Catching Up With... Abigail Washburn & the Sparrow Quartet

Paste: The new Sparrow Quartet record has a really unique sound. I know all of you are into many different musical styles, but where does this almost-chamber-music influence come from?

Washburn: Well, when we got together to record this record, we were trying to figure out how to build compositions and essentially create music that would keep everyone really excited and stimulated for the next year on the road together. We’re going to be playing this music a lot, so when we were making the record we essentially just wanted to have it be not only challenging but full of heart and soul. That was the effort, at least. I hope it came off that way. A lot of times we had fairly complex ideas, given the nature of the musicians in this group. So the arrangements, in a lot of ways, end up sounding classical because of the exactness of the placement of a lot of the notes.

Sollee: We were trying to accomplish a hybrid of different styles and ethnic backgrounds, of different melodies and rhythm and sound. It’s so hard to just improvise when you’re trying to combine that many things, like trying to cook in the kitchen with spices from all over the different parts of the world. So we had to really think it through, and really bang our heads together to make something out of it. And Abby would bring us these Chinese songs, and some of them were just beautiful poetry, and some of ’em were fiddle tunes and, I mean, how do you put all that together? You do that with pen and paper and a lot of time back and forth.

Fleck: Plus, we were trying to draw in some of the, um, aspects of the Tarot and, uh, and some of the, um [background giggles], the numbers such as Pi and...

Washburn: You are so full of it!

Fleck: …to give the music a [background laughter] mystical side that wouldn’t reveal itself except to, you know, mathematicians and scholars many thousands of years from now.

Dreissen: That’s amazing, that’s exactly what I was gonna say. [Laughter] But what I would have to say about the compositional aspect of this group is that, each instrument and player has unique talents that they bring to the group: the way Abby plays on the banjo, the way Béla plays on the banjo, how Ben approaches the cello, things that I might play on the fiddle. Based on the things each person [contributes], the strengths that everybody has, you try to draw upon those and try to find all the different color combinations that the different musicians and instruments can put together. To have both banjos playing, or we want to have a string-like section, or we want to have a rhythm section happening, like a bass happening and Ben will play a little bit of bass on the cello. We explore all these different colors that only a double-banjo/fiddle/cello group has, I guess. [Background laughter]

Paste: Béla, Abigail plays claw-hammer style banjo and you play three-finger style on this material. Can you explain for our readers what the difference is between claw-hammer and three-finger, and what it is about that combination that you were interested in? What was so appealing about it to you?

Fleck: Sure. Well, as you know, Abby is a Scorpio, so when she does her claw-hammer style, [giggles] you can hear that, especially in her thumb pluck. But, I’m, uh, I’m a feces [laughter] and you can hear that in…

Washburn: [laughing, and trying to pull the mic from Fleck] Give me the microphone!

Fleck: …in some of the bullshit—the bullshit that I play. [Background laughter] Wait, what was the question again?

Paste: The first part was to explain, for people who don’t understand, the difference between claw-hammer and three-finger banjo style, and also what it was about the combination of those two that interested the group.

Fleck: Well, I’ll be serious just for this one question since it’s about the banjo. Abby does the thumb-pluck claw-hammer style, which is a very rooted, old-fashioned, funky style. It’s really great for playing certain kinds of fiddle tunes and rhythmic stuff, and it grooves. What I do is kind of a bluegrass style, which is played with finger picks, and there’s a lot of fancy-pants stuff going on. So Abby is the central rhythmic force of the group. I always think Casey is like the motor of the band with his rhythmic chop, but the music is built around Abby and her banjo, so for me as the second banjo player, it’s gonna come on top of that. In other words, I’m not going to be playing the fundamental, basic banjo part, I’m always looking for things to do that add to that, and come in and out of her continuum. So sometimes I might just play really abstract stuff where I might wait ’til halfway through the song to come in with the solo, or [I might play] the weird, icing type stuff.

Paste: Ben, if Abigail is the rhythmic force, Casey is the motor and Béla is putting the icing on the cake, what’s your role in the quartet? Since you’re the lowest instrument, you’re going to be holding things down to a certain extent, but I also noticed that you do some call-and-response with Abigail.

Sollee: Well, I’m doing two things. My cello—because of its role as the lowest instrument—usually gets pushed down into that bass role, and every once in a while, because of what Casey and I can do, we’ll play double stops together to create a texture for Abby to sing over—kind of an organ-like thing. Or maybe when Casey and Béla are off doing some solo stuff, I’ll play a little bit of a bass-ish thing with the rhythm chop. So it’s really just filling the order. We all do that in this group, just filling whatever order needs to be filled. And I try to provide another contrasting voice to Abby, with my cello mostly and sometimes with my own voice. But, mainly, just putting something she can sing against on the bottom: a nice drone, or the call-and-answer thing that we’re doing sometimes now, and to be that fundamental string sound that gives it a little bit of that—you know, people hear it and they’re like, “Hmmm, classical.” They get pulled to the classical side and then we go into a rhythm thing and they get pulled back into folk. I’m doing whatever needs to be done, but it ends up grounding [our music] a little in a contemporary-classical-ish sound.

Fleck: One of the cool things about the group is that everybody takes turns being whatever’s needed. And so, at one point, Casey might be the rhythmic engine for the song. At another point, it might be Ben. Another point, it might be me. Another point, it might be Abby. And at other points, somebody needs to be the melodic guy. It could be any of us, and it might not be the one you’d expect. So that’s one of the cool things about everybody being so open, musically.

Paste: When you guys are making those kinds of transitions, is that something that’s fairly choreographed, or are you just like, “There’s a hole; I’m going to fill it?”

Fleck: With the album, we put a lot of time into building structures we could count on, but we left a lot of holes for improvisation, so both is the answer. There’s times where it’s a completely scripted, orchestrated thing, with little places we can play with it, and there’s times where it isn’t, where the song is largely improvised and we’re doing it different every time. But the same things kind of happen in both of them. You try and figure out how to make the thing complete while it’s happening.

Paste: Casey, you also play five-string fiddle. When did you pick that up, and how does it shape the quartet’s sound, as opposed to if you had a four-string?

Dreissen: I’ve been playing five-string fiddle since about 1995 now. It’s becoming more common that people will play them, but it’s not as common as a four-string, for sure. For a while there weren’t good acoustic ones made, and it’s kind of been reserved as an electric instrument, but now there’s a couple guys who are making some great instruments. But what has drawn me to that instrument is the added range. It’s got a lower string on it. It’s got the same four as you would find on a violin, but then it’s got the lowest string on a viola, so it’s got a C string, so between the range that Ben has and the lower range of mine, there’s really quite a large range of colors that he and I can come up with. Honestly, whenever I pick up a four-string fiddle, it feels a little foreign to me now since I’ve been playing five-string for so long but I just love having the extra oomph down on the bottom, and for harmonies. And it works great for different types of vocalists, too—based on where their ranges are, I can do [different things] to help support them.

Paste: A lot of the songs and the lyrics on the new record are really haunting in places. Is that something you were going for this time? Are there any particular themes or feelings you were trying to explore on the record?

Washburn: That’s a good question. When I go into making songs, I usually am not thinking about how to craft an idea before the original inspiration comes. Usually there’s either some lyrics or some melody, or both, that comes to me—just seems to come from, from that eternal divine creative place no one knows what to call. I’d say every song I do starts with it, and usually, any song I decide to do that’s traditional strikes me in a really profound place. The exciting thing about working with this group, for me, was that I could actually bring to fruition a lot of bigger conceptual ideas I had for certain songs, and for music in general, that on my own I wasn’t able to execute. For example, “Great Big Wall In China” is one of the songs that was heavily composed by this group. Although I came with the lyrics and most of the melody in place, Ben helped me play with that a bunch. I had this idea of wanting to listen to other Western artists who had done music that expressed their awareness or their perception of the East or the Orient, and when we were working on this song, I was listening a bunch to Puccini’s Turandot, and I wanted to incorporate somehow the ideas and melodic themes from that opera. And that’s ambitious. You know, it’s an ambitious idea, and I didn’t really know how to do it until the four of us sat down together and worked it out. We listened to one aria in particular called “In Questa Reggia” that, essentially, parallels the theme of the lyric in my song, in that it’s the princess from the East who’s singing about the fact that no foreigner will ever own her, no foreign man will ever own her, and it’s about her exploring who’s going to take her hand in marriage. The whole opera is about that, and most of the men die [laughs]. But in this aria she’s singing about how she’ll never be owned, and a lot of the song “Great Big Wall In China,” for me, is about how the human spirit is so much bigger than any nation state, and how the human spirit is much grander than any of the nation-state lines we, as humans, create between each other. So it felt like there was a strong parallel, and we really explored that.

Paste: You touched on this a little already, but when you’re writing a song, is it more about evoking a feeling for you and whoever’s listening, or is it storytelling, or something else? What do you think a good song accomplishes?

Washburn: I feel like I’m developing as an artist, and as I change and evolve, my perception of what songs should do to people—or should manifest in me—changes. On my first record, I would say that it was distinctly a process of me bringing my emotional life to the fore and sharing it with people through song. Not extremely personal, but in a universal kind of way.

Paste: Not so much confessional.

Washburn: Exactly. Not confessional, more of a poetic description of certain feelings. On this record, I felt like I had the ability to go to a place where I could conceptualize more and be a little bit more intellectual about it, and some of the more adult themes in my life could be expressed in a more full way. So it’s changing, and I’m eager to see what happens next, but I feel like this record, as opposed to the first, is much more a combination of my heart and my mind.

Paste: Now, you guys are going to be traveling back to China again this summer for the Olympics. Tell me a little bit about the gig at the U.S. embassy and how that came about, and tell me about your plans for the show and the trip in general.

Washburn: The state department has reserved us tickets for Aug. 12 through Aug. 22. [Laughs] That’s all I know! But I did have discussions with the ambassador last fall, in September when I was there playing shows, and he said he’d like to have us play some celebratory events for the opening of the new U.S. Embassy on the 13th and the 21st of August. I’m really excited to be [involved]. They decided to put [the embassy opening] during the Olympics because so much media would be over there that it would be the perfect moment to showcase the new place.

Dreissen: You’re asking a little bit about how something like this comes about: well, Abigail and I went to China with two other musicians back in 2004. We first played little clubs here and there, and had a friend help us organize a few things, and we actually did play at the ambassador’s residence, I believe, that first year.

Washburn: No, I think we did the consulate in Shanghai that year.

Dreissen: We did? OK, it was the consulate then. There was just like one or two kind of official things we did. Then the next year we went back with this group, The Sparrow Quartet, and we ended up playing the ambassador’s residence and some more consulates and a couple more government gigs got added into it. And then year number three is when we went to Tibet, so each year we’ve been building friendships and relationships with the people over there, and opportunities come up for them to do cultural events, like this thing we did in Tibet where a grant came up for some sort of American cultural mission to Tibet, and our friend that’s with the cultural program there, he said, “I’ve got these guys I know, and I would love to have them be the ones. They speak Chinese, and they’re representing American music in many different forms...” So we ended up doing that. And the Olympics are coming up, so we, of course, said we’d love to be involved if there’s a possibility. You kind of plant the seed a little bit, and your friendships lead to all these different opportunities. That’s kind of the short synopsis of the timeline.

Fleck: I have to say, Abby is the most perfectly suited person, probably in the world, to represent America in that setting because she speaks the language and she plays traditional music, American music, and that’s a real unusual combination to speak Chinese and play folk and bluegrass and old-time music and write her own music in Chinese, which shows her respect for their conventions. So, it’s pretty perfect from the government’s point of view that someone like Abby showed up in the world at this time.

Washburn: I started going to China in ’96, so it’s been over a decade now, and I just have a very, very deep love for that culture, and 2004 was the first time I went on tour there, with Casey, but I’d been going there for a long time before that, and music was almost—it was essentially an afterthought to my love for Chinese culture. Oh, and I do want to send out some props to our good friend John Campbell, who actually wrote the article that was in Paste> a couple years ago. There was a feature article in Paste called “How the East Was Won,” and our pal John Campbell wrote that around our first tour to China in 2004, and Paste was one of the first magazines to let the world know about it. At that time, it was Casey, me, a bass player named Amanda Kowalski, and a guitar player named Tyler Grant.

Paste: You guys have done a lot of work in China, and Béla also in Africa. How do you feel that this kind of musical and cultural exchange affects the relationship between countries and the people of these countries? I know you talked a little bit about how humanity goes beyond these borders...

Fleck: I first started playing in—I don’t know, third-world countries?—in the mid ’80s with Newgrass Revival: really strange locations for a bluegrass musician. We went on these state department tours, we went to Egypt, we went to Bangladesh, India, Turkey. I know some of these places are not so distant anymore, and some of them are even [considered] Europe now. We went to Morocco, Portugal, Spain—why did they send us to Spain? I have no idea. But, Nepal, then we went to Mongolia, Korea. So what I discovered when I went on these trips is that I technically had sort of an ambassador status, so I could make requests ahead—send a note down the line to the embassy, “Our band is coming to town,” and I would say, “Please find me some local musicians I can get together with.” And I was just curious, but I discovered that when we tried to play together, all of a sudden this magical thing would happen, and everybody would just start smiling and all of a sudden, politics was over, and that we couldn’t speak the language was over, and everybody would just glow. Those musicians, us, everybody around the situation, and I realized that there was a magic to that situation—that interaction, even with no language skills. So that’s one of the reasons I was excited about the chance to go to China, which I had never been to, and I knew similar things would happen. I have to say, the times that we played with musicians [abroad] were always—every single time, that would happen. You just take some open-minded musicians from different cultures, put ’em in the same room, there are no disagreements whatsoever, and I wish politicians could figure out a way to get to that same place.

Washburn: And that’s been a really big part of every trip we’ve done to China together: playing with friends in Beijing. A band called Hongai that’s a Mongolian band in Beijing; a really phenomenal artist who’s named Mamuar who’s Cossack Chinese but lives in Beijing now; there’s just a pile of people that it’s really fun to get together with and collaborate with when we’re over there. Last September, I was there, and it was a bunch of professors from Beijing Conservatory of Music, and we had a girl band. They were playing pipa, guzheng, and laruan, and I was playing banjo and we had a little quartet. And those kinds of connections are—like Béla was saying—they just, they’re deep, you know, and they last forever in each other. There’s this new appreciation for who you can be, far beyond where you come from.

Paste: You already mentioned “Great Big Wall In China” on the new album, and there are several songs—“A Fuller Wine” also stands out to me—that are full of these really beautiful images. They’re very hushed, peaceful songs, but most of all, what stood out to me was the sense of wonder in those songs. Does that have anything to do with the feeling you get from being in a place like China?

Washburn: You know, when you can’t communicate easily with the tools you’ve always had to use, people go through this—this beautiful process of having to break down to the fundamentals and figure out how to get across what they need to get across. And in the process of doing that, a lot of the BS in life goes away, and you’re focused on what really matters, and usually that’s a connection between people. And, of course, it’s getting food and water. But everything gets simpler. And, all of a sudden, when you break it down to the most simple elements, there’s a connection to the things that are bigger and greater than you—it’s like a window opening and you can see out into the sky finally. You’re not boxed in by all the normalcies, the things you’re used to. And, yeah, I think that’s very much reflected in all this music we’re making. I think it began with all of us being in a foreign land and it continues to develop those themes.

Paste: With this terrible earthquake that’s happened, recently—over 50,000 people have been killed. Have you been to any of the areas that were affected, and since you’re going to be there soon, do you have any plans, as far as organizing or contributing to any kind of relief efforts or some kind of benefit?

Washburn: In 1996, and again in 1998, I was in Chengdu studying at Sichuan University, and I started learning the basic folk melodies I know now. It’s in Sichuan Province, and there are a lot of people that I’m—in fact, both of the folk songs on our record are from that very area, right there where the earthquake hit. I don’t know how the people that I care about there are doing; I’m not sure. In terms of relief efforts, I don’t know quite what to do. I think it would be smart of us, actually, to suggest to the state department that that be a place we visit during the Olympics. It’s a good idea.

Out now & coming soon from the Sparrow Quartet:

In addition to their work with Washburn, the members of the Sparrow Quartet each have other musical projects releasing albums this year and next.

Ben Sollee: Learning to Bend (solo debut, out now)
Casey Dreissen: 3D (solo recording, out now); Oog (coming in late 2008)
Béla Fleck: Jingle All the Way (Christmas album with his Flecktones, coming fall 2008); an original orchestral piece with performances by Edgar Meyer and Zakir Hussein (to be recorded early 2009); an African album, recorded in Gambia, Tanzania, Uganda and Mali (coming summer 2009).

Washburn is blogging for Paste from China. Follow her posts on Dear Diary.