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Written in fRoots issue 203, 2000

TEAGRASS
Moravian Love Songs
Gnosis Brno G-Music 009 (1999)

It isn’t unusual for British Isles traditional songs to be treated with American instrumentation and styles, so it’s hardly surprising that other Europeans raised on a diet of American music should do the same.
      Moravian independent label Gnosis Brno has been releasing an estimable catalogue of deep-traditional Czech and Moravian music and new roots evolutions since 1993, but head person Jiří Plocek is also a very fine bluegrass mandolin player in the band Teagrass, and their second album brings bluegrass arrangements and instrumentation, of the banjo-less variety, to traditional Moravian songs.
      This is no tongue-in-cheek bluegrassing-up exercise. It’s led by and built around songs from south eastern Moravia, found by Plocek in lesser-known collections made at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century, and performed by clear-voiced female guest singers, mainly Tat’ána and Jitka Málková and Alice Holubová. The band goes where the songs need to, often into territory well outside bluegrass, and the playing, with very fine soloing on fiddle, dobro, guitar, mandolin or New-Orleansy clarinet, would be considered classy on either side of the Atlantic.
      The dobro was invented by Czech emigrants to the USA, and Czech bluegrassers are already gaining esteem in North America; Teagrass shows that their source material can come as easily from a Moravian valley as an Appalachian hollow.


© 2000 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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