Judging from the newspaper stories posted on the Internet, the Punch Brothers must be some kind of string band iconoclasts. Reviewers laud them for their “daring” forays into chamber music and progressive folk, and half their write-ups seem to contain the phrase, “this isn’t your father’s bluegrass.”
But for guitar player Chris Eldridge, whose father Ben formed the seminal bluegrass band The Seldom Scene, the Punch Brothers’ music is just the natural creation of five twenty- and thirtysomethings who grew up playing string instruments and listening to everything else.
“What we do is actually very natural from our perspective. The goal is not to try to shock anybody,” Eldridge said in a telephone interview. “We all have a lot of diverse influences and a lot of diverse musical loves, so I think it’s pretty natural for us to try and find similarities.”
The Punch Brothers, who are in the midst of a 22-date winter tour, will swing through Viterbo’s Fine Arts Center on Tuesday night. Although the band only has one official release — 2008’s Punch — they’re debuting new material from their forthcoming Antifogmatic (planned for an early summer release) and drawing from five years of collaborative playing.
The band that would become the Punch Brothers first came together to help record Chris Thile’s 2006 solo album How To Grow a Woman from the Ground. Thile — a mandolin prodigy best known for his work with Nickel Creek — brought the group back together when he began composing “The Blind Leaving the Blind,” a four-movement chamber suite on bluegrass instruments that was inspired by his pending divorce.
“He really wanted to assemble younger musicians that would be able to pull that off,” Eldridge said. “Because before that he had been using all these acoustic superheroes like Bela Flek or Jerry Douglass, all these guys who are ridiculous musicians but probably wouldn’t have the time to work on something as ambitious as ‘Blind.’ It was just a massive undertaking.”
The intricate, 40-minute “Blind” suite would comprise the bulk of Punch, but it wouldn’t define the band. They also have more typical folk and bluegrass numbers, the sort of songs that will predominate Antifogmatic. (The album takes its name from a turn-of-the-century phrase for an alcoholic beverage one imbibes at the start of the day in anticipation of bad weather.)
“This record has a lot more short song forms, but I think we’ve tried to give them the treatment,” Eldridge said. “The music is still as rigorous in its own way as the music on Punch, although I think we hopefully will have tricked people into hearing them as songs, as opposed to super-dense music.”
As such, the album may be a return to form for those members of the Punch Brothers who grew up playing bluegrass. Eldridge, for example, founded the critically acclaimed The Infamous Stringdusters, while Noam Pikelny played banjo with Leftover Salmon, and Gabe Witcher has fiddled or played violin on over 300 records. The band’s final member, Madison native Paul Kowert, is a classically trained bassist.
Although the band members’ roots are diverse, Eldridge sees the Punch Brothers as a natural continuation of the American string band tradition.
“I think there are a lot of people from the string band world who didn’t just grow up listening to the Stanley Brothers — and the Stanley Brothers are amazing! They’re one of the most incredible bands ever,” said Eldridge, referencing a pioneering bluegrass group. “They were kind of combining and assimilating things, too, so I think that’s just how music works. It will continue to evolve, and it should. Because if it evolves, it’s alive.” |
