In memory of Tony Rice, with comments on art and culture

 I had a few other ideas for a post this morning, but if you are a bluegrass fan, a guitar fan, or otherwise serious about music, you may be aware that Tony Rice died on Christmas.  Details are not being released, except that it was sudden.  Under the circumstances, we hear about a death, and our first thought may be, "COVID?"  However, if it was sudden, it probably wasn't.  Regardless, Tony Rice.

A few words about Tony Rice, if you don't know who he was.  It is almost impossible to overstate his importance as a guitarist, or as an innovator in bluegrass and acoustic music generally.  Who first decided to use a plectrum on a guitar to flat-pick fiddle tunes?  We can argue about that.  Doc Watson, Joe Maphis... doesn't matter.  However, the first generation of bluegrass lead guitarists created a template.  Doc, Clarence White, a few others.  Then Tony Rice came along.  As great as Doc, Clarence and the rest were, Tony had an elegance to everything he played.  Singers could marvel at his voice, but I'm a guitar nut.  Tony Rice brought jazz elegance to bluegrass guitar.

So not only could he play straight bluegrass, and sing like the best, he was a founding member of the David Grisman Quintet, which was the original group to blend bluegrass with Django Reinhardt's style of "gypsy jazz."  He was some snot-nosed kid, re-inventing music because he could play better than everybody else.  And then he kept going.  Rice could play any style of jazz, bluegrass... anything.

The state of the bluegrass world, as of this morning, is equivalent to if-a-Supreme-Court-Justice-died, or something like that.  I'd name a movie star or a pop star, if I knew one.  In jazz... Sonny Rollins, or someone like that, who is remarkably still alive.  When he dies, the jazz world will do what the bluegrass world is doing now.

And bluegrass is such a niche genre that this isn't a major news story to the philistines.  It spiked in popularity with O Brother, Where Art Thou, but bluegrass was never exactly fully mainstream.  And today, Tony Rice can die, and for those who don't follow the genre, unless you're reading my obscure ramblings, you might not know.  In contrast, when Sonny Rollins dies, you'll hear about it.  Even if you don't listen to jazz, you'll hear about it.  It'll be one of those "someone important died, now let me tell you why he was important, even though you don't know the name" kinds of stories.  Tony Rice, though?  Bluegrass is too obscure.

To most people.

Yet I love it.  And Tony Rice was beyond compare.  I cannot choose a favorite Tony Rice song, or album, or anything.  His duet albums with Norman Blake, maybe?  Scratch that.  Church Street Blues.  No, wait.  Manzanita.  Damn.  Can't do it.  Fuck.  Tony Rice.

And there are so many artists of skill and talent who could die tomorrow, whose names would mean nothing to me.  The greatest mystery writer in the world?  Nope.  Not my genre.  I'll just skip over genres like 19th Century British aristocracy fetishism, because stop it, people.  Didn't Emerson teach you anything?

Ralph Waldo Fucking Emerson.  Get over the fucking Brits.

Or sculpture.  The greatest sculptor alive could die tomorrow, and if I saw the name in an obit, it wouldn't mean anything to me because I don't get sculpture.

Yet, I do think there is something different here.  Music permeates culture more thoroughly than sculpture.  (And of course, people are too stupid and lazy to read.)  It's just that the music that permeates our culture is mostly shit.  Objectively shit.  Also, get off my lawn.  And there is no reason for the music around which people coalesce to be the music that is shit when there is so much great music in the world.  The music of the world is being preserved.  Mostly, and fuck you, Universal Music Group for letting that fire destroy so many master tapes and then covering it up, you fucking assholes.

Bluegrass has an image problem, in some minds.  It gets associated with... Deliverance, and certain cultural identities, so plenty of people won't even try to listen to it.  In a way, I get that, even if I scorn such artistic closed-mindedness.  But artists do something far more important than we, academics, ever will.  They make positive contributions to the human condition, while I rant from the peanut gallery, whether pretentiously or just casually.  And to decide that an art form must be disregarded in its entirety based on some political or cultural association like that...

What a bunch of fucking bullshit.  Every time I hear people say that they don't listen to country, or bluegrass, or anything like that... I prod a bit, and damn-near every time, it's that bullshit cultural association.

And you know what Tony Rice did?  He blew that away.  That's part of the whole jazz elegance that he brought to bluegrass.  This wasn't "dueling banjos," and some inbred kid sittin' around ominously while you wait to watch Ned Beatty get assaulted.  Tony Rice was listening to everyone from Django Reinhardt to John Coltrane and incorporating everything into the most sophisticated music around.

Was he my favorite?  I don't have a favorite, but you know, let's do something uncharacteristically seasonal for me, as a tribute to Tony.  Here he is, doing a Coltrane-meets-Django version of "My Favorite Things," from Backwaters.