The Duhks Spread Their Wings
�It�s funny, too, because lots of people do just throw us in a Bluegrass category, but to be honest we don�t� Bluegrass is probably, in the influences of our music, is probably one of the least noticeable ones,� guitarist Jordan McConnell told me by phone from Nashville on rare day off for the band, �It�s Old-Time, it�s Irish, it�s Quebequa, it�s Afro-Cuban, it�s funk and blues and Gospel, but we�ve never called ourselves a Bluegrass band or even claimed to have much ties to Bluegrass music.�
The hardest part, he tells me, is being lumped into a category they don�t belong in and then judged according to the standards of that genre. And one of those standards is the way a Bluegrass band traditionally looks, although that issue is usually dispelled once the band takes the stage and proves they have the chops. �But it�s funny the negative reactions tend to come more from, not necessarily how we look or anything like that, but what we�re doing with the music, how we�re, you know, we�re destroying the traditions or, you know, we�re not playing Bluegrass music the way that Bluegrass music is supposed to be played. That tends to be more where the bad vibes are coming from. But you know, it happens and it happens less and less all of the time and it�s never really been that big of an issue,� McConnell notes.
But they are in good company. In the early Seventies, as new, younger fans made their way to Bluegrass, many of them were looked down upon for their style of dress and their free, improvisational way with the music. One of those artists The Duhks are intimately familiar with.
Banjoist Bela Fleck produced their second album (and Sugar Hill debut), The Duhks, in 2005. The collaboration brought out the best in the band, but scheduling conflicts prevented Bela from returning for the new album. �We had actually thought about getting Bela on the record again and it was something we all really would have wanted to do if it had worked out, but it was just a matter of timing,� McConnell says
So the group took the opportunity to try something different and they brought renowned fiddler Tim O�Brien in to produce the album. �We became friends with him gradually, over two or three summers I would say,� McConnell recalls, �We started doing the same Festival circuit as him, we were playing more of the same festivals, I guess I should say, and just gradually got to know him a little bit. We�ve all been huge fans of his music for a long time and, you know, we were playing with him once in a while and it eventually just got to the point where we were sitting in Tonder, in Denmark, we just sort of sitting around shooting the shit and he was� he had come up and played with us a few times at different festivals at this point, so it was getting to be a pretty established relationship, he was familiar with our music, he loved our second record and we were just sitting around talking. I was asking if he was producing anything at all and he stood and he said �Only projects I really believe in� or something like that and I gave him this look and he sort of gave me this look and I was like, �we should talk.��
The Duhks have used a different producer on each record, but, at least for the two Sugar hill releases, one constant remained. �Gary [Paczosa] is the best engineer in the world as far as I�m concerned. He gets out of acoustic instruments in the studio� I really don�t think there�s anybody better in the world at doing what he does. And he�s also a really, really close friend of ours, over the years, I guess it�s been about two or three years we�ve known him now, we�ve just gotten really close and we wouldn�t really want anybody else to�� McConnell says trailing off into a laugh, �I shouldn�t say that, I guess, that�s a pretty strong statement. We love working with him and he�s an amazing producer as well as an amazing engineer.�
With the production team assembled, the process of picking the songs for the album came next. Using a mixture or originals, traditionals and contemporary songs, the album covers a wide breadth of styles. But it wasn�t as intentional as picking a certain number of each: �Just kind of how it works out. I mean, we all, every one of us listens to completely different styles of music,� McConnell explains, �Like Leonard and myself listen to a lot of traditional music. Scott listens to a lot of traditional Peruvian, African, Afro-Peruvian, Afro-Cuban folkloric music. Jess and Tania both listen to a lot of contemporary Pop music. I listen to a lot of contemporary Rock music. Leonard listens to a lot of contemporary who knows what (laughs). But we never sit down and go, �ok, we�re gonna have three contemporary covers on here, we�re going to do one Dan Frechette song, we�re gonna do four traditional tunes, we�re gonna do a couple of traditional songs.� It�s just what ends up happening, what people end up bringing to the table that works and everybody likes. It just sort of folds out that way.�
Is it the lyrics or the melody that grabs first?
�Well, obviously the best case scenario is you find the song that is lyrically very moving and poignant or� and has a melody that�s amazing. But often� it can be both ways, like this songs got a really cool melody line, it�s about taking a dump in the forest,� he laughs, �If it�s really cool and it works, we�ll do it. And vice versa, if the songs got amazing lyrics but it�s not quite there in the melody side of things, that ones a bit easier because you can always mesh with the melody and start changing things to be a bit more interesting or melodic or whatever. So, yeah, you know, it just, again, comes down to what ends up grabbing somebody.�
Other songs were brought to the band by O�Brien, such as the albums lead track �Ol� Cook Pot.� �He had this stack of CDs he gave us and this one, it was a demo CD that someone had handed him and it was� the name was scribbled on the front of this thing, you couldn�t even make it out,� McConnell recounts, �He�s like �I don�t know who this guy is, but I think this is a cool song, I think we should check this out.� And we started jamming on it, it was, like, immediately really cool and fun. So we ended up working that one up and he eventually found out� I don�t know how he figured out who wrote it, but he eventually found the guy that wrote it and he lives in Nashville.�
The Duhks are currently in the middle of their Fall tour, co-headlining many shows with singer-songwriter Ari Hest. Their schedule has been full of new places and venues to keep them busy. �Yeah, the last six months have been almost entirely new venues. We�ve been trying to get into newer markets,� he says, �We�ve signed up with a new management company, in the last 8 months I would say, and it�s just been amazing. We�ve got our ideas of how we�re supposed to do this and they�ve got these ideas that are just like�(laughs) crazy, it�s like a whole �nother world with these guys. We come from like the Folk music circuit and these guys are New York, highfalutin� management guys, so we�ve been doing a lot of really cool new theaters, more sort of club kind of stuff, lots of new venues. All kinds of radio, it�s been nuts.�
In five years you hit a lot of small clubs and festivals, but there are those that stand out, he tells me.
�Well, we played at Telluride two summers ago? Last summer? It was two years ago. And that was stunning. First, for the landscape. Your standing up on stage and looking out at the most gorgeous mountains you could ever imagine. You look off to the right and there�s this two-thousand foot waterfall or something crazy like that flying down the side of the mountain. And Bela got up and played with us during that set and Tim did as well. Gary was sitting down� Gary, our producer, is also an amazing photographer, Canon used to send him all over the world to do photo shoots, he has this amazing collection of photos in his house. So he was sitting down on the stage taking pictures and yelling at the sound guy to turn this up and that up,� he laughingly recalls, �So that was� It�s almost the most comfortable I�ve ever felt on stage. That was a pretty amazing one.
�One I should tell you about is this gig we did in Australia last Christmas called the Woodford Folk Festival. It�s just, I don�t know, I think the town is actually called Woodford, just outside of Brisbane, and it runs from the 26th of December until the 1st of January. And they get something like 40,000 people a day at this Festival, something like 40 � 60,000, something like that, just an insane amount of people, but the way it�s set up, you go out there and just stay there. It�s like this little country all to itself and they�ve got this little cities set up inside the site. Like you�ll have this whole row of vendors, but it�s set up in this grid kind of thing so you get this huge area like you�re walking down a downtown area, then suddenly there�s this huge stage right in the middle of it. And the vibe at that Festival was just, like, nothing I�ve ever experienced before, just the epitome of peace, love and happiness. Everybody was in a good mood and amazing music too, from all over the world. So we played this giant sort of natural amphitheater thing that is their main stage and that was a pretty amazing gig.�
Between tours and radio station appearances, the Duhks also found time to shot their music video for the �Out of the Rain,� a song written by lead vocalist Jessee Havey. In the video the band enters into a world of water spending nearly the entire video underwater. Or did they?
�No, the whole thing was shot in front of a green screen. It was crazy because we didn�t� we went in there in two days of filming, in the middle of a heat wave, inside this building in front of the green screen. Actually, it�s funny, when we filmed our last video it was the middle of winter, in Toronto, probably 45 degrees below zero. So they were running out in between takes to powder your nose, �cause my nose was just this bright red the entire day, so they�d run out and powder your nose and try to make you look less cold and then throw a jacket on you and you try to warm up for thirty seconds before they did another shot. And this time it was the exact opposite, it was 42 above Celsius, I don�t know what that is in Fahrenheit� Insanely hot though. They were running out between takes to wipe us down and (laughs) trying to give us this powdery make-up so we look less like we are soaking wet with sweat.
�So anyway we did these two days of shoots and had no real concept of what the video was going to look like because it was all, literally all just standing in front of a green screen sort of moving around and doing this or doing that. It wasn�t until� It was funny, too, we saw it in stages. The first thing we saw was the video pieced together with none of the animation, so it�s still just us doing these weird things in front of a green screen, but we sort of got a sense of the flow of the video. And then the next thing we saw was the actual animation and we just, we were sitting in the middle of the airport watching it on somebody�s laptop and just laughing our asses off. Because it was just like, no idea of what to expect, I mean it�s crazy, it�s totally bizarre.�
After the video the band hung around with some of the children who were extras in the video, playing them some of their music and getting to know them. McConnell says it was a great experience that was also captured on video, which he would like to see released in the future.
With so many varying styles within the band, some might fear that the band might come apart under the stress of so many different ideas, but McConnell says that they all have their outlets to prevent that. �I mean, we all work on our own stuff besides this band,� he notes. �I�m playing mainly traditional Irish music, but me and Leonard have a project with a girl named Lydia [Garrison-]Clauson who is an amazing Old-Time fiddle player, she�s got this insane drive in her playing. We�ve got a band that we�ve been calling the Turtle Duhks for a while. She was in a band called Turtle Island Dream and when we�re all at Festivals together, we�ll get a little gig on a side stage somewhere and just rock Old Time tunes for half an hour, forty-five minutes. Then Jess writes a bunch of music, she�s always working on stuff. Same with Tania, she�s one of the most insane fiddle players I�ve ever heard in my life and she�s always, always creating stuff and writing. She�s got two solo records already [1998�s Something & 1999�s This Side Up both self-released on Elizabeth�s SwanSisters label], so she�ll probably put out another one at some point.
�Because we all have such different ideas musically, you don�t always get to express everything you want express in the Duhks, so that�s really important for people to have a way to do what their heart really wants to do, I guess.�
