In the family tree of bluegrass, we start out with the early settlers of the Southern states who brought an array of stringed instruments on their voyage to the New World from the British Isles. Down the tree a few many years, we find the rural spirituals of famous pickers such as Bill Monroe or Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatt of Southern Appalachia. In the 1960’s, the family tree expanded—moving westward—growing with America. Follow this line far out to San Francisco on a VW bus where the banjo found its way into the three-fingered hand of Jerry Garcia. Garcia and David Grisman’s work in the genre would inspire a young punk rocker we find playing guitar under the shade of their branch. His name is Adam Aijala of Yonder Mountain String Band.
I had a chance to catch up with Aijala on the phone prior to the 15th Annual Northwest String Summit, which kicks off this Thursday, July 14 at Horning’s Hideout (North Plains, OR). I asked how he reconciled his heavy influences, like Black Flag, with the ambient sound of bluegrass, the trademark genre of his career.
“Even though they don’t sound the same, there’s an energy similarity. I can get into the same zone with both kinds of music in my head. What I loved about bluegrass was how people could do so much with just microphones and no amps or anything.”
While the guitarist and vocalist admits that in his younger years he grew up as a skateboarder, listening to metal and punk rock, he went on to listen to nothing but bluegrass for awhile. “It wasn’t until they came out with the iPod that I just started listening to everything again.” Aijala is influenced by a wide array of music. On his band’s 2015 release, Black Sheep, they covered punk rockers, the Buzzcocks’ “Ever Fallen in Love.” While admitting that he wasn’t crazy about putting a cover song on a studio album, a little convincing from his bass player, Ben Kaufmann, was just the nudge that he needed.
“It was just something that we’d been teasing around for a few years now—playing it back stage, but never really trying it on stage. It was Ben’s suggestion to put it on the album, which is funny because he didn’t grow up listening to any of that stuff.”
Aside from YMSB’s 2003 release, Old Hands, which featured songs entirely written by or in collaboration with the band’s friend, Benny Galloway, a.k.a. Burl, the Buzzcocks’ song is the only cover appearing on one of the band’s studio releases. This does not hold true for live releases which include such fun-loving numbers as the theme song from The Muppet Show.
A Massachusetts native of Finnish descent, Aijala now lives in Colorado, and the former punk rocker has traded his skateboard in for golf clubs. The self-described “Bogey man” has lived through a number of changes in his band and his genre, especially of late. After losing founding member and mandolin picker, Jeff Austin in 2014, YMSB has brought on some new, younger talent to the band including mandolin prodigy, Jake Jolliff along with fiddle player and vocalist, Allie Kral.
“He actually really loves Jake,” Aijala explained when I pried about playing with legendary mandolinist, Sam Bush. “Jake is pretty heavily influenced by him in his own playing.”
Aijala elaborated on the adventure of bringing on new talent, which includes the band’s first ever fiddle player.
“It adds more to the dynamic having a fiddle in the band. The music we’re creating has a different feel, because, obviously we’ve got new musicians. Jake’s a pretty amazing musician, and so is Allie [Kral]. They’re considerably younger than us, too, which is cool, because it lights the fire in me a little bit—to keep up with these little whippersnappers.”
I learned that Yonder Mountain String Band, in its 2.0 incarnation, is now working on a studio album to follow up the 2015 release Black Sheep. Aijala revealed that he has been increasingly involved in editing, recording and engineering on his band’s work.
“It feels like a forward movement. As far as receptions—I’m not really concerned about that. I’d love to have people really like it, but ultimately, we’re doing this just to have new music to play on stage.”
Aijala spoke to the reality that musicians such as himself do not make a living off of studio albums anymore.
“Our bread and butter is the live show.”
Further to that point, I asked the veteran bluegrass picker how he felt the emergence of more bluegrass bands has effected the overall economy of the genre. He has obviously put some thought into the topic, since he explained that if a festival is looking to hire one bluegrass band—one of them is going to get it and the other one won’t. The guitarist remembers a time when his ensemble was the only group playing a non-bluegrass festival without a drummer. Today, plenty of bands at non-bluegrass festivals are picking without percussion.
“I feel like we’re in this together. I think we can coexist and everybody benefits—at least that’s what I’d like to believe.”
“When we first started out, we wanted to sound like a trad bluegrass band,” he admitted that influences like Phish, The Grateful Dead, and even Frank Zappa lured YMSB over to the jam side of bluegrass in the early days. “I know a lot of people who never got into trad bluegrass at all, and when they think of bluegrass—they don’t even think of Bill Monroe and Jimmy Martin, Jim and Jesse—they think of YMSB or the Stringdusters…”
There’s no question that Adam Aijala was a major player bridging the bluegrass of old to the thriving bluegrass scene we see picking its way across America now. You can see him live on tour this summer.
[Photo credit: Jay Blakesberg]