Search - Vassar Clements :: Once in a While

In '59 when Vassar Clements was Bill Monroe's fiddler, Jimmy Cobb was Miles Davis' drummer. A decade later, Clements fiddled with Jim & Jesse while Dave Holland was playing bass with Miles. Guitarist John Abercrombie was leading a garage rock band in the late `50s and breaking into the New York studio scene a decade later. . . . `Jam sessions, places where you can go and sit in, everybody does that,' explains Vassar. `There are people here in Nashville who can really play jazz even though they make their living in the country scene. A good musician, it doesn't matter where he comes from. He hears all kinds of music, and if it's in him he learns.' "[This] is just such a jam session. A collection of tunes that would have elicited a comment from Bill Monroe but not from Benny Goodman. A set of gently swinging standards of the kind Vassar heard as a youth, when he drove with friends to a big rink in Orlando to hear Artie Shaw, Les Brown, Tommy Dorsey, and Danny Kaye; the kind the Blugrass Boys jammed between gigs. . . . "Here you have the music that musicians make for themselves, played with conviction and emotion with the accent on play." --Dave Helland, Down Beat