For the last 10 weeks, Mustered Courage, a bluegrass quartet from Melbourne, Australia has been zigzagging across America in a white conversion van that, according to the band, hasn’t always been the most dependable.
“When we’re traveling down the road, it’s a lot better than when we’re on the side of the road, I’ll tell you that much,” said banjo player and lead singer Nick Keeling.
“We’ve had a couple of van breakdowns,” added guitarist Julian Abrahams.
They've also been crammed into small hotel rooms, eaten food of varying quality and had to dodge cars in some larger northeast cities while trying to cross the street.
Keeling is originally from Austin, Texas, Abrahams is a native Australian. The two met at school where they were studying jazz. Later they would play together in a hip-hop band.
“Jazz actually has a lot of similarities to bluegrass the improvisation is such a key element to bluegrass music. Jazz is all about soloing and playing as many notes as you can, or as little notes as you can,” said Abrahams.
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“Nick and I played too many notes in jazz, so we got ousted and banned from playing jazz; blacklisted and banished to the wasteland of bluegrass music,” said Abrahams with a grin. “Hip-hop? Well, we just didn’t want to be mid-30 year-old white rappers from Australia, so we thought we might be more suited to playing bluegrass in our 30s.”
Along with Paddy Montgomery on the mandolin and Josh Bridges on the upright bass, Mustered Courage is trying to do its part to introduce bluegrass music to what it jokingly refers to as the “deep deep south”…Australia.
“I’d say it’s budding,” said Keeling. “Obviously, since like I said we invented the type of music, no one had heard of it before,” he quipped. “It takes a while. There’s a great community of pickers, but a lot of the fans may not know exactly what they’re hearing, but they’re growing to it pretty fast.”
“It’s somewhat a blessing and a curse to be an Australian bluegrass band. And more so kind of a ‘newgrass’ band because we’re not über traditional or anything like that,” said Abrahams. “On one hand, it’s kind of like a novelty factor so people are like ‘wow, this is something brand new, I’ve never heard of it before’.”
Mustered Courage has been in Nashville for the past few days, taking part in the Americana Music Festival. The band drove up to Bowling Green Monday to play a few songs in our studio.
"When we're traveling down the road, it's a lot better than when we're on the side of the road, I'll tell you that much"
The band’s latest album “Powerlines”, is at the heart, bluegrass. But several listens reveals much more.
“I think this album is a real melting pot of a lot of things and not just in each song, but song to song,” said Keeling. “There’s instrumental like we played on this show and there’s a cappella which we like to showcase that we can sing a little bit. Everything from pretty standard straight up bluegrass to quite contemporary stuff.”
“There’s more kind of an Americana influence on songs like ‘Powerlines’. We really tried to vary the feels and things like that. As Nick says we’ve got an a capella tune on there, we’ve got a track that was kind of an 80s hair metal song we put to bluegrass,” said Abrahams.
“Because one time someone said all bluegrass songs they thought they sound alike… he’s no longer around,” Keeling said with a smile. “We definitely try to wipe that stigma off the face with this kind of variety if you will.”
The band’s summer in America comes to an end next week with visits to West Virginia, Ohio and North Carolina for the IMBA's IBMA’s World of Bluegrass Festival.
“It’s going to be amazing. We’re going to try to hassle all of our hero pickers and try and steal some licks and try and weasel a little bit of respect out of the people we respect,” said Abrahams.
