Review: Grisman picks bluegrass for Belly Up Aspen show

ASPEN — Midway through his concert last Sunday at Belly Up, David Grisman announced that he was going to play some “dawg” music — a reference to the style, a fusion of jazz, string-band, gypsy and Brazilian, that had made the mandolinist a pioneer in American acoustic music. But Grisman and his band then began picking a rhythm that was very much in line with what had been established as the theme of the evening — straight-up bluegrass.

When Grisman began singing the tune, the joke became apparent: It was a song about a dog, not dawg music.


The group Grisman led onto the Belly Up stage was the David Grisman Bluegrass Experience — the DGBX for short — and Grisman takes the name seriously. The concert lasted two long sets, and not for a minute of it did Grisman and company stray into dawg territory. This was a night for bluegrass — bluegrass songs, bluegrass sounds, bluegrass instruments, bluegrass harmonies, bluegrass stories. The musical connections were to age-old bluegrass pioneers like the Stanley Brothers and Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys, not to new-school newgrassers along the lines of Sam Bush, Béla Fleck, or Grisman's other band, the long-running, ground-breaking David Grisman Quintet.


While Grisman looks like a stock version of a Talmudic scholar, his familiar beard more silvery-gray than ever, his ability to play an unadulterated brand of bluegrass is magnificent. His playing often takes off from Monroe's “chop” style, which emphasizes the mandolin as a rhythm instrument, and gives bluegrass its recognizable drive. When he moved into lead playing, Grisman unleashed flurries of notes. .More.