Bryan Sutton (and Friends)—Almost Live—Sugar Hill—2009
Bluegrass musicians and aficionados love to designate the pantheon of the world’s finest pickers, those uncontested champs of their instruments, masters like Bela Fleck, Sam Bush, and Jerry Douglas. In the Tellurides and Merlefests of the last five years, the flatpicking guitarist par excellence has been Bryan Sutton, inheriting the laurel from Tony Rice. Sutton cut his teeth in Ricky Skaggs’ bluegrass finishing school and has gone on to be the busiest and most in-demand studio guitarist in the genre. Sutton may be a superpicker, but he isn’t quite a superstar on par with new-generation peers like mandolinist Chris Thile, due perhaps to his quiet, clean-cut persona, but he has elevated bluegrass guitar soloing to heretofore unmatched command. In the old Bluegrass Session shows, Tony Rice used to take a pass on his turn during some of the fastest tunes. Not Bryan. None other than Sam Bush has commented from the stage that Bryan plays so fast that none of the other guys in the band wants to play the break after his.
2006’s solo outing, Not Too Far From the Tree, saw Sutton dueling with his own boyhood guitar heroes like Rice and Doc Watson. Now, on Sutton’s fourth solo release, Almost Live, out July 14th, he brings along today’s bluegrass elite on an album of in-studio collaborations meant to recreate many of his on-stage ensembles. In fact, the record opens with “Morning Top,” a gliding Sutton original featuring Fleck, Bush, Douglas, and fiddle-stud Stuart Duncan that showcases each player equally, making it an unusual choice to open a guitar picker’s album although no one would complain about listening to these guys play. In fact, Bryan’s willingness (or eagerness) to share the spotlight makes for a dazzler of a disc, one that reaches for variety and eclecticism, with his own guitar as a featured, if not always central, instrument.
The front end of Almost Live is loaded with the record’s most astonishing displays of virtuosity: “Big Island Hornpipe,” a jaunty romp that has Sutton trading foxy runs with Thile and banjo powerhouse Noam Pikelny in the “How to Grow a Band” combo, an early version of the Punch Brothers, and the Bela Fleck duet “Five Straw Suite,” a tangle of complex time signatures, impossible chord progressions, and spidery appregios. This kind of abstruse plonking might have casual bluegrass fans and purists clawing at the window for air, but the album takes a traditional shift to Hot Rize, Sutton in the Charles Sawtelle role, for Norman Blake’s “Church Street Blues.” Sutton also throws in swing (“Le Pont De La Moustache”; check out Sutton’s solo on this one: lord have mercy), a guitar duo (the gentle “Dark Island” with Russ Barenberg), and an old-tyme clogger (“Wonder Valley Girls” with Duncan on fiddle, Tim O’Brien on mandolin, and Dennis Crouch on bass). The record ends with Sutton singing lead vocals, joined again by Thile on tenor harmony for a take on the Delmore Brothers’ “Gonna Lay Down My Old Guitar”; Bryan and Chris improvise outrageous simultaneous leads, an appropriate reflection of this record’s synergistic approach. Those simply wanting to hear non-stop guitar shredding might be better served with Sutton’s 2003 showcase, Bluegrass Guitar. But for those interested in a consummate document of today’s preeminent acoustic instrumentalists, among whom Sutton’s place is secure, Almost Live is an indispensable set.
