Backbone > Ear Whacks
Pulling Strings with Vassar Clements
By Todd Paul; Photos provided

Vassar Clements possesses that rarefied level of musicianship that is equally at home playing just about anything with just about anybody. At 74, Clements has plied his bow with everyone from Earl Scruggs and Doc Watson to Chet Atkins, the Grateful Dead, B.B. King, Paul McCartney, the Monkees, Spinal Tap, the Boston Pops, John Sebastian, and Clarence Gatemouth Brown. He debuted at the Grand Old Opry with Bill Monroe when he was 14 years old, and toured with Monroe for 15 years. His presence on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s 1972 crossover album Will the Circle be Unbroken introduced him to a younger, pop-music audience, and the classic album Old and In The Way, recorded live in 1973 with Jerry Garcia, Peter Rowan, David Grisman, and John Kahn, made him an instant favorite with fans of what has lately become known as jam band music. He has explored jazz with former Miles Davis band members Dave Holland, John Abercrombie, and Jimmy Cobb, and his collaboration with Stephane Grappelli earned him his fifth Grammy nomination.

Clements was born in Kinard, Florida in 1928, where he says he heard more big band swing music than bluegrass or country. At seven years of age he taught himself the fiddle and formed his first band with two cousins. By the time of his appearance at the Opry, he was a master of the instrument; he later expanded his repertoire to include viola, cello, bass, guitar, mandolin, dobro, and tenor banjo.
After nearly a decade as one of Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, Clements joined Jim & Jesse’s Virginia Boys; he moved to Nashville in 1967 and began a long run at the Dixieland Landing Club. This was followed by tenures with Faron Young’s Country Deputies, John Hartford’s Dobrolic Plectral Society, and, finally, the Earl Scruggs Review.

Clements was tapped for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s landmark album as a result of his association with Scruggs, who had been asked to recommend players for the project (“The way Earl says it—‘He’ll do.’”). It was this recording that boosted his career beyond bluegrass. Suddenly, Clements was the fiddler of choice for everyone from Jimmy Buffett to Rita Coolidge. His career as a session player took off, and he appeared on albums by Gordon Lightfoot, Steve Goodman, David Bromberg, J.J. Cale, David Sanborn and others. His first solo album, Crossing the Catskills, was not named for any specific connection with upstate New York, though Clements says he “played up in that vicinity a lot”—more than anywhere else—during the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Clements now has some 36 albums to his credit, with more on the way. And in the genre-busting tradition of Circle and Old and In The Way, he continues to assimilate widely. On his most recent offerings, Full Circle (2001) and Old and In The Gray (2002)—a reunion effort by Clements, Rowan, and Grisman, with Herb Pedersen and Brynn Bright filling in for Garcia and Kahn—Clements puts a bluegrass spin on Cream’s “White Room,” The Beatles’ “I’ve Just Seen a Face” and “Yesterday,” Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Mr. Bojangles,” Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho and Lefty,” and The Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women,” along with more traditional string band tunes such as Bill Monroe’s “Tall Timber” and Carter Stanley’s “The Flood.” A prolific composer of instrumentals, Clements also included his own “Vassar’s Fiddle Rag” on the latest release. A new western swing album with fellow fiddler Buddy Spiker is in the final stages of production and due for release this year.

Clements’ idiosyncratic musical expression has evolved into something he calls “hillbilly jazz,” a combination of bluegrass stylings with the rhythm of swing and the freeform improvisation of jazz. His melodies dance in and out between the other instruments, swirling skyward in effortless flights of fancy. He has said he expresses his philosophy through his playing; if so, his philosophy must be a positive one. It’s impossible not to smile when Clements is playing, and playing around with, a song.

His instrument is as singular as his talent. Believed to be over 300 years old, it bears a carved, bearded head in place of the traditional scroll, and on the back is a painting of Sappho holding a lute. The instrument may have been made by violinmaker Gaspar Duiffoprugcar in the mid to late 1500s; it resembles the description of a Duiffoprugcar instrument once owned by Prince Youssoupov, a distinguished Russian amateur violinist.

In an era of niche marketing and target audiences, players like Clements can be hard to define. The reality, he says, is that musicians never want to be pigeonholed. “I don’t want to be categorized,” he says. “It’s the music industry that does it.” The advantage to being uncategorizable, he adds, is that “peop le don’t know exactly what they’re going to hear each time.”

By the same token, Clements doesn’t know exactly what he’s going to play each time, his fiddle soaring high and free over the boundaries of song. “Everything that I play has to come from the heart,” he says. “That’s all I know how to play.” To emphasize the point, Clements notes that he doesn’t know how to read musical scores, though he often has a hard time convincing others of that fact. “I’ve had ‘em think I could read and I couldn’t convince them that I couldn’t,” he says. “I say, ‘I can’t read,’ and they say, ‘yes you can.’” When a score is placed before him, Clements listens to what the other musicians are doing and plays by ear. He says this seems to satisfy everyone.

On February 15, Clements will appear at the Bardavon in Poughkeepsie with Northern Lights, a tight bluegrass quartet with which he has performed periodically for the past decade. In 2000, Clements and Northern Lights released a superb album titled Three August Nights Live, which was recorded in concert at the Claremont Opera House in New Hampshire and the Machias Performing Arts Center in Maine. This disc shows off Clements at his best on such bluegrass standards as “Rainmaker”, “Dueling Banjos,” and “Midnight Moonlight”; the band also throws in the occasional surprise, such as “Wild Horses” by Jagger and Richards, and Bob Seger’s “Heartache Tonight.”

Taylor Armerding, Northern Lights’ mandolin player, says “it’s still a thrill” playing with Clements, even after having done so several times a year since 1990. Armerding recalls his first exposure to Clements; it was the early 1970s, and Armerding, serving in the Army and new to bluegrass, saw Clements at The Cellar Door in Washington, dc with the Earl Scruggs Revue. In the liner notes to their live album, Armerding writes that he left the club “convinced I had been in the presence of a musical god.”

Sharing stage and song with Clements is “almost like being in a different dimension,” Armerding says. Even in his seventies, “He still...has the fire,” approaching tunes in a new way each time he plays them. “He has a very young mind,” says Armerding.

In his typical self-effacing manner, Clements says he’ll be backing Armerding and company at the Bardavon, not the other way around.
“I’m playing with them—that’s a good group of boys.”

Vassar Clements and Northern Lights will perform at the Bardavon on Saturday, February 15, at 8pm. Admission is $24.50 Adults, $22.50 Student/Senior, $19.50 Members. Tickets are available in person at the Bardavon Box Office, 473-2072, or through Ticketmaster. The performance is presented in association with the Hudson Valley Bluegrass Association and The WinterGrass for Farmers Project, in cooperation with The Hudson Valley Farming Community, Cornell Cooperative Extension, and Scenic Hudson.

A portion of the proceeds from this performance will benefit the Hudson Valley Farm for Life Loan Program. Audience members are invited to a pre-concert talk one hour prior to the performance with Dale Johnson, folklorist and musician.