12/11/02
Barnes moves banjo in a new direction
By Jay Hardwig
To
do list: finish laundry, fly airplane, create modern lexicon for the
banjo. That’s how your list of chores might read if you were Danny Barnes — but chances are you’re not. Danny Barnes, after all, lives in Port Hadlock, Wash., and rarely wraps his hands around the Smoky Mountain News. The former frontman and resident genius of the Bad Livers, Barnes moved from Austin to the Puget Sound back in 1999 in search of fresh air, strong tea, and a little elbow room. In the years since, he’s filled his time studying aeronautics, pumping out a string of intriguing CDs, and touring the country with a banjo on his back.
In his spare time, he works at “creating a modern lexicon” for his instrument, a project that involves pushing a few boundaries, bending a few minds, and shucking off expectations.
“As soon as the first note is struck on the banjo,” Barnes observed in a recent e-mail interview, “people think Hillbilly, or Old Time, or Bluegrass, or whatever.”
The banjo has been “ghetto-ized,” says Barnes, stuck on its own asteroid and boxed in by perceived limitations. It doesn’t help, he adds, that most bluegrass players are content to imitate the classics.
“Bill Monroe was an innovator in the purest sense,” he notes, “but for whatever reason, the music evolved into copying an innovator, rather than innovation [itself].” Barnes’ vision, then, is to treat the banjo as a modern orchestral instrument, and not just an ethnic instrument — to increase the range of acceptable styles and voices, and “to play music on it, not just a type of music.”
The experiment can go awry — as many concluded from the Bad Livers’ last disc, “Blood and Mood” — but if anyone can pull it off, it’s Danny Barnes. He’s flat-out one of the finest pickers out there — be it banjo, guitar, or cotton — and he writes lovely songs to boot. His latest, “Things I Done Wrong,” is by turns lonesome, lovesome, despondent, messianic, frisky, and a hoot — and firmly rooted in the soil of American folk music. There’s bluegrass in there, sure, and folk and jazz and melody and nonesuch and come-what-may, proving that music doesn’t have to fit in a tidy box to be enjoyable, accessible, and awful damn good.
If you’re interested in the modern lexicon, come on down to the Grey Eagle Thursday. If such talk just hurts your head, come on down anyway: Barnes is a first-rate musician, and any chance to hear him sing and pick is a rare treat indeed. I guarantee this: Good music will be made.
(Jay Hardwig can be reached at smardwig@charter.net)