If someone told you they had heard a first rate bluegrass saxophonist, you would be excused for staring dumbfounded at the person who told you so.
It seems almost ridiculous on its face, as the repertoire associated with woodwinds doesn’t intersect much with the acoustic stringed instruments used in bluegrass. But there have been exceptions. Eastern European klezmer music commonly blended a clarinet with fiddle and mandolin, and though a good bit removed from bluegrass, it is a folk music style, and the instruments worked well together.
If you think back to the 1940s, not many thought of the five string banjo as a serious instrument for soloing until Earl Scruggs showed us how it could be done. Bill Monroe’s radical approach to the mandolin likewise demonstrated a new way to see a familiar face.
Eddie Barbash is a saxophonist with legit professional credentials who has found a deep and abiding love for bluegrass music, and fiddle tunes in particular. Discovering that the phrasing of a fiddle can be reproduced on the sax opened up new worlds to him a few years back, and he has made a passionate study of the music ever since.
Living now in Nashville, Eddie is a regular at jam sessions with the region’s top bluegrass pickers, and has toured with Sierra Hull, along with jazz specialists like Jon Batiste and Cory Wong. He worked with Jon for several years in the band for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, and continues a career in jazz. But what really gets him going is playing fiddle music on the sax, and improvising in that style.
A new album, Larkspur, finds Barbash offering solo saxophone recordings of both popular and obscure fiddle music. And it works.
Check out his version of the old favorite, Forked Deer.
Let’s meet this remarkable musician and find out more about how he found his muse in the bluegrass world.
“I was born on Long Island, spent my first two years living in Oaxaca, Mexico, then lived in Atlanta until I was 16. I finished my last two years of highschool at UNCSA in Winston-Salem, NC then moved to New York City for college where I lived for 16 years.
My father loves music and started me on classical piano lessons when I was five. I picked up saxophone in the third grade band and was pretty good at it right away, which was exciting and fun, and inspired me to work hard at it. By the time I was in middle school I had decided that I wanted to be a professional musician and was practicing saxophone several hours a day.
I didn’t immediately love jazz, but in the music education system in this country, if you’re an advanced saxophonist you get funneled into jazz. I learned to love jazz through playing it, and eventually ended up in New York at the Juilliard jazz program where I met and started working with Jon Batiste. We played together for 10 years culminating with a stint as the house band for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.
It was towards the end of my time with Jon that I found fiddle music, and I used to sneak fiddle tunes into our shows wherever I could. Discovering fiddle music was so exciting because it was the first time in my life that I had been inspired to learn a style of music because I loved it.”
So how did a New York jazz cat find his way into fiddle tunes?
My first really formative memory of hearing bluegrass was on a drive from Boston down to North Carolina when I was in college. I had played a couple gigs with an Americana group led by Ric Robertson called the Boston Boys, and Ric was tagging along on my drive to go visit his parents in Greensboro. The record that I remember him playing was Ralph Stanley’s Clinch Mountain Gospel. I loved it and listened to it again and again, but didn’t think about trying to play any of it on saxophone.
That drive ended with a two week stay in Raleigh-Durham where I crashed in a big house with a bunch of people attending the American Dance Festival at Duke. Those were the iPod days, and I remember somebody at the house dumping several gigs of music on me that included some Skillet Lickers old time recordings that I also liked a lot.”
At this point, Eddie was just a saxophonist who enjoyed bluegrass music, but a moment came when he learned that he could play it as well.
“The spark that lit my fiddle tune fire was in 2012 when my friend Jeff Picker and I were at a bachelor party weekend in a cabin in the Catskills. We had been playing jazz together since highschool and Jeff, as is typical of virtuosos, had gotten tired of playing jazz bass and started learning to flat pick. He had a guitar with him and taught me Daley’s Reel.
Ironically, because he didn’t have a capo, he taught it to me in G and I didn’t find out until years later that it’s one of the few fiddle tunes that’s usually played in the much more saxophone friendly key of B flat.
The thing that instantly hooked me was the way you could improvise by creating variations on the melody, as opposed to the typical modern jazz approach of improvising on the harmony and abandoning the melody. I obsessed over Daley’s Reel and almost immediately started learning as many tunes as I could from the bluegrassers I could meet in the NYC scene.”
And what about Larkspur?
“Larkspur is about as far from the mainstream as you can get: solo saxophone playing bluegrass, old time, and Irish fiddle tunes. I’ve been trying to figure out how to make this repertoire sound good on the saxophone for 13 years now, and I finally felt like it was time to make a formal document of what I’ve learned.
I chose to perform the tunes unaccompanied because I wanted to represent them in the purest most unadorned way I could. Any band I could think of felt like it would either be a fusion of genres or would leave the saxophone feeling like a novelty act in a traditional setting.
I decided to record the album outdoors because this is not sterile music, and I wanted it to feel live rather than studio clean. Every tune, with one exception, is one complete unedited take. The outdoor studio also provided beautiful scenery for the videos that we shot of each performance.
The album is named for Larkspur Conservation where we filmed and recorded it. Larkspur Conservation is an amazing organization that is at the forefront of the natural burial movement. The nature preserve where we made this album is a natural burial ground where you can be buried in a beautiful forest. This process is not only better for the ecosystem than a traditional cemetery, but each grave guarantees that the land surrounding it will be left undeveloped and wild.”
Larkspur is available now from the popular download and streaming services online. Eddie has also prepared transcriptions for all the tunes he recorded on the album, a few in multiple keys, and they are offered for sale on his web site for $5/each.
Could this lead to more reed players tackling bluegrass music? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
In any event, hats off and a deep bow to Eddie Barbash for following his heart where the music led him. We are happy to have him on our team.
