projects
Allison de Groot & Tatiana Hargreaves
visit www.allisonandtatiana.com for more information about the duo
Traditional music is not static; it shifts with the times, uncovering new meanings in old words, new ways of talking about the communal pathways that led us to where we are today. For master musicians Allison de Groot & Tatiana Hargreaves, traditional stringband music is a way to interpret our uncertain times, to draw artistic inspiration and power from the sources of meaning in their lives. History, family, literature, live performance, and environmental instability all manifest in the sounds, feelings, and sensations that permeate their new album, Hurricane Clarice (coming March 25 from Free Dirt Records). Recording last year in the midst of a global pandemic and during an unprecedented heat wave that saw the city of Portland, Oregon burning under 120 degree heat, these two master musicians found themselves turning to their own communities, to their families, to bring that support into the music. In fact, it was producer Phil Cook (Megafaun, Hiss Golden Messenger) who suggested the two weave their own family histories into the project by including audio recordings of each of their own grandmothers. The album became a direct infusion of centuries of matrilineal folk wisdom, a fiery breath of apocalyptic grandmother energy. And yet the beauty of Allison de Groot & Tatiana Hargreaves’ music is that they’re using these old sounds to speak to something new, to speak to a dying world.
Soledad
Album art by Mikaela González
“...with this latest release... [Hargreaves] plays old-time fiddle as if projecting it through a kaleidoscope. With each turn, there is a new array of color, or in this case, soundscape”
Soledad is an original four-movement suite inspired by One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. I started composing the pieces in 2015 while reading the book in Spanish for a class at Amherst College. Each week we would read one chapter, and after finishing it I would sit down in a Hampshire College practice room with my copy of the book and improvise. I found myself returning to the same themes, inspired by the same characters week after week. Those themes eventually developed into the four movements that make up Soledad. I’ve been wanting to make a recording of the suite for several years, and I finally got the chance thanks to the Emerging Artist Grant from the Durham Arts Council. This project is made possible by an Ella Fountain Pratt Emerging Artists Grant from the Durham Arts Council with support from the North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the Department of Natural & Cultural Resources.
Find the album on Bandcamp
HARD DRIVE
“Mix blazing old-time fiddle with 3-finger bluegrass banjo picking and pounding bass, add a super cool visual aesthetic, and play it hard as hell the old way.”
“They bring a regard for the old-time music into this bluegrass so that it has a richness that is pretty much lost in modern bluegrass.”
Hard Drive is a hard-driving aural modern traditional old time authentic millennial bluegrass collective made up of Tatiana Hargreaves, Aaron Tacke, Sonya Badigian, and Nokosee Fields. From brother duets to raging fiddle tunes, Hard Drive brings a sense of deep intuition and silliness to the world that encompasses old-time, country, and bluegrass. The Bluegrass Situation describes the band as “a delightful subversion of our expectations of what traditional bluegrass is supposed to be.” Hard Drive serves up a “high-octane bluegrass-old-time style, delivered with deep intuitive insight, manic exploratory zeal and seriously powerhouse instrumental (and vocal) chops but also, importantly, with an abundant and overwhelming sense of fun.” [Folk Radio UK]. They float gently around a Bermuda-Triangle-type spacetime warp in central North Carolina, and they are constantly expanding at the approximate pace of the universe.
Blount & Hargreaves
Jake Blount is an award-winning banjoist, fiddler, singer and scholar based in Providence, RI. Although he is proficient in multiple performance styles, he specializes in the music of Black and indigenous communities in the southeastern United States, and in the regional style of Ithaca, New York. He foregrounds the experiences of queer people and people of color in his work. Blount’s debut solo album, Spider Tales, released in 2020 through Free Dirt Records debuted at #2 on the Billboard Bluegrass Chart and received widespread critical praise and received positive coverage in NPR, Rolling Stone Country, Billboard Pride and AV Club. Together, Blount & Hargreaves present tunes and songs from musicians of color as stripped-down duets on banjo, fiddle, and voice, drawing the audience into the largely forgotten landscape of this diverse and powerful musical tradition. As a duo, they have performed at venues such as National Museum of American History, Appalachian State University, and the Museum of the Cherokee Indian.