You never know what you’re going to get when you speak to a musician for the first time. Talking to Ben Sollee last week was like talking to an old friend. Easygoing and thoughtful, the cellist from Louisville, Ky., interrupted a couple times only because his young son was banging on a banjo.
Performing at the Parish tomorrow night, with Pacific Northwest avant-folk duo Thousands opening, Sollee spoke of his ambitious idea to tour without a van. Last fall, he and his band traveled by bicycle on their Ditch The Van Tour, using bikes called “The Big Dummy” made specifically for moving cargo – including a cello.
“We’re turtles,” he claims, “averaging 40 or 50 miles a day, but then…. we have to play a show!”
His current band includes Austinite Phoebe Hunt, fiddler for the Belleville Outfit and most recently Cowboy and Indian. Sollee also backed Sarah Jarosz for a time a few years ago.
“There’s a lot of really well-rounded players in Austin,” he affirms. “There’s no esteem to any one art. There’s much more people being really good at lots of different things. Phoebe’s classically trained but she likes to play fiddle tunes. She can play swing music all day long, but she can sing and write her own songs. So when you’re looking for a flexible side person to play with, or someone you just enjoy playing music with, Austin really seems to deliver.”
Sadly, Sollee reports that Hunt won’t be at the show on Saturday as her father’s getting married that day. “We’re going to strip down to what we do for the bike tours,” he says. “It’ll be just me and my drummer Jordan Ellis. We’ve got a lot of extra tools to keep the show rockin’. Jordan plays a lot of the parts on the record, as well as the bass lines and stuff through a sampling pad in his drums.”
While Austin might categorize Sollee as a bluegrass artist – besides appearing here with Jarosz, he was also part of the Sparrow Quartet with Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn – his solo work is eclectic, folk-based pop. His new album Inclusions will surprise fans.
“The record started out as a collaboration between me and two DJs,” he explains. “They’re both from Kentucky. We got together to see if there was some common ties between hip-hop and folk. We had a good time experimenting. I learned a lot about what it meant to be a DJ. I came away from that experience with all those sounds in my head, trying to figure out how to get them organically in the studio and how to translate that to the stage.”
Sollee’s classical training helped in the making of the album as well as its naming.
“From a composition stand point I come up with big ideas and then try to create them musically. So that’s kind of a classical approach.
“But I can also put people on equal ground because I use the vernacular of both the DJ and the orchestra. That’s a big hurdle for someone who’s studied music for their doctorate, then they go see someone like Girl Talk and they say, ‘They’re just rehashing everything that already existed. They’re not actually creating something new.’
“But that’s an elitist way of looking at it. A lot of the great folk music was based on folk melodies that were rehashed and redressed and run through some modulation. It’s about the tools that the people are using and the tools that people are using now are a lot more immediate.”
This article appears in July 22 • 2011.