He continues, “Mason, our guitar player, is my barber. I’d been going to him for haircuts for the last five or six years. Every time we’d end up talking about music so I just casually asked him about jamming with us. It was a good fit, everyone really seemed to like him. I don’t think he knew a ton about bluegrass music but he caught onto it fairly quickly.”
The storytelling aspect of bluegrass songs is one of the reasons that Zohreh is passionate about the music. She says, “I love the simple melodies and the distintive harmonies. It’s a unique kind of sound.”
Greg’s interest in bluegrass comes from a desire to learn music that differs from what he plays as a violist in the Winnipeg Philharmonic. He explains, “I was looking for something that I had to learn from scratch. I made a point of not learning how to play the banjo from sheet music and tabs. I really wanted to learn to play the instrument completely by ear in the bluegrass tradition.”
When it comes to songwriting, Zohreh takes two different approaches depending on her inspiration. She says, “Sometimes I’ll get a melody stuck in my head that won’t go away. I’ll play it out on my fiddle or the piano and figure out lyrics to go with it. Alternatively I’ll have a phrase that sticks out in my mind that will make a good song lyric, so I’ll build it around that.”
Once she’s got a song down, she records it and sends it to the other band members for their input. She explains, “Usually it’s Greg who gets veto rights. Either he likes the song or he doesn’t and if he likes it then we do it. We all gather together and when we’re jamming, we try out different ideas and arrangements for the songs.”
Greg points out, “I love hearing those tunes and trying to decide how we’re going to approach them because it’s not always super obvious. there have been some tunes that started off going in one direction but we’ve taken them in a totally different direction so there’s no semblance of the original tune left at all.”
The variety of instrumentation that the band can bring to bear is something that Greg enjoys. He says, “The really great thing about playing in this band is that Ameena plays fiddle and clawhammer banjo, I play a little fiddle, bluegrass banjo and mandolin and dobro and Zohreh plays fiddle. We have a lot of different instrumental combinations so that we can bring completely different sounds to each song.”
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