Boston-based bluegrass group, Twisted Pine, is ready to make you shake your hips at MASSMoCA’s 2015 bluegrass fest.
Kathleen Parks grew up learning Irish fiddle in her Irish family, and listening to her father play jazz trumpet, but it was while she was a student at the Berklee College of Music that her musical life shifted. That’s when she heard bluegrass for the first time.
“It sounds like Irish but twangier,” she says, “and I want to shake my hips.” She feels an energy in its free-shifting improvisation — like Irish music and jazz combined.
In the expanding Boston bluegrass scene, Parks fiddles and sings in the band Twisted Pine, which also features Dan Bui on mandolin, Ricky Mier on banjo, Rachel Sumner on guitar and vocals, and Chris Sartori on bass.
The group is catching national and international attention, too. They’ve performed recently at festivals from Rockygrass in Colorado to Celtic Connections in Glasgow, Scotland; received a grant to record their debut full-length album in Nashville, Tennessee; and been nominated for an International Bluegrass Association Momentum Award. This week they return to Mass MoCA’s FreshGrass Festival in North Adams, Massachusetts, where they won the band competition last year.
Photo by Joan Harrison
“[FreshGrass] is the capstone of the summer,” Bui says. “We’re excited to be there.”
Bui, Mier, Parks, and Sumner met through Berklee, and Sartori met Mier at a music jam. At parties and informal gigs, the group solidified their pleasure in playing together. “For me that’s what fuels the music — the spontaneous interaction with other players,” Mier says.
Twisted Pine honed its style at the Cantab Lounge, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, bluegrass hub, evolving their playing from an informal jam to a melded group. Now they play there once a month, working out new material and arrangements.
“It gave us an excuse to get together, call out tunes, and spice it up,” Sumner says of the gig. “A lot of bands have gotten their start there.”
Twisted Pine has shaped its sound out of high-energy standards and original tunes. Sumner and Parks both write original songs, and all the band’s members have worked out arrangements.
“People sometimes have a strict definition [of bluegrass] — it must be Scruggs-style banjo,” Sumner says. “We’re a little loose; we come from different backgrounds.”
Mier, who played slap bass in jam bands, picked up banjo after he and Bui became roommates. Sartori played jazz, funk, and R&B fusion before he met them.
“I was classically trained on flute,” Sumner says. “I didn’t know chords.”
But the fluid flexibility of bluegrass moved her. “It was new for me,” she says, “because classical orchestras and ensembles … are stiff. I was drawn to this because I was starved for it in the classical world.” So she picked up the guitar and began writing her own songs.
Parks says her songs often have a rock feel, influenced by Paul McCartney and Elliott Smith. Sumner calls her tunes “story songs,” often drawing on her life. One song, for instance — which Twisted Pine will perform at FreshGrass — recalls a Christmas Eve when Sumner and her family were evicted from their home.
“It’s one of the worst things that’s happened,” she says, “and I figured out how to channel it [into music]. I like finding beauty in horrible things.”