The grass is looking bluer on the other side of Andrew Collins. The celebrated acoustic music star is certainly a student of bluegrass, but this is 21st century Canada so don't expect his mandolin to have a southern drawl.
Even the founder of bluegrass himself, Bill Monroe, was a visionary innovator as he established a brand new sound out of old-style instruments and melodies. Collins is just carrying on Monroe's tradition of leaping up and over traditions to construct what might perhaps one day be someone else's future traditions.
Saturday night is Prince George's first look at this newgrass style of bluegrass.
Collins has wracked up five Juno Award nominations and taken home five trophies from the Canadian Folk Music Awards over his years (and he's still young). He is part of bands like The Foggy Hogtown Boys and Creaking Tree String Quartet. Those bands have been called "technically brilliant" by critics but they are part-time units and Collins is rather dedicated to the profession, to say the least. He was also looking to blend in ingredients like jazz, folk, chamber, country and other pinches and pecks of musicology that a consensus-based band can't always accommodate.
He admits it was a streak of obsessiveness that got him into this mess in the first place. He was a fan of the David Grisman Quintet, the progressive bluegrass/acoustic jazz band from San Francisco.
While Collins lived in Whistler in his youthiest days, he got a chance to see them perform at a festival. He felt the shiftlessness drain out of him as he watched the string-band guru in action.
"I went to high school with Chris Coole, my close friend and bandmate in the Foggy Hogtown Boys, and I saw how much time and practice he put in to become proficient (guitar and banjo) and I just never thought I'd have the focus to do it, and that kept me from picking up the mandolin for a number of years," Collins began. But then that spring day delivered a dose of fate. Watching Grisman work the diminutive instrument put walking shoes on his first steps. "I bought myself a mandolin the next day."
The watershed concert was on May 23, 1996. Collins knows this because he kept the ticket stub as well as the epiphany.
"That first eight or 10 years - I crammed in 30 years of practice in that time. If you do nothing but that thing, you progress quickly," Collins said. "I was practising, easily, eight hours a day, jamming, busking, anything I could do. I was living and breathing mandolin."
Adding to the fervor of it was his inexperience. He took music lessons throughout his school days, but high school band class does not transfer seamlessly into folk music stardom. There was a lot of dust on the ol' trumpet by the time Collins got a mandolin into his hands, and they aren't exactly close cousins in the instrument family.
Still, though, he was able to call on his childhood education, and he wishes more emphasis was put by the public school system onto teaching music. Just because the lessons don't seem pertinent at the moment, he said, doesn't mean they aren't having an effect on your life.
"I remember music theory class. It was so conceptual and disconnected from actual music, but as an adult when I came back to music, there was information there that I didn't understand at the time but was foundational knowledge that benefited me in my music life," he said.
The rush of having a new breakthrough never gets old, he said. If a musicians stops learning, that musician risks their vitality.
He and his two compadres in the Andrew Collins Trio (he is accompanied by Mike Mezzatesta on guitar/fiddle and James McEleney on bass/mandocello) are dogged in their rehearsal and preparation and there were splendid moment as they prepped for their latest album where they could actually feel the frustration of a new musical lick melt away into a newfound ability, a new thing they could do in their instruments they weren't able to before. Those are golden sensations, he said.
They must be ready. They are but three and their instruments are devoid of electronic technology or special effects capabilities. What their fingers do, the audience gets without any way of painting it a pretty colour.
They felt confident about their recording sessions. They and the songs were fit to be printed when they went in with co-producer David Travers-Smith to make the new album entitled And It Was Good.
There's a storytelling nudge to the title, with its biblical reference, and Collins noticed something spiritual about the sessions that produced it.
When he got to the studio for the first day of their recording schedule and he looked at the calendar, the day, accidentally and coincidentally, was May 23, 2016. That makes the past 20 years a bit of a story ending in the phrase "and it was good."
The date Prince George fans need to mark is Saturday at Art Space. The Andrew Collins Trio takes the stage at 7 p.m.
Tickets are $20 at Books & Company or at the door while supplies last.
