Jayme Stone says he’s ‘smitten’ with clawhammer, an affinity that can be traced back to 2013’s recording session for the Lomax project.Vanessa Heins
When Jayme Stone first took up the banjo 20 years ago, he, of course, made a point of listening closely to such masters of the instrument as the Seegers (Pete and Mike), Ralph Stanley, Butch Robins and Earl Scruggs. "That was my initial 'in,' " he recalled in a telephone interview the other day en route to a gig in Louisville, Ky.
But in developing his own sound, Stone went another way, eschewing the frenetic clang associated with bluegrass and old-timey country for something more feathery and lyrical. The touchstone here was Bela Fleck, the multi-Grammy-winning banjoist who, in myriad solo projects and ensembles such as New Grass Revival and the Flecktones, expanded both the instrument's palette and its idiomatic range. Fleck "tied everything together," said Stone, who, in fact, later took lessons from Fleck. "He's such a modern musician, so forward thinking, I thought, not only am I able to inherit the amazing and diverse traditions of the banjo, Bela's proving that you can do just about anything with it."
And so it has come to pass for the Toronto-born and -bred Stone who, at 36, has two Juno Awards to his credit, for best instrumental recording of 2007 (The Utmost) and 2008's best world music recording, a collaboration with Malian kora player Mansa Sissoko titled Africa to Appalachia.
A Jayme Stone session can be an eclectic affair, just as likely to feature trumpet, clarinet, trombone and drums in its instrumental bob-and-weave as fiddle, mandolin and guitar. But a funny thing has happened to Stone on his way to a much-anticipated concert Friday evening at Koerner Hall in Toronto: he's gotten that old-timey "religion."
More specifically, he's become "smitten" with clawhammer banjo – that is, the highly rhythmic, down-picking, fingernail-driven approach to the banjo's five strings. Stone, who's called Colorado home since his wife, Laura, enrolled in the contemplative psychotherapy program at Boulder's Naropa University almost 10 years ago, sees the strum-heavy clawhammer technique as a way of "widening my palette," to the extent "that all I want to do now when I'm off the road is sit on my front porch and learn how to play clawhammer."
The source of Stone's enthusiasm can be traced back to 2013, when he invited a dozen or so musicians to the Colorado Chautauqua in Boulder to work up a mess of tunes – ballads, sea shanties, field songs, anthems, ring shouts, "handmade, homemade music" – from the thousands of hours of field recordings produced by legendary U.S. folklorist/archivist Alan Lomax (1915-2002).
Stone described the week-long session as "very much collaborative, very much organic," but there was no intention to take "the Lomax project," as he called it, beyond Boulder if there wasn't any magic among the singers and the pickers. "I sent everybody resources of where to look for tunes and I certainly had a whole lot of suggestions, some of which stuck and some of which didn't." Fortunately, "the chemistry and the camaraderie right from the beginning was so wonderful for everybody and grew over the next year," so that when it was decided to record the results in studios in Toronto and Boulder in mid-2014, "every song [had] everyone's indelible mark," Stone said. The fact that the album, titled Jayme Stone's Lomax Project, would be released during Lomax's centenary was a serendipitous bonus.
The recording is very much a mixed bag, including a Lomax original from 1963 (Lazy John), two instrumentals (Hog Went Through the Fence, Yoke and All; Julie and Joe) and several a cappella numbers (Prayer Wheel; Now Your Man Done Gone and The Devil's Nine Questions among them). "Everybody who chose songs for the recording had a different inroad," explained Stone. "Margaret Glaspy is a songwriter and an amazing lyricist so words and story were her way in." (Indeed, her vocals on I Want to Hear Somebody Pray and Maids When You're Young [Never Wed an Old Man] are among the album's high points.) "I tended to things that were farther afield – songs from the Caribbean, the Georgia Sea Island, lesser-known traditions … This allowed the project to reflect the diversity of the Lomax archive itself. That was really important to me."
Naturally, there's fleet-pickin' aplenty – but no trumpet or trombone, no reeds. "I do have a penchant for horns, it's true," Stone laughed. "And there are some more obscure recordings Lomax made of Italian folk music and Galician dance music but, by and large, in this country [the U.S.], that wasn't part of what he recorded. Other than Jelly Roll Morton [whom Lomax famously taped in 1938], he didn't record any jazz and I wanted the instrumentation to reflect that."
Jayme Stone's Lomax Project featuring Grammy-winning vocalist/mandolinist/fiddler Tim O'Brien appears at Koerner Hall, Toronto, Friday, starting at 8 p.m. It plays Peterborough's Market Hall Saturday at 8 p.m. Other tour dates, including appearances this summer in Orillia, Montreal and Guelph, at jaymestone.com/tour.