Did you listen? I hope so. I promise it won’t waste your time.
This interview is about bluegrass flatpicking, but it is way more about art and creativity and the power of music.
Stash: I’m still on the quest to be the slowest flat picker.Mickey: What what do you mean by that?S: For one I like the idea of being able to play as little as possible to imply the song that you’re playing. I think there’s more to flatpicking than playing really fast and most of what you see is a big emphasis on playing fast and I think there’s a lot to be said for playing slow and deliberate and not fast and automatic.
Stash: One of the things I remember, a seminal moment for me in bluegrass was hearing Andy Statman play on some early Country Cooking record and be like whoa this is a crazy mandolin solo out of nowhere like Tony Triska’s stuff.
So you can see what a “heretic” Stash might be considered with his emphasis on slowness. But he is not a heretic. He is one of the most respected musicians in bluegrass or in any musical style. That is why this interview is so useful and bears some close listening. I plan on adapting his stepwise idea of “simplification” and applying it to my own poetic decision making. Here (this video)is something to appreciate as we all contemplate how creating art is a very idiosyncratic act.
I began writing poetry myself because one Sunday afternoon in March 1922, a friend suggested that I should: the thought had never occurred to me. I scarcely knew any poems-The English Hymnal, the Psalms, Struwwelpeter and the mnemonic rhymes in Kennedy’s Shorter Latin Primer are about all I remember-and I took little interest in what is called Imaginative Literature. Most of my reading had been related to a private world of Sacred Objects. Aside from a few stories like George Macdonald’s The Princess and the Goblin and Jules Verne’s The Child of the Cavern, the subjects of which touched upon my obsessions, my favorite books bore such titles as Underground Life, Machinery for Metalliferous Mines, Lead and Zinc Ores of Northumberland and Alston Moor, and my conscious purpose in reading them had been to gain information about my sacred objects. At the time, therefore, the suggestion that I write poetry seemed like a revelation from heaven for which nothing in my past could account.Looking back, however, I now realize that I had read the technological prose of my favorite books in a peculiar way. A word like pyrites, for example, was for me, not simply an indicative sign; it was the Proper Name of a Sacred Being, so that, when I heard an aunt pronounce it pirrits, I was shocked. Her pronunciation was more than wrong, it was ugly.Ignorance was impiety.
You might think that Stash is a solo act, but he often plays well with others. Check out the video below. I am reminded of Frank Zappa, but a special kind of mashup– with Jimmy Martin. I am gleaning so much from this interview and I hope you do the same.