Two Steps Back

The banjo and upright bass are the butt of countless jokes in the music world - the former for playing a narrow range of styles, propensity to fall out of tune, and lack of dynamic range; the latter for being the musical lightweight of a group doing little more than marking time and root notes. If you've read this far, then I probably don't need to bother dispelling these notions for you. But even for you enlightened readers and listeners, there's not much repertoire out there for these two odd ducks of the acoustic menagerie. Hearing the wide open spaces in the collaborations between Bela and Edgar or Hartford and Huskey made us want to dive deeper into that landscape.

There is a wide sonic and tonal range that neither the banjo nor upright bass generally cover - that midrange often occupied by guitar or piano that's too high for the bass and too low for the banjo. Our goal was to explore the full range of our instruments while embracing that space between them, almost like a third member of the ensemble. Instead of sounding like a bluegrass band where half the members failed to show up, we approached this more as the two hands of a pianist, which worked equally well for the blues and jazz material as for the more textural and atmospheric pieces.

This recording is a snapshot in time of two friends and collaborators wanting to expand on the ephemeral sound check duets they shared over the years as part of the band Roosevelt Dime. The germs of some of these songs go back several years, but it was over the course of a few days, as the world went into full lockdown in March of 2020, working and arranging together, that they came to life. We hope that these tunes may inspire and uplift you.