Of Note: CD Reviews

MandoBasso

Bill Bradbury and Gunnar Biggs

After years of prodding and encouragement from friends and fellow musicians, local bassist Gunnar Biggs finally released a CD of his own last year. Placing himself in trios or forming duos with other local top caliber musicians, Biggs called the disk Footprint, and it proved to be one of the best local releases that we've had in a long, long time. One of the disk's surprises, contrasting with Biggs' straight ahead jazz and avant-garde compositions, was "Zanesville Breakdown," an Appalachian inspired toe tapper that the bassist performed with mandolinist Bill Bradbury. A year later Bradbury and Biggs have reunited to produce Mandobasso, a whole disk of mandolin/bass duos derived from or inspired by Ireland and Appalachia. Fresh and filled with excellent musicianship, the disk is a pleasure from beginning to end.

Biggs and Bradbury are not the first to pair the mandolin and bass. In 2008 bassist Edgar Meyer and mandolinist Chris Thile released a CD of their duets. The bass and mandolin are at polar opposites of the musical range, extremely high and low, and their timbres are also quite different. Meyer and Thile exploited this disparity to its fullest, the two musicians speeding through licks and arpeggios as though each were a soloist and knowing full well that the disparity between their instruments kept them from stepping on each other's toes. Like Bradbury and Biggs, Thile and Meyer's music has its roots in Ireland, but their pyrotechnical performances and incorporation of dissonance took their folk-based music into a Lester Flatt meets the Mahavishnu Orchestra realm.

In quite a different manner Bradbury and Biggs are somehow able to accentuate the similarities of their two instruments, the timbres of the bass and mandolin blending across the staff of treble and bass. Exceptionally well recorded at California State, San Marcos, the mandolin's strings ring out and the sound of the bass is full and rich. Even on some of the uptempo tunes the playing has a relaxed feel, as though Bradbury and Biggs have been performing as a duo for years.

Recently retired, Biggs taught double bass and was the director of jazz ensembles at San Diego State for the last 25 years. A serious composer, Bradbury holds a doctorate in music and teaches at Cal State San Marcos. With those backgrounds, you might expect this disk to have an academic bent, but the music that these two offer is far from academic or abstract. It is warm, direct, and disarmingly uncomplicated, never straying far from its Appalachian/Celtic roots. If you gave the Meyer-Thile disk a chance but were turned off by the frenetic playing and use of dissonance, you might want to give this disk a try.

--Paul Hormick