Tony Rice

Biography

Tony Grain is among bluegrass’ most inventive flatpicking guitarists. Although he’s shown a mastery from the genre’s customs, Grain set the typical for more sophisticated styles. A previous person in the Bluegrass Alliance, the David Grisman Quintet, J.D. Crowe’s New South, as well as the Bluegrass Record Band, Grain has continuing to reveal his eclectic strategy on single recordings, two albums with flatpicking electric guitar ace Norman Blake, and two albums, documented along with his brothers Larry, Ron, and Wyatt, because the Grain Brothers. In 1996, Grain joined up with with Chris Hillman, Natural herb Pedersen, and his sibling Larry to record a tradition-rooted record, From the Woodwork. Elevated in Southern California, Grain inherited his musical skill from his dad, who used several West Coastline bluegrass rings and was seriously inspired by California-based bluegrass groupings, like the Dillards as well as the Kentucky Colonels, which highlighted influential electric guitar picker Clarence Light. Moving briefly to Kentucky in 1970, Grain became a charter person in the Bluegrass Alliance, among the first contemporary bluegrass groupings. As an associate of J.D. Crowe’s New South in the first ’70s, alongside Ricky Skaggs and Jerry Douglas, he continuing to promote a brand new method of the music from the hill nation. After interacting with imaginative mandolin participant David Grisman throughout a jam program in 1975, Grain came back to California and helped to create the David Grisman Quintet. Through the five years that he used the group, Grain helped to place the building blocks for the “fresh grass” design that Grisman dubbed “Dawg Music.” Departing the Grisman Quintet, Grain created a bluegrass supergroup, the Bluegrass Recording Band, with J.D. Crowe, Bobby Hicks, Doyle Lawson, and Todd Phillips. Although just a part-time endeavor, the group created five unforgettable albums. Rice’s albums like a soloist and along with his music group, the Tony Grain Unit, possess ranged from the jazz-tinged Mar Western, including bluegrass-style remedies of music by Kilometers Davis and John Coltrane, to vocalist/songwriter-oriented albums, including Chilly on the Make, Local American, and Me & My Acoustic guitar, which presented his virtuosic acoustic guitar selecting and soulful vocalizing of tunes by Ian Tyson, Phil Ochs, and Gordon Lightfoot. Grain released an album-length assortment of Lightfoot’s tracks, Sings Gordon Lightfoot, in 1996. Grain continuing to interpret the original bluegrass repertoire aswell, releasing an record of outdated chestnuts, Has and Sings Bluegrass, exactly the same season. In 1997, along with his sibling Larry Grain, Chris Hillman, and banjoist Natural herb Pedersen, he founded Grain, Grain, Hillman & Pedersen, as well as the superstar quartet released three albums between 1997 and 2001. Rice’s performing voice have been essentially silenced because of dysphonia because the early ’90s, but he continued to be a high instrumentalist, collaborating with Peter Rowan on a set of albums for Rounder Information, 2004’s You HAVE THERE BEEN for me personally and 2007’s Quartet. The encouragingly entitled Tony Grain Sings and Has Bill Monroe made an appearance in 2011.

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