Jake gave Taylor the gift of producing a CD for his last birthday, complete with a crack band of musicians (Mark Erelli, Zack Hickman, Greg Liszt). This is Taylor’s first solo CD project, after 28 years with and as co-founder of Northern Lights, and the past eight years with the Bluegrass Gospel Project - which he continues to perform with regularly.
Jake's New CD
About his newest CD, Jake offers, “This is organic music. It’s a bunch of guys playing their instruments and singing, and getting taped while they’re doing it. There’s no pitch correction, no chemicals, no nothing.” Armerding and his “bunch of guys” – Boston musical heavies Zack Hickman, Mark Erelli, Billy Beard, Richard Gates, Kevin Barry and Taylor Armerding – holed up in a studio in North Reading just before Christmas, got completely snowed in, and made some beautiful, raucous, lasting music. Armerding confides, “For years I’ve been trying to get away from love songs – everybody writes them, they’re the easiest to write, all that stuff. But then I fell in love and got married, so it wasn’t really an option.” Erelli, a longtime friend and colleague who contributed guitar and vocal tracks to the project, commented, “It’s pretty amazing to listen to a whole record of love songs and not hear any of the usual love song clichés.” |
It was the early 1980s when local bluegrasser Taylor Armerding started his 5-year-old son, Jake, on Suzuki violin. Twenty-six years later, Jake returned the favor by assembling Boston’s best bluegrass musicians to help his dad record his first solo album. And the two of them will celebrate simultaneous album releases when the Jake and Taylor Armerding band takes the stage. Jake is releasing his fourth album of originals titled HER, a collection of love songs that may have something to do with the fact that he got married last fall. Taylor’s album, his first solo project, HEAD THAT WAY, is a retrospective of his more than 30 years on the local and national scene. Besides Jake on fiddle and vocals, Taylor’s CD features Zack Hickman on bass, Mark Erelli on guitar and vocals, Lincoln Meyers on guitar, Greg Liszt on banjo and his youngest son, Jesse Armerding, on drums. The special double-CD release concert will deliver the fusion of bluegrass, blues, folk, pop, classical and rock that has come to be known as Americana. Together, the Armerdings deliver harmonic vocal blend that is so clean, so tight, so smooth that it is difficult to tell who is singing what. It’s as if they’re related.
Taylor Armerding was a co-founder in 1975 of New England’s most prominent progressive bluegrass band, Northern Lights. He spent 28 years as the band's front man, mandolin player, lead singer and chief songwriter. During those years, the band recorded nine albums and toured nationally and internationally, playing occasionally with the late fiddle legend Vassar Clements, bluegrass star Peter Rowan and folk legend Jonathan Edwards. Since 2001 Taylor has fronted the Vermont-based Bluegrass Gospel Project, plays occasionally with Jake and in 2008 joined the Jonathan Edwards trio on mandolin and vocals. He also plays mandolin, sings and dresses up more than usual to play with two Zack Hickman projects – Barnstar and the House of Ill Repute.
Jake Armerding studied classical violin into high school and absorbed bluegrass just by being around the house. At 13, he joined Northern Lights on fiddle and recorded three albums with the band during his high school and college years. He soon turned his attention to songwriting, and recorded his first CD, Caged Bird, while at Wheaton College (IL). In 2003, Nashville independent label Compass released Jake Armerding, a collection of folk-pop songs written over a year living in Music City. “A master at bending boundaries” marveled the Boston Globe, while the Washington Post called Armerding's instrumental skills “remarkable.” After more than 500 performances, from Anchorage to London and Miami to Bangor, Armerding returned to Nashville to record Walking on the World. “His real achievement has been to bend the boundaries of the genre -- to break the conventions that define country music,” wrote the Boston Globe (March 2007).
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