I had the fortunate opportunity to interview my good friend Ivan Rosenberg. Published in Banjo Newsletter, May 2007.
Ivan Rosenberg: Clawhammer and Dobro
By Jake Schepps
2006 brought Ivan Rosenberg’s first full-length CD release playing clawhammer banjo, titled “Clawhammer and Dobro.” Ivan is a renowned Dobro player and teacher, praised for his tremendous work and musicianship, and this release nests well in his superlative catalogue of music. It sits in the interesting, and seldom-explored, place between old-time and contemporary bluegrass, and the album has been met with critical acclaim. With guests like Mason Tuttle, Mary Lucey and Jon Stickley (both of the Biscuit Burners), the tunes offer crisp melodies, stellar musicianship, and a wonderful variety of textures. Ivan’s music is rarely demanding for the listener, yet is always interesting upon careful listening. It offers a wonderful balance of being compelling, fresh sounding, while thoroughly maintaining an accessibility. Not an easy balance to strike, but one that Ivan seems to walk with ease. Ivan and I met over 10 years ago in Missoula, Montana and began our first band together with the interesting moniker the Crazy Water String Band, alongside Martha Scanlan and Thomas Sneed from the wonderful (and now defunct) Reeltime Travelers. While our band’s life was short-lived, it has been my privilege to have a long musical relationship with Ivan. He contributed the Dobro work to my first album “Expedition,” and has been a wonderful mentor in the realm of independent music releases. He has a great depth of knowledge about music, the music business, and countless other insights. It was my pleasure to sit down and discover more detail about his musical processes, his experience as a musician, and his path with the banjo.
Jake Schepps: When did you start playing banjo?
Ivan Rosenberg: I started playing clawhammer banjo sometime in the mid-90s. I got one shortly after I saw Mark Schatz playing one with Tim O’Brien and the O’Boys. I was amazed by his music, and while playing clawhammer, he looked like absolutely the happiest guy on Earth. I thought if I got a banjo, maybe I would also be that happy.
BNL: Did it work?
IR: Not exactly, but that could also be because I never got a "world-music" hat. It might be a banjo/hat combination thing.
BNL: Did you take lessons?
IR: Not at first. I started with the Pete Seeger banjo book (the red edition), which had one or two pages on clawhammer, and then wound up with a few tab books. You can play some decent music in the clawhammer style as soon as you get the right hand basics, and for a long time I was happy with that. I recorded and performed several clawhammer tunes and used to feel confident that my playing was pretty good, but for me, getting to the next level without lessons never happened.
So, a few years ago I got a lesson with Bob Carlin when I ran into him at Folk Alliance. When he checked out my playing, his main impression was that I was doing many things characteristic of beginning players. It wasn't exactly what I wanted to hear (I didn't tell him I'd been at it for almost 10 years), but he was completely right. He gave me some pointers on keeping my volume even when I went up and down the neck, and showed me some right hand techniques that were more interesting that what I was doing. Bob showed me some interesting note-thumb-note-thumb combinations instead of just doing the galloping rhythm, and suggested varying how I played notes throughout a song—mixing up using hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, etc. The good part was I learned some of what I needed to work on. The bad part was that, since I subsequently considered myself a beginner, I was scared to play in front of people for a few years after that. But all in all, that lesson was the best 50 bucks I ever spent—it completely changed my approach to clawhammer banjo.
I got one other banjo lesson with Chris Coole at the British Columbia Bluegrass Workshop in Sorrento, BC a couple of years ago. If you've never heard him, Chris is one of the very best and most creative clawhammer players and he has immaculate technique. In addition to showing me a few tunings, Chris demonstrated how to do the clawhammer equivalent of a 3-finger style forward roll, which involves using a pull-off without hitting the string with your right hand first ("Hamish's Morphine Pill" starts off with one of these). He also showed me a clawhammer technique that gets you the equivalent of a reverse roll in 3-finger style.
BNL: Do you feel like you fall into a particular clawhammer style?
IR: Not really. I have a decent understanding of some traditional styles, which I learned out of books and from listening to stringband records and fiddle/banjo music, but for my own music I'm not trying to replicate any style or fit into a category. I love the real-deal old-time banjo music, but mostly I'm attracted to the rhythmic and melodic possibilities of clawhammer banjo, and I love the tone and the almost hypnotic aspect of clawhammer style. So I guess I'm mostly interested in expressing my own musical ideas through clawhammer playing.
BNL: Do you find that you have spent so much time playing bluegrass Dobro that it is challenging to adjust your ear make it sound authentic in an old time way?
IR: I think I can get a pretty authentic backup sound when I'm playing with a fiddler, and I've listened to enough old-time music that I think I get the role of the banjo pretty well. The toughest thing about playing ensemble old time music seems to be finding that middle ground where you play just the right amount of melody notes in the right parts of the tune and then play more rhythmic backup at other times. That's nebulous territory and it depends on the tune what will sound good, and my best guess is that the only way to really get it is to keep listening to good old time music and try to absorb the feel of it.
BNL: What kind of banjo do you have?
IR: It's a J. Romero banjo made by Jason Romero in Arcata, California. It's a beautiful instrument: mahogany with a wooden tone ring, a 12-inch pot, a really cool curved scoop, and a Renaissance head. It's a very warm-sounding instrument with amazing tone—I think this banjo more than anything else has inspired me to play more clawhammer music for the past few years.
BNL: Tell me about your new record “Clawhammer and Dobro”
IR: My musical sensibilities are somewhere right in between bluegrass and old time, and the CD was my outlet for blending the instruments I play and the genres I like best. It has original music that takes some of the rhythm, drive, and chord progressions from modern and traditional bluegrass and some of the melody-driven ensemble aspects of old time.
BNL: How do you compose music?
IR: For this project I wrote most of the tunes on banjo. My other CDs have been Dobro focused, but I like to write on other instruments so my tunes don’t sound like a bunch of Dobro licks. Most of the tunes on my CD “Back to the Pasture" were written on mandolin, which I don’t really play—but it was a guarantee that I wouldn’t write Dobro-lick tunes. On this one, even though I wrote tunes on banjo, the songs somehow wound up having more Dobro-like melodies than banjo melodies. They're pretty sparse melodies with lots of sustained or droned notes and few scalar ideas. I wrote a lot of tunes in the double-C tuning (and a couple in double-Bb, double-C tuned down a step). The way I write them is basically to noodle around with chord progressions humming a melody or trying out a phrase until I find something I like. I find a good way to make it a theme, probably do it twice, and then I have an A-part. Then I typically come up with other parts with the intention to incorporate rhythmic or melodic ideas from the A part—that way the tunes have some coherence from part to part. And I like to do something unexpected with each tune: maybe adding a couple of beats in an interesting place or resolving the tune to an unpredictable chord. Next, I see if the melody lines up better in a different tuning, and experiment with keys and tempos. And I run a little dummy-check to make sure I am not "writing" someone else's tune. I listen to a lot of John Reischman, and a couple of times I've been disappointed to find that I had just been listening to my newest greatest composition on a Reischman CD.
BNL: You have recorded and released a lot of primarily instrumental titles. Is there anything you do to keep it engaging throughout the record?
IR: With an album of instrumentals, I think it's hard to get to know the CD if there are too many tunes, so I usually only have 10 or 11 songs. That way, hopefully each tune is doing a particular job and the listener can take in the album as a whole. I have a bunch of old time albums that have 30 or 40 short songs, and they're great as historical resources, but maybe not the kind of thing you'd put on at a dinner party. On a Dobro album, I would have changed tempo a lot more than on my latest CD, but for clawhammer, I love the mid-tempo groove, so I paid more attention to changing keys and mood.
BNL: For that song “The Creptid Mule,” what tuning are you using?
IR: The tune is in B-minor but I play it in standard G tuning. It has a modern funky bluegrass progression, and B minor is my favorite key on Dobro in G tuning, though I'd never tried B minor in G tuning on clawhammer. I wanted some "outside" clawhammer sounds on this tune. I know the fretboard in G tuning well from my Dobro playing, so I thought that for experimental clawhammer banjo, G tuning could be cool. It wound up being my favorite solo on the CD. The solo starts off really sparse and spacey, introducing just a few notes of the head. Then, for the entire A part, the solo is gradually building on those notes with syncopated phrases until it finally completes first lines of the tune just as the A part is ending. I don't know how much sense that makes without hearing it, but I think it wound up being a unique solo with regards to clawhammer music.
BNL: On your forthcoming CD with Billy Cardine of The Biscuit Burners, you play some banjo and it sound like you did a little fingerstyle playing.
IR: We intended to do an album of mostly dobro music, but we both play banjo, too. I wound up playing clawhammer on 4 songs, and the album starts off with a clawhammer/3-finger banjo duet called "Banjo a Trois (Minu Uno)." Bill also plays the Chaturangui, an Indian instrument developed by Debashish Bhattacharya that has 6 guitar stings for slide and a slew of sympathetic and drone stings, similar to a sitar—it's a very epic-sounding instrument. Bill wrote a tune for Chaturangui and clawhammer banjo called "Chatuvondoo." The melody is inspired by Indian Classical music, and the tune has some very technically challenging lines due to the twisty melody and phrasing. I managed to claw almost every note. It took me hours and hours to learn it, and it involves a lot of stops and several melodic-style lines that go thumb-note-thumb-note instead of note-thumb-note-thumb, but one phrase didn't seem possible on clawhammer. I figured that when you're doing an duet with Chaturangui and banjo, anything goes, so I broke with the style and up-picked a few of the notes.
BNL: What else is on that new record?
IR: I have an original clawhammer tune in C-minor (played out of double-C) called "Harmison Crevice," and Mary Lucey (from The Biscuit Burners and lately playing with Uncle Earl) sings one that has just clawhammer banjo and Bill playing Dobro for accompaniment. The rest of the album mostly has Billy and I playing a lot of Dobro on original new-acoustic tunes with folks from the Biscuit Burners and a few other guests.
BNL: You have done a lot of independently released records. Do you have any words of wisdom for BNL readers given your experience? In a world where everyone is doing independent releases, computer programs like Garageband and Pro-Tools have made it extraordinarily easy and accessible to put out a CD, and you can do a short run of CD’s for a reasonable price. A lot of people are doing it, but once you have a record, what do you do with it?
IR: If you want to stand out, I think it helps to do something that's new and original. I always try to look in my particular small corner of the music world for something that nobody has done, or that I can do a little differently. The Dobro world is small with few recordings relative to other acoustic instruments. No one had ever done an entire album of solo chilled-out sensitive Dobro music where nothing was ever up-tempo. So I made a CD like that called Ashes and Coals—it's easy to listen to and I found a nice market of Dobro students who bought the album because it's slow and you can hear each note. For this CD, to people who listen to either Dobro or clawhammer music all the time, it should sound different enough to be of interest and maybe worth picking up. I've had good luck getting my tunes into TV and film scores, and that has to do with the music being more atmospheric and melodic, so it can be onscreen without detracting from what's happening visually.
BNL: What is in your cd player?
IR: I recently got a CD set by Kenny Hall and the Skiffle Symphony with plenty of great old-time jug band tunes. I think every stringband fan should own Kenny Hall and the Long Haul String Band Volumes 1 and 2. And I love the recent EP by Outlaw Social, a modern old-time band from Victoria, BC. I play with The Breakmen from Vancouver, BC, and through them I've had the opportunity to hear a lot of great original Canadian music in all kinds of genres. I am listening to the Creaking Tree String Quartet, The Foggy Hogtown Boys, Mark Berube, Dyad, Spygirl, and Nathan. Chris Coole and Erynn Marshall have a new CD coming out, and that'll be the next thing that takes up full-time residence in my CD player.
BNL: What is next for you and your music?
IR: I am moving back to the San Francisco Bay Area, though I'll still be flying out to play festivals with The Breakmen as well as a new stringband out of Washington State called Mighty Squirrel. I do a lot of workshops, and I'll be at The Puget Sound Guitar Workshop this year. I'm also the new program director for the British Columbia Bluegrass Workshop in Sorrento, BC in August. I am focusing a lot more on teaching and recording, and staying busy as a Dobro and clawhammer teacher and session player. I've also written 7 or 8 new tunes for a "Clawhammer and Dobro Volume II."
Ivan is on the web at:
www.ivanrosenberg.com
www.myspace.com/ivanrosenberg
www.myspace.com/mightysquirrelsmusic
www.myspace.com/thebreakmen
