Episode 34 — Ciphers, Picks and the Art of the Jam
Hello, my name is Steve Pretty. I'm a musician, performer and composer from London. And welcome to my podcast, Steve Pretty On The Origin of the Pieces.
This is the show that helps you to hear, understand and enjoy music in new ways. Hello, Musically Curious People. It's lovely to be back again.
Thank you for joining me once more. Really enjoyed putting the last episode together. I hope you enjoyed that one too.
That was episode 33. I had quite a long interview with a brilliant Madalitso band from Malawi, who I thought were absolutely fascinating about the nature of homemade instruments. This idea that you make instruments from whatever's around you, which is basically what humanity has always done.
They've got these incredible instruments, a guitar that's made from motorcycle brake cables for the strings and the fantastic instrument with a very long string that's made from the inner tubes of truck tires. So do check that out. Once again, you can see this as well as hear it.
This whole podcast is available on video as well as sound, so do tune in to that on YouTube or on Spotify. Again, once again, today is video again, as always, so a lot of the stuff you'll be hearing today is worth checking out visually as well. So I talked to the Madalitso band, but also it was around Halloween, and so I did a little bit of a Halloween moment where I played some of the live soundtrack that I made for the 1922 version of Nosferatu, which I did back at Olso Festival in the summer, which I really, really enjoyed doing that.
So if anyone would like me to do that again at their festival or event, I would love to do some more of that really interesting experience live scoring a film like that. And of course, yes, I talked about the Farting On The Sofa, which is the new theme song for this show. If you're just tuning in, if you're new to the show, the theme song you just heard at the opening, that isn't the regular theme tune.
The regular theme tune is called Mm Mm. It's by me and Angelique Kidjo and Hackney Collery Band. And it's from the Hackney Collery Band album Collaborations Volume 1 with the incredible Grammy winner Angelique Kidjo.
But despite the fact that I own the rights to that tune, it was taken down due to a copyright strike by the copyright owner. And the copyright owner is me, essentially. So I don't know how that's happened, but I'm in the process of trying to sort that out.
Fingers crossed that will be returned soon. But meanwhile, I went into why this song, Farting on the Sofa, how it came to exist and the way I rearranged it for a band and then played it in front of three and a half thousand people, the Hammersmith Apollo, got everyone to sing along, and then rearranged it even more for the podcast. But it was really about trying to reconnect with our sense of inner musicality that we have when we're kids.
There's not much of a line really between improvising in language and improvising in music when we're kids. But as we get older, that line, and we just kind of keep getting obsessed with really stripping music away as something that we do day to day. It's something that only professional musicians do.
And certainly you would never try composing anything if you weren't a proper composer. Whereas when we're kids, we're just singing about what we're doing. We're just humming, we're improvising.
My daughter at the time was farting on a sofa. She started singing about farting on a sofa. And thus the theme song was born.
So anyway, I hope you enjoyed that. That's episode 33. Now those of you long time listeners may have heard me talking about making a new website for the podcast.
And I'm very pleased to say that finally, finally, finally, finally...
It is done. It's done. The website is ready.
It's up. I'm going to be continuing making some tweaks to it. But there is...
I'm really happy with it. I'd love to hear your feedback, but there is transcripts of every single episode of the show. So all of the show so far, 33 episodes, and this is the 34th.
With the full transcripts, all tagged carefully so that you can explore the different themes that we've tackled, whether it's musical evolution, whether it's cow punk, we did an episode on cow punk, Debussy, all manner of things, UK hardcore. We did Igbo rap from Nigeria, all sorts of incredible things from all over the world. I'm slowly beginning to tag them.
There's a map section that I'm really happy with on the website, where you can scroll around a virtual globe and find little dots of where I've done an episode or where I featured music from, which is a really fun way to explore the show. Yeah, and there's also, you can go back and listen to all the episodes, of course, through the website. Or you can also buy t-shirts.
There's people who do ask me about these t-shirts. This is a t-shirt, or if you're watching on Spotify or YouTube, of the sort of cartoon of Charles Darwin that was made to make fun of him back in the day when he came up with this theory of evolution, because it's Charles Darwin essentially as an ape, as a monkey or an ape. But I've had him play the trumpet because this is about the evolution of music.
So it's Charles Darwin playing a trumpet. It's the logo of the show over the top. So you can buy a t-shirt from there.
You can go back and listen to back episodes. There's ticket links as well for my shows at Wilton's Music Hall, which are, next ones are on the 24th of January. Very excited about those.
At 2pm I'm doing my first ever kid show with the format, and then an evening show as well, which is gonna be really fun. So yeah, you can look at past recordings of that. There's a full, the full shows from previous shows are up there on that page.
And what else is there? All manner of stuff. Yeah, I'd love to hear your feedback about it, because yeah, it's taken quite a bit of work to get going, but now it's there.
Every episode is gonna have its own dedicated page, its own extra listening resources and so on. And of course, you can find even more on my Patreon, which I'm slowly building and I'm uploading new stuff to every episode. And there's also exclusive ticket discounts for my Wilton shows and other tour stuff I might be doing up there.
So do check it out. I would love to know what you think. And the website address is originofthepieces.com.
originofthepieces.com. And I have this section called Clip and Mix, which I've been talking about a bit in the show recently, where you can send me a clip of audio or music or anything you like really. And I will try and do something musical with it to help us kind of hear sounds differently, think like a musician, hear like a musician.
At the moment, you can just send that via email or via my socials through the website originofthepieces.com. But soon there's going to be a little upload button there that you can upload stuff directly to me and I can have a play around. Anyway, so originofthepieces.com, let me know what you think.
But for the show today, we've got a special edition today. This was also recorded at Womex. The last interview I did on episode 33 with the Madalitso band was from Womex 2024.
Womex is a kind of world music trade fair, if you like. It's a kind of conference during the day, lots of meetings, and then a lot of incredible live gigs with music from all over the world in the evening. And this Womex that's just gone, which was in October, was in Finland.
I went over to Finland, especially for the show pretty much. I got some really fascinating interviews with all manner of different musicians from all over the world. And I'm going to be featuring those over the next few months.
And I've still got quite a few actually from Womex last year. So lots and lots of interesting stuff from all over the world to come. But today's episode is specifically about two genres, really.
It's a kind of almost a double genre tombola, because the two genres we'll be looking at are crossed over in a very unique way. They are bluegrass and hip hop. There is a band called Gangstagrass, who are a fascinating band who take all of the greatest elements of hip hop and all of the greatest elements of bluegrass and fuse them together.
So I'm going to play a little bit of their set first so you can hear what they get up to. And then I've got an interview with them and a few more live bits. So without further ado, I'm heading over to Finland to talk to the great American band, who by the way are on tour over the autumn here.
It's November now when I'm recording this and they're on tour the rest of this month. I'm hoping to be able to join them on their London date on the 29th of November as well, at the Garage in Islington. I'm hoping I'm going to be jumping up on stage with them for that, because we really hit it off and had a lot of fun.
Anyway, without further ado, this is Gangstagrass from the US via Finland.
What's up, this is Gangstagrass. I am Wrench.
Dolio the Sleuth.
Orson the Voice of Reason.
I'm Sleeves, the manager.
Joe Clear, I play the fiddle.
I'm Chris, I play banjo.
So nice of you to do this. Thanks, guys. I really, really loved it.
I really, really loved it. I mean, like probably most people here hadn't heard anything like it before, really. Can you explain a little bit about what you do?
All right. So we take some banjo and some fiddle and some singing that people might like from country music, bluegrass music. And then we put in a couple of amazing rappers, some beats and infuse it with all that hip hop.
And you might be thinking to yourself right now, that's going to be terrible, which a lot of people do when they try to imagine it. So don't try to imagine it. You have to hear it and then you'll see how it works.
It really works. It really, really works. And just the podcast, they have a section in the podcast called The Genre Tombola where I kind of pick a random genre and then try and dig into it and examine it.
So I know like I'm a musician myself, the concept of genre is sticky and tricky, right? But what genre would you say that you were in if I had to put you in the genre tombola?
Well, there isn't one word. Gangstagrass. Yeah.
If you come across in your random genres and you get bluegrass hip hop, you're basically going to be looking at us.
One band. One band genre. Yeah.
And so can you talk really interestingly, I think about the crossover between bluegrass and hip hop, because it's not obvious, right? It's not obvious. It's not an obvious thing to do, as you say.
Why? Where did the concept come from?
It just came from the influences that I have from growing up. My dad's from Oklahoma, so I heard a lot of country music on the stereo at home, but me and my friends were all into the Run DMC and the early hip hop stuff going on. We were breakdancing at school, and so those were just big influences.
When I started making music, I wanted to have elements of both in there.
Right. But you talk very eloquently on stage, I think, and then you like press stuff about the fact that you like both of these things, but there's a kind of common.
Yeah. I was doing it for fun because I like the music, but we've also discovered a lot of amazing things about how much common ground, they are, how much common history there is, and the way that genres in America were artificially defined by race, because of the record industry. And so we're trying to kind of undo some of that damage.
And we discovered that the hip hop and bluegrass, they're both people's music, music that folks figured out how to do something spontaneous, that they could do with each other wherever they met. So you guys want to tell us a little bit about doing a bluegrass pick?
Sure. I mean, there are jam sessions in all sorts of music, but particularly in bluegrass, like you can get together at a festival or whatever, not having met someone ever in your life, and there's a common repertoire kind of language in a musical sense. And you know, you can put together almost a band very quickly with seasoned players, you know, just knowing kind of the culture of it.
But I mean, that takes a lot of work and a lot of like going to festivals and hanging out and kind of being scared to jump in. And you know, hopefully you get that done in your 20s or something.
Well, even last night, so just to jump in, last night at the end of, so we're here at Womex, the World Music Expo. And like last night, there was, at the end of the day, there's a sort of day thing, right, where everyone's schmoozing and trying to hustle gigs out of each other. And then at the end of the night, there's all the showcases which are one you guys played.
But last night, at the end of the kind of day bit, there was a really, really nice jam with a lot of traditional musicians from Scotland and around the UK, but also a lot of bluegrass musicians.
Yeah, we jumped in there for sure. And a friend of ours, Casey Dreeson, helped put that together and he's kind of a world fiddler. So he knows all these folks.
Turns out he knows a bunch of the Scandinavian tunes. We don't, but you have to kind of click into your learning mode.
And for me, it's like trying to undo a little puzzle. Some of the puzzle pieces are really easy. Like these are runs or notes that I know that are really easy.
And I try to find the hardest part, if it's a new tune, and then work that out somehow and get it the next time around. It's tricky on these, you know, the Swedish tunes, I don't know, or that kind of thing.
Yeah, like that's completely out of my wheelhouse.
Nordic tunes.
Yeah, like I pretty much only play bluegrass music, but I think trying to play kind of those other tunes, like a bit more kind of focused on the melody and stuff, which is quite hard on banjo, like banjo is not really an instrument that lends itself to like playing a tune. It's kind of more about the rhythm kind of thing.
It's not linear exactly, right?
Yeah, like it's kind of, it's much more about the rhythm kind of thing. It's really important to like keep a good rhythm, which is kind of how it goes so well, I think, with this, with hip-hop kind of thing. It's kind of a pitch, like Baylor Flick said, is like a pitched rhythm instrument kind of thing.
That's kind of how I think about it as well. Like it's, you know.
Well, it is a drum basically, isn't it? It's a drum with some strings on it.
Yeah, it's exactly that. It's exactly just a snare drum, take the snare off or put it on the other side, stretch it over a neck. That's a banjo pretty much.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And we did have an MC that jumped in on the jam session with all the fiddles and banjos last night, our son The Voice of Reason. Can you explain how it is that hip hop MC can just jump in on a bluegrass jam?
Magic. No. Well, within any hip hop communities, you're going to find cyphers, which is just a circle, just a bunch of cats.
Usually it's a bunch of cats just spitting their rhymes, depending on, and you'll find them anyway. Like if it's a little bit more rare now, but like when I was coming up in the game, you know, you go to a show and outside of the show, there'll be a cypher, right? And there would be, you know, dudes that were performing will be, will come out and get in the cypher, you know, and, and, you know, cats would just rhyme.
And sometimes it would, it would, it would turn into a battle. Most of the time it wouldn't. It was just a lot of different cats just kind of showing off their skills, whether it's something they created, whether it's something they were doing off the dome, like right there in the moment.
And so it's, you know, that that improvisational thing that exists within the two is what makes a lot of what we do so easy, because both of the the musical cultures already have something like that. So when they were in the pic yesterday and getting it in, it was easy enough to just sort of step into that spot. They were doing the song Jerusalem Bridge that we actually did something with on our latest album.
And so that was easy enough to do. But once you've been doing it long enough, just stepping into any musical situation and spitting bars is second nature.
It's interesting, isn't it? So I'm a jazz musician and obviously you get jazz jams and that's how a lot of the music evolved. And I think it always feels like magic because I've always really admired trad jams and bluegrass jams.
And I don't understand how it works really. It looks like, if it looks and feels like magic as an outsider, even as a musician, how do they all know these tunes? And okay, they're not, harmonically they all do quite similar things sometimes.
Full F and A. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it feels like magic.
But similarly with a cipher, like a hip hop band, you think as an outsider, how does this happen? But then it's just like that's how you come up, right? That's how you learn.
And so the commonalities between all these different musics are super interesting.
Yeah, we met in the cypher.
Oh yeah, really?
Yeah, we met in the cypher.
How did you meet Arson The Voice Of Reason?
I met him in the cypher. It was my first night in town. I always navigate, you know, where the scene is.
So I went to a nightclub. After the club, there was a cypher out front. I'm a new dude in town.
I jumped in, spit some rhymes.
And is this like a little amp, a PA and stuff or is it?
No, it's just a circle of people outside on the street corner. That's hip hop.
But there's something really interesting as well, like coming back to the kind of roots of it all. It strikes me, you may disagree, but it feels like it's all for folk music basically, isn't it? It's music of the people, made by the people coming up.
It's not academic music in that sense. It's all made by hanging out and playing.
Hip hop music is folk music. And so that's a big part of the reason why we're able to have so much common ground and easy time collaborating across any genre that was made by people that were figuring out how to create music without resources and without an amplifier, without anything, something where two people could run into each other and start collaborating in that way.
It's like a musical conversation, isn't it? Yeah.
Yeah, that's the thing that happens in a bluegrass pick. People will trade solos. I imagine that happens in jazz, too.
And it's not like it's planned. You're just kind of trading, and that's what's happening in the cipher, too. So if you combine a cipher and a pick, you basically have Gangstagrass.
And I think you do have to broaden out a bit more to really jam outside of the area that you might have focused. And there are trad musicians that don't do that. So there are old time musicians, American old time musicians, that don't play bluegrass.
They can't take a solo or whatever. Or there are Irish musicians that focus just in the Irish fiddle tradition or whatever. And so again, someone like Casey, who led the jam yesterday, he's someone that bridges all those gaps.
And that's something I aspire to, to play different music from around the world, but also like to be ready to respond to, like I think we had a throat singer from Tuva, from Siberia, that popped in and said, I want to teach you a rhythm and a melody. And it was in five and people started to get that. And everyone was open to that.
But this is a community of musicians that is flexible that way, in a kind of in a jazz sense to play rhythm, if you don't know the melody or...
When you say in five, could you explain like, things are usually in four, right? What does that sound like versus in five?
I mean, you know, just so it would be like one, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, and the pulse being that short, long, short, long. Interesting as opposed to one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. Yeah.
And I don't know, how was that for you?
It was okay.
You've got five strings.
Yeah. I mean, the thing with like bluegrass banjo and playing, so you put, you got picks on your fingers, you use three fingers for it. So everything's in threes.
So you kind of have to figure out like, how am I going to express? I mean, that's always a challenge, even when you're playing in four, right? Like you've still, you can't resolve in like a single bar with three fingers kind of things.
You've got to figure out how you're actually going to play those strings. So when you get to five, it's a little, a little weird as well, I suppose, but like it's just another challenge kind of thing.
Exactly. So it takes, you know, musicians that are curious enough to practice that and try that and then be open to jamming that way.
The way I sometimes think about like any sort of musical kind of spontaneous musical jam is like, you've got to know, it's a real skill I think that you only learn by doing to know when you're on broadcast and when you're on receive, and that's a massive part of it. But so much of it is just being like, okay, I'm on receive mode now, and then like, okay, I'm going to step in and now it's my solo, so I'm now on like broad transmit, but the rest of the time I'm receiving, now while listening to what everyone else is doing.
Most of that session was more of like kind of the fiddle style where it's just like everyone plays the melody, or you might play the harmonies.
There were like a dozen fiddles.
I know, it's amazing.
Two banjo players, that's a dozen fiddles.
Mandolins also.
That's true, and it's a good point that the person that started Jerusalem Ridge, it didn't come from us. It actually came from the Finnish banjo player. He really wanted to play that.
I think it was his opportunity to play with American musicians who do this. And we play that often. So it might not be the first one that I call in a session, but he really wanted to.
And we did it, and then we see Rand kind of pulling up. I'm like, okay, yeah, let's do it. So it's them playing with them.
Give them space for that.
And the cool part about it is before being a part of this, I had never heard Jerusalem Ridge. Right, right. And so now, I heard it coming down.
I was like, oh wait, they're playing Jerusalem Ridge. All right, cool, let's get it in. I'm sort of used to that, which is, again, the great part about this whole experience and this whole idea, like just learning from a musical standpoint, a lot of the different sort of stuff that's out there that you might have missed as a kid.
Like I knew a little bit of country music coming up, but I wasn't like a bluegrass aficionado or anything. And, you know, hanging out with these guys has definitely, you know, cracked that box wide open for me.
Yes, it's really special seeing. Have you had any resistance from audiences or from promoters?
A little bit, you know. In general, especially musicians, you know, have open arms, open minds about this. And from the bluegrass community and the hip hop community, we have just an overwhelmingly positive response.
So we get to headline bluegrass festivals. And there are a few purists who have the impression that, you know, there's just one particular way to do bluegrass. And this is not it, because it's not even supposed to have drums, but a hip hop beat that's like way outside the boundaries.
Then they come to a show, and then all of that skepticism is thrown out the window. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's 100% conversion, pretty much.
99.99999. It's one guy. I'll never forget this guy.
I'll never forget him. We were at a show at a festival in Knoxville, killing. We do the first song, and the whole place goes crazy.
It's one guy, he's up front, and he's just like, nope! And he's stormed out. I'll never forget this dude as long as I live.
He looked like one of the UGNOTs from Empire Strikes Back, which is a deep cut. Yeah, but yeah. Yo, I will never forget that dude.
And I salute that guy because at the very least, he knew. He was like, no, I'm not doing this, and left, and didn't try to make anybody else go with him. I wasn't like, yeah, yeah.
I'm like, what are you doing? Why would you support that? He was like, nope.
Not for me.
And we get to see how the music changes the minds in real time because there's a lot of, maybe not a lot, but there's certainly a few, and especially at bluegrass festivals, maybe a lot of those guys at the beginning of the set standing there with their arms crossed, looking skeptical. And then next thing you know, they're dancing along and they come to the merch table afterwards and they buy the merch and give us hugs. And it's really nice to see.
What about the other way around? How has it been received in the hip-hop community?
Because we kill it on the mic. Yeah, because we get the immediate respect just because we do it. We get down on the mic.
Some of the cats that we've looked up to for most of our hip-hop experience have eventually done collaborations and stuff with us. It's authentic because we don't diminish anything that we do in the hip-hop arena. The bluegrass part of it is not diminished in any way, shape or form.
We're both going 100 percent.
Do you think you're bringing people across? Do you think you're bringing audiences across to each other's?
Yeah. When you come to a Gangstagrass celebration, you're going to see folks that you would not expect to see in the same room together, but they're all getting down.
It's so great. It's so powerful, I think. I'm going to ask you a couple of bigger questions about music more generally.
Then I think if you got, we can maybe have a little play if you fancy. Yeah. Demonstrate this whole thing.
Exactly. That would be great. Although I did see it demonstrated as well as seeing your showcase and that jam.
On the bus. I was on the bus last night.
We did a little bus party.
Yeah. I'll stick it on the podcast as well because it was someone's birthday or something. It was that.
Oh yeah. It was Frank's birthday.
Frankie.
There we go.
Womax, dude, right?
Yeah.
He's one of the founders of Womax, I guess.
Right.
It's his birthday, so.
It's great.
60th. Yeah, right.
So to explain, there's a bus that goes between venues, between the day venues and the evening venues. I just got on the bus and then suddenly I was like, oh, wait, something's happening. And then and then you guys, yeah, and then bow, Gangstagrass pops up out of nowhere.
So every time you're taking the bus, just know there's a non-zero probability that Gangstagrass might just pop up.
Steve back in the studio here, just reminding you that you can watch some of this as well. It's a lot of fun to see them jamming on a bus. So here they go, Gangstagrass jamming on a bus at Womax 2025 in Finland.
So, I got two sort of bigger questions, and I ask everyone who I have on the show. First one of which is, what's the point in music?
Yeah. For me, it's the kind of thing where it actually doesn't matter if there's a point, because it's just happening. It's something that people just do.
So, I feel like there's just some kind of, you know, natural and instinctual drive to express yourself and to play with time and frequency and the way that these sounds make us feel. And so, trying to put any kind of conceptual justification on that for me is like, you know, after the game trying to figure it out. But it's just going to happen, man.
Wait, give me that question again? That was too big.
What's the point of music?
The point of music, Jesus. What the? What?
Good God, man. That's like, what's the point of breathing? Like, I can't function with that.
Like, I tell people, you know, you've had that question your whole life. Like, if you, would you rather go blind or deaf? And I've seen my children.
Their images are burned into my brain. I could, it would be easier for me to be blind than deaf, because music for me is just like, music exists because there's always something being expressed in it, right? It allows you to sort of feel other things other than the thing that you're directly focused on, whatever mundane task you might be doing or whatever.
It allows that, it opens a lot of that up.
One last thing, and that's the show is called Origin of the Pieces. So it's about, you know, like sort of nod to Darwin, Origin of the Species. So it's about sort of how music evolves and all that.
So I guess my question is, like, how does music evolve? Like, how is music evolving?
Well, you see, there are these finches on this one island.
You can extend that much more, the musical finches.
Yeah, I mean, it is just one of the central impulses of musicians is to create and to share. And so musicians are always incorporating things that they're hearing and collaborating with each other. And so it evolves naturally through this process.
It's just dialectical. So there's always going to be new combinations being made anytime two musicians meet, you know, and if they're from completely different backgrounds, they're going to find a way that those can connect and go together into something new. And so that's just the whole history of music.
It's just people being like, yeah, but what if we did this and this together? And then that becomes the thing. And then somebody takes that thing and says, well, what if you add in this?
And so it's just experimentation. That's it.
Any art, it's a mode of communication that happens in order for you to communicate with someone that doesn't speak your language. You have to meet at some point, you know, eventually you learn, okay, this is the word you use for bread and this is the word I use for bread, but it's still bread, right? But you start getting other types of bread, you know.
So I always think, I always find it interesting, you know, people say about music being a universal language and although I think that's sort of true on one level, but actually for me, what's more true is that it's not universal. It's like lots of dialects. So it's like music is the sort of, you know, is a language, but it's all got lots of different dialects that we and we learn bits of each other.
So right before I spoke to you guys, I was talking to a Palestinian violinist, you know, and there's loads that you guys would have in common with him. There's loads that I have in common with him and you guys, but like we all come from different worlds. We all speak slightly different languages, but like the core thing that underlies it is like the communication.
It's kind of like we all eat, but there's different foods from different places. You might go to some place with food that you've never had before, and stick it in your mouth and be like, that is delicious. And so, it doesn't matter if you know they're cooking or anything.
There's a universal thing for people to eat delicious food, and you can connect to that on a level without having to know the cuisine, really. And that's how I think kind of with music, I can hear things from people halfway around the world with completely different experiences. And to me, I can be like, man, that is soulful, you know, that like really touches me.
And so, that's how I think there's a universal aspect to it.
I think you also, you have to choose to be out of your box a little bit to evolve. And again, in folk music, a lot of folks are very, very satisfied to be in, to do the thing they do. But if you're curious about sound, and I think, you know, then it's very personal too.
Like for me, it's curiosity about sound. Like is there a sound that I haven't heard? And, you know, that's led me towards, you know, exploring synthesis and other things like that.
But that's also a way to, you know, to learn to work with different styles and that kind of thing. Curiosity.
Yeah, I guess kind of, we talked about music being like an expression of ourselves, right? Like no two people are the same, are they? Right?
Like we're always, every new person is a different, completely unique person. And if music is an expression of like yourself, then that's how it's always evolving, right? People are always different.
They're always going to be different. So music is always going to be different, I think.
That's great. Thanks so much guys. I wonder if we can get some instruments out and have a little jam.
Sure.
Great. So after my chat with them, they were kind enough to stick around for a little bit longer and give me a couple of tracks. Now the first of these is an acoustic version of their track, Do Better, which I highly recommend.
And then after that, they stayed on and did a little bit of a freestyle, just to kind of demonstrate that what we were talking about in the interview, this idea of freestyling, coming up with rap spontaneously, and the commonalities that that has with jazz jam sessions or with trad jam sessions, in other words, with strings, fiddles, folk music jam sessions, basically. So I never really thought of that commonality before between hip hop and bluegrass and trad and jazz and all the rest of it. But this kind of demonstrates that quite nicely, I think.
So here we go, here's Do Better followed by a little bit of a jam, a bit of a freestyle about the podcast, and in fact, about their upcoming tour as well. And they should sneak quite a good plug in for that. We didn't really cover it when we were talking, but the kind of core of the bluegrass sound is, could you just explain a little bit about that, please?
Okay. Well, we got string instruments like guitar, fiddle, and banjo. And in bluegrass you might also have a mandolin or a dobro, which is a kind of a slide guitar.
Upright bass. And they'll be playing notes, but also doing things that keep a rhythm going as well.
Because as you were saying earlier, it's not normally drums, right, in a bluegrass thing. So everyone's got to play super rhythmically, I guess, yeah.
And we probably do a little more of that in a situation like this without the drum machine. Yeah, so adjust a little bit and play a little bit more. A little bit more rhythmically.
Yeah, because wrench creates the beats. So in the live show, there's a drum machine and all these awesome beats happening. And here we're just going to go.
Yeah, just acoustic. To that traditional bluegrass, the instruments are providing the rhythm entirely.
Yeah.
And there's probably a good note that coming out of bluegrass, there's a rhythmic technique on the fiddle that didn't exist before, you know, just like a chop technique where you get kind of a bass note and then a...
So that came out of bluegrass in a very kind of stylistic way. Like if you were playing fast, you might just be going... Just damping the strings and playing offbeat.
Just like that. But then if you put that in half time, you get more of a drum beat.
I see. I see.
But so they didn't anticipate that when Curly Wise or whoever started chopping. It was just a way to do something like the mandolin was doing. It actually did come from the mandolin, I think.
Yeah, because that's exactly what the mandolin is, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Interesting because it's such danceable music without drums, which is why it's interesting that you don't need that. So we're just implied.
Joe also does play mandolin, and am I correct that you made the fiddle that you're?
Yes.
Oh, really? Wow, you're a luthier as well. That's great.
That's it all. Yeah.
Wow. How did you get into that?
I couldn't afford a good mandolin.
Right.
Well, no, I was-
I'm sure it was really cheap to make your first one.
Yeah, right, right. It turns out that takes- That's right.
It only took four years. It's kind of an extension of going to college and then wondering what to do and coming up with a good idea, having some experiences where good ideas were rewarded like with a grant. And so I was like, well, what if I pitched this idea?
What was the idea, Jeff?
To be an apprentice, to go and have an apprentice is a kind of a traditional thing, but of our own making with a maker. So that was the whole thing.
Fantastic. Right. We've got to hear some music.
Yeah.
Yeah. What do we got? You want to do what?
I suppose we could get that Do Better.
That's what we're going to ask for.
Check the raison d'etre is to make songs better, And take on the effort of doing the utmost, Because way too many humans are cut through. There's so much going on, they're doing just so. They can get it in and get over on the next man.
I'm here to elevate and navigate like a sextant. So we cruiser through the weather. Anything you can do, my crew can do it better.
Make song for you to groove to forever, whatever. Units you choose to measure, night after night, day after day.
We can collaborate, cooperate on getting by, feel substantial enough to lift us up high as one. The value of a nation is increased by the virtue of the treatment, it extends to the least of us. Is the value of a life governed by the greedy, or determine the hildes and feed the needy?
If we reach to our neighbors when the storm is wreaking havoc, then we each have a better chance of staving off the damage. That's a demonstrated fact. Come together as a pack, and it ain't nothing wrong with that.
We all do better, you can't get better.
We all do better when we all do better.
Woo, yeah, fantastic.
Thanks guys, that was amazing.
Do you want to do, do you want to do like a Long Gray River kind of thing, or a Gunslinger Rambler?
Nobody gonna miss me.
Nobody gonna miss me, sure, yeah.
What's the name of the podcast?
It's called Origin of the Pieces.
Origin of the Pieces.
Yeah. There you go. All right.
Nobody gonna miss me in G.
So, this is the spontaneous thing that we're talking about is that we don't, we hadn't figured out what we're about to do and it hasn't been written. So, we're just mentioning to each other a few guidelines to go off of and from there, we'll be able to make it up.
Because, you're gonna do some freestyling, right? Yeah, yeah. Just for people who might not know, can you just explain what it is?
So, all right. So, there's an interesting thing floating around within the confines of the culture right now. The sort of definition of freestyle.
There are two and I think a lot of cats need to just accept the fact that there are two. A lot of freestyle rhymes is just, you know, you just rhyme and you just wrote some stuff that rhymed together and it's interesting with its metaphors and that sort of thing. And then, the idea of like an off the top freestyle is just like, all right, this is what's happening right now.
I'm going to make up some stuff that rhymes together and we'll see what happens. So, there are two different definitions. A lot of times they sort of cross pollinate with each other.
But yeah, this, I'm just going to make this up. I'm just going to make this up.
And I don't have no calories. I get cool like Mickey and Mallory.
Woo, yeah, yeah, that was great. Lovely little plug as well, perfect. Perfect.
So my huge thanks once again to Gangstagrass for that chat and live session, and including the bus session, which I really enjoyed hearing them jam on a bus. But yeah, really fascinating guys, really lovely bunch of people as well. I do recommend you check out their tour if you can, if you like the sound of that.
They put on great, great live shows. They just did a little showcase over in Finland, so I only saw them for 40 minutes, but I imagine the whole show is gonna be something quite special. And as I say, I'm hoping I'm gonna be able to jump up on stage with them and have a bit of a jam in the spirit of what we were talking about in that interview on their London date, which is the 29th of November 2025, if you hear this in time.
Hopefully, maybe I will see you there. And if I do, do come up and say hi. Meanwhile, thank you very much for listening.
I haven't done a little request to rate and review the show for a little while, so it'd be really, really helpful if you could do that. Lots of you have over the last couple of years. Yeah, we just had our two year anniversary of the show and I'm really, really proud of what we're creating here.
So thank you very much for all your support and going forward, we've got a lot of fun stuff coming up, so I'd really like to be able to reach some more people. So spreading the word, word of mouth is incredibly helpful, but so is reviewing it on iTunes, reviewing it on Spotify, leaving a comment, leaving a star review, and of course on YouTube as well. You can share it there.
And now with the shiny new website originofthepieces.com, it's never been easier. If you want to share a specific episode, there's share buttons on every page. If you want to share a particular bit of the show, that's really easy now.
So anyway, originofthepieces.com. Meanwhile, thanks so much for listening. Reminder that I've got my Wilton's Music Hall shows on the 24th of January.
Chris Lintott and I are also doing a bit of a tour with our universe of music show, Crossing Over, Astronomy and Music. We've got a couple of shows coming up, which I'm really looking forward to. So go to universofmusic.co.uk, universofmusic.co.uk to check out our dates for that.
Otherwise, stay tuned and I will speak to you in a couple of weeks. Bye!