The grass
gets greener

>> Notre Dame de Grass respect the roots of bluegrass while tending to its future

TRUE BLUE: Matt Large (centre) and Notre Dame de Grass

by JOHNSON CUMMINS

Fans of traditional bluegrass music can give even jazz diehards a run for their money in remaining the staunchest, stubbornest bunch you will find in any given genre, with rigid rules firmly in place to keep it from being bastardized and losing touch with its origins.

The roots of bluegrass lie with the immigrants from Ireland, Scotland and England who settled in the Appalachians. With the eventual merging of the music from the homeland with the African-American precursors to blues and jazz, the bluegrass sound began to take shape. Its official genesis, though, is commonly traced to its founding father, Bill Monroe, and his band from the mid-’40s, the Blue Grass Boys. Along with band members like banjo player Earl Scruggs and guitarist/singer Lester Flatt, Monroe created a sound that involved fiddle, banjo, mandolin, dobro and upright bass, with three-part harmonies borrowed from gospel.

Montreal’s Notre Dame de Grass offer a perfect example of conservative mixing with contemporary on their new CD, New Canada Road. In fact, singer/guitarist Matt Large has in the past earned a reputation for being a staunch purist of the genre within the Canadian roots music scene, and despite having tempered his rules to a certain degree, he’ll still admit to getting downright ornery if the term is misapplied.

“I just never want to see this music I love get watered down, and suddenly everything that has a banjo in it considered bluegrass, because it’s not. There are rules, but that also doesn’t mean they can’t be bent. I really don’t have the authoritative desire to homogenize bluegrass and not let it breathe and go forward. Monroe told everyone he wanted it to move forward, and fully supported people who took the tools he laid out and expanded upon it. Obviously, you can’t follow the rules too closely—we can’t write a song about ‘my little cabin home on the hill’ because I live in Montreal.”

In fact, New Canada Road’s title track tears out the lyrical roots of bluegrass with a song exposing the current plight of urban sprawl as Large has witnessed across the nation. The quintet does remain true to bluegrass form, however, with searing instrumental work. Large’s pine-shaking bellow, hovering within the tight vocal harmonies, come straight from the heart, trumpeting the importance of hard work and family while personalizing familiar bluegrass themes of gospel and even, as Large puts it in his liner notes, “the obligatory you-done-me-wrong song.”

NDG’s leaps from tradition could be called baby steps by the uninitiated, but he insists that the plan behind New Canada Road was a concerted effort to add to the great canon of bluegrass tradition and at the same time, catch the ear of new supporters to ensure its future.

“I didn’t really want to just appease the X-amount of bluegrass fans, because I just write my songs and that’s the way they come out, but I also wanted people who just enjoyed acoustic-based music to embrace the record. I have to make the records that I want to make, and I think we did that.”

CD launch with Terry Joe Banjo
at Green Room on Saturday,
May 26, 8 p.m., $10