s a good one.  Serious mandolin player?  No such animal.

At long last, I have been proven wrong.  Punch is Chris Thile’s bid at making art.  In the numerous times I have listened to it since the day of its release, my varied and even bipolar responses to this recording tell me so.  It gives me that same troubled sense I had the first time I saw Picasso’s Guernica:  I am bothered by it, its questions lead to more questions, it hurts my head…and yet I keep going back.  Just when I think I understand a section of it, I am left hanging from a ledge by my fingertips.  Just when I say to myself, “Oh, I get it – these guys are just improvising over jazz progressions,” I realize, no, these pieces (especially Thile’s four-movement “The Blind Leaving the Blind”) have been intricately scripted – they’re orchestral.  Coltrane backs right into Aaron Copland.  Charles Ives has a head-on with George Shearing.  Bill Monroe, please say hello to Paganini.  All hell has broken loose among the yearlings.

But perhaps we should back up a bit.  Chris Thile was the buoyant centerpiece of the young trio Nickel Creek, and those of us who loved their stuff (and who perhaps had a crush on fiddler Sarah Watkins) last year bewailed news of their “Farewell (For Now)” tour.  Even before that, just as Ricky Skaggs and Marty Stuart and Mark O’Connor had before him, Thile wore the moniker of child prodigy.  Then, also in 2007, Thile made a record called How to Grow a Woman From the Ground Up, along with four of his best friends, who also happen to be among the best practitioners of string music today:  banjoist Noam Pikelny, fiddler Gabe Witcher, guitarist Chris Eldridge, and bassist Greg Garrison.  That disk met with generally positive reviews, although some who sensed the band’s interest in alternative music and farther-flung forms seemed unsettled by it.

Now, at age 27, this Icarus is flying even higher, and he seems to be packing extra wax.  Thile, along with his cohorts from the How to Grow a Woman Project, has created a work which poses any number of dilemmas to the listener, not the least of which is the question:  Do I have to like this?  Is there something wrong with me, as a fan of acoustic music, if I don’t?  Thile has already answered that one, in an interview for the UK’s Daily Telegraph:  “We'd all be happy and grateful if all we were meant to do was be a straight, hard-core blue-grass band, it's a noble calling.”  Apparently he and the other Punch Brothers have a different calling, and sometimes it seems to be to bring all they have ever heard and know of American music to bear upon these songs.  I do hear Copland and Ives here; sometimes we move from sweet, flowing currents of melody to jarring dissonances.  Gershwin is here, too, especially in Gabe Witcher’s bluesy passages (and Witcher is unrivaled for tone among fiddlers that I know of).  And even though the open-ended lines and wandering tunes deny the bluegrass lover’s need for structure and resolution, they seem to take us places we didn’t know we needed to visit.

So, what can one say definitively about the instrumental sections of this record?  Not much:  Even potential motifs, a common component of classical composition, are fleeting.  We grasp at snatches of melody, but they are like foam on the water.   Thile’s vocal compositions, which trace the demise of an intimate relationship, serve to bring us back to a more familiar shore.  These melodies are quite lovely, and the lyrics, though not as poetic as they aspire to be, are in many instances interesting and witty.  I especially like the song in the third movement:

o woman i’m your servant

i don’t know anything but i’m ready to learn

o woman i’m starving for your approval

be kind to me

Punch will no doubt be acclaimed far and wide as a work of genius (and some of those who make this claim will merely be band-wagoners).  There is no question that each of the five young musicians involved has great command of a wooden instrument (Thile has been generous here – this is not simply a showcase for his fabulous mandolin playing); neither is there any doubt that what they have done has not been done before, not even by O’Connor, Bela Fleck, David Grisman, or any other innovators in the bluegrass field.  The rest depends on the way in which the individual listener undertakes the journey.  Begin now:  the adventure awaits.

The Punch Brothers played to a sold-out house in Rockland, Maine (The Strand), in February.  To see their schedule for the remainder of the year, visit www.punchbrothers.com.

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