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____________________________________________________________
Yo-Yo Ma
Stuart Duncan
Edgar Meyer
Chris Thile
The Goat Rodeo Sessions
Sony Classical
88697 84118 2
____________________________________________________________
1. Attaboy
(Edgar Meyer/Chris Thile/Stuart Duncan)
Stuart Duncan: Fiddle
Chris Thile: Mandolin
Yo-Yo Ma: Cello
Edgar Meyer: Bass
2. Quarter Chicken Dark
(Edgar Meyer/Chris Thile/Stuart Duncan)
Stuart Duncan: Fiddle
Chris Thile: Mandolin
Yo-Yo Ma: Cello
Edgar Meyer: Bass
3. Helping Hand
(Edgar Meyer/Chris Thile/Stuart Duncan)
Stuart Duncan: Mandolin
Chris Thile: Fiddle
Yo-Yo Ma: Cello
Edgar Meyer: Bass
4. Where's My Bow?
(Edgar Meyer/Chris Thile/Stuart Duncan)
Stuart Duncan: Fiddle
Chris Thile: Fiddle
Yo-Yo Ma: Cello
Edgar Meyer: Bass
5. Here And Heaven
(Edgar Meyer/Chris Thile/Stuart Duncan/Aoife O'Donovan)
Chris Thile Music/Bug Music Inc. (ASCAP) / Yerba Azul Music, admin. by Bug Music (BMI) / Eggbert Music/Hendon Music Inc. (BMI) / Cosmic Seed Music (ASCAP)
Stuart Duncan: Fretless Banjo, Fiddle
Chris Thile: Gamba, Mandolin
Yo-Yo Ma: Cello
Edgar Meyer: Gamba, Bass
Aoife O'Donovan, Chris Thile: Vocals
6. Franz And The Eagle
(Edgar Meyer/Chris Thile/Stuart Duncan)
Stuart Duncan: Fiddle
Chris Thile: Mandolin
Yo-Yo Ma: Cello
Edgar Meyer: Piano
7. Less Is Moi
(Edgar Meyer/Chris Thile/Stuart Duncan)
Stuart Duncan: Plectrum Banjo
Chris Thile: Mandolin
Yo-Yo Ma: Cello
Edgar Meyer: Bass
8. Hill Justice
(Edgar Meyer/Chris Thile/Stuart Duncan)
Stuart Duncan: Fiddle
Chris Thile: Mandolin
Yo-Yo Ma: Cello
Edgar Meyer: Bass
9. No One But You
(Edgar Meyer/Chris Thile/Stuart Duncan)
Stuart Duncan: Fiddle
Chris Thile: Mandolin
Yo-Yo Ma: Cello
Edgar Meyer: Piano
Aiofe O'Donovan, Chris Thile: Vocals
10. 13:8
(Edgar Meyer/Chris Thile/Stuart Duncan)
Stuart Duncan: Fiddle
Chris Thile: Mandolin
Yo-Yo Ma: Cello
Edgar Meyer: Bass
11. Goat Rodeo
(Edgar Meyer/Chris Thile/Stuart Duncan)
Stuart Duncan: Fiddle
Chris Thile: Mandolin
Yo-Yo Ma: Cello
Edgar Meyer: Bass
____________________________________________________________
Produced by Steve Epstein
Executive Producer: Ruth E. DeSarno
Engineer: Richard King
Assistant Engineer: Brian Losch
Mixed at MSR Studios, New York City
MSR Assistant Engineer: Brett Mayer
Recorded June 12-15 and August 8-12, 2011
at The Barn, Lenox, Massachusetts
Main Microphones for The Goat Rodeo Sessions:
DPA 4006TL Omnidirectional microphones
For Sony Masterworks:
General Manager: Alex Miller
A&R Executive: Cathleen Murphy
A&R Manager: Lynn Lendway
Art Direction: Roxanne Slimak
Design: Roxanne Slimak & Long Vu
Photography: Jeremy Cowart
Product Development: Laura Kszan
Marketing: Leslie Collman-Smith
____________________________________________________________
Sunlight streams through the windows of the barn-turned-recording studio, set back in the Western Massachusetts woods. The quartet of musicians is set up in tight formation, not much farther apart than if they were sitting around a kitchen table. The music that's emanating from the four sets of strings feels both new and familiar—it's composed and improvised, uptown and down home, funky and pastoral. It is uniquely American.
Though these players are among the finest in the world, the songs they are recording are challenging for them to execute. Multiple conversations break out between takes, all frequently interrupted by laughter, trying to work out how best to navigate a tricky passage. “Well,” says one of the quartet, “this is the magic that makes it a goat rodeo.”
According to the website urbandictionary.com, a goat rodeo is “a situation that order cannot be brought to (at) any time” or “about the most polite term used by aviation people (and others in higher risk situations) to describe a scenario that requires about 100 things to go right at once if you intend to walk away from it.” When Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer, Chris Thile and Stuart Duncan ran across this term, they knew they had found the title for the ambitious and groundbreaking project they were planning.
From the outset, the very idea of bringing these musicians together required some innovative thinking. Yo-Yo Ma is simply one of the pre-eminent musicians alive; the seventeen-time Grammy Award winner has been honored with the National Medal of Arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But he has also sought to find new contexts for his cello, and has played alongside musicians from Bobby McFerrin to Astor Piazzolla to the honking Muppets of Sesame Street.
One of Ma’s previous collaborators is MacArthur Award-winning bassist Edgar Meyer. The two musicians, along with Mark O’Connor, recorded the acclaimed Appalachia Waltz in 1996 and its 2000 follow-up Appalachian Journey. Meyer introduced Ma to young mandolin wizard Chris Thile, best known as a member of the alt-bluegrass groups Nickel Creek and the Punch Brothers, and the three preformed together on several songs for Ma’s 2008 holiday collection Songs of Joy and Peace.
When Ma approached Meyer and Thile with the idea of making an album, they suggested adding one more voice—fiddler Stuart Duncan, a top-call session musician who has recorded with virtually every superstar in Nashville, from Dolly Parton and Reba McEntire to Alan Jackson and Tim McGraw. Ma was suitably impressed.
"They're all so excellent at what they do," says the cellist. "They're not only supreme masters on their instruments, but in a particular, rooted genre, and really devoted to that."
Still, virtuosity does not assure chemistry, and the first issue was whether these very different personalities would mix. But observing a session on a mid-summer day at James Taylor’s home studio in the Berkshires, it’s remarkable how much they carry themselves like a band. They’re comfortable enough to needle and support each other in equal measure. The jokes, dirty and otherwise, stop only when the music starts. Ma unself-consciously massages Duncan’s wrist and fingers during breaks.
So the first hurdle in the Goat Rodeo was cleared; these guys could work together. Now what were they going to play? It was determined that the material for the album would all be original, and so Thile, Meyer, and Duncan set off to write some songs. Despite the disparate backgrounds involved, they maintain that the composing directive was clear.
"The music kinda wrote itself," says Thile in the studio's kitchen (where a hand-written sign reads "If Yo-Yo ain't happy, ain't nobody happy!"). "It was a matter of finding the center of what all of us could do. Yo-Yo doesn't improvise, and Stuart doesn't really read music. So it was kind of easy given the boundaries we had—while also trying to make it sound like it didn't have any boundaries at all.”
Not that the songs are simple sketches designed to let these virtuosi flaunt their finger-power. “These arrangements have just enough twists and turns that you really can’t let your guard down,” says Meyer. “Each little thing has to go right—if I trip on one thing, that’s gonna throw off Chris, and then that’s gonna throw Yo-Yo, and then Stuart’s gonna have to make up a whole new part…”
Adding to the complexity, three of the players are gifted multi-instrumentalists, and so half of the songs that eventually made the album break from the standard set-up of Ma on cello, Meyer on bass, Thile on mandolin, and Duncan on fiddle. For "Franz and the Eagle" and "No One But You," Meyer moves to the piano. On "Where's My Bow?" Thile and Duncan (who first played together on Thile's debut album, recorded when he was twelve years old) both pick up the fiddle. On "Here and Heaven," all bets are off: Duncan brings along a banjo, Thile and Meyer both play gambas, and vocalist Aoife O'Donovan (who also sings on "No One But You") gets added to the mix.
"In creating a primarily instrumental record," says Meyer, "I think for an average listener things can sound rather monotonous after awhile." Adds Duncan, "we wanted to any kind of sameness from to track."
The results are both gloriously divers and solidly cohesive, shifting not just from song to song, but from moment to moment. Sublime melody spins into the muscular swing of the finest bluegrass. Arrangements swell and recede, jaw-dropping solos spiral upward, long lines create loose, dreamy moods. The songs are dense—Duncan described one part that Thile wrote for him as "a snowstorm of information"—but never cluttered. It may not be easy (in terms of logistics or sensibility) to harness these musicians for a session, but in the end, no one else could have made these recordings.
As they started giving the compositions names, a theme developed: Most of the working titles included the word “rodeo”. There was the “Dutch Rodeo”, the “Jewish Rodeo”, the “Piano Rodeo.” Meyer’s long-time copyist read these and suggested a term that he and his wife often use—which was, of course, “Goat Rodeo.” When the bassist took it back to the team and they looked up the meaning, it struck a chord with the knotty circumstances around this undertaking, and The Goat Rodeo Sessions was christened.
Yo-Yo Ma may have initiated this scheme, but he's actually the wild card here, and throughout the sessions, he's the one asking questions non-stop, trying to comprehend the bluegrass tradition and vocabulary that the other three share. Yet he insists that, despite the album's title, the challenges were really no different than any other music he makes.
"If Emanuel Ax and I were playing a Beethoven sonata, we would be doing the same thing," says Ma. "We would be saying, 'OK, what's the purpose of this, what is this about, are we telling the story in the same way?' All the different categories bluegrass, jazz, classical music, R&B, whatever—they're really just temporary placeholders. What we're trying to do in the end is to simply make music, and to have the music transcend whatever roots or categories it starts from.
"As a musician, my job is to create memories," he continues. "That's the most basic thing that has to happen—and if that doesn't happen, then why do it?"
- Alan Light
Alan Light is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and Rolling Stone. He is a former Editor-in-Chief of Vibe and Spin magazines.
____________________________________________________________
Thanks to: Richard Alcock, Christin Canterbury Bagnall, Angela Barkan, Brandon Becker, Noelle Bell, Sue Berger, Michael Block, Tara Bruh, Mark Cavell, Jason Colton, Mark Dillon, Dieta Duncan, James Eglehofer, Scott Farthling, Francia Forrester, Jennifer Liebeskind, Mark Ludlum, Brian McKenna, Elisa Peimer, Brian Reaney, Jason Raditch, Bogdan Roseie, Steve Schoen, Jesse Sklar, Larissa Slezak, Darin Soler, Tammy Van Aken, Scott van Horn.
Special thanks to the Taylor Family: James, Kim, Henry and Rufus for welcoming us to your amazing studio and your home. To the great folks at The Barn: Ellyn Kusmin, Dave O'Donnell, Troy Smith, David Kusmin and Peter Whitehead for making The Barn a perfect experience for this project. Chris Ruigomez, Steve Carver and our friends at the BSO for the stunning piano. To Michael Roller and everyone at Samel's Catering for feasts fit for kings (and goats!).
To Richard Gordon and the crew for capturing a true goat rodeo in action.
____________________________________________________________
Stuart Duncan wishes to thank Dieta Duncan for her enthusiasm, encouragement, and culinary delights, and Joshua, Jonathan and Darcy for their patience and support.
Yo-Yo Ma wishes to thank Cristin Canterbury Bagnall for nurturing the idea.
Edgar Meyer wishes to thank Grace "Ya-Ya" Bahng, Eberhard Ramm and Nancy Jackson.
Chris Thile wishes to thank The Punch Brothers and Jordan Tyce.
All songs published by Chris Thile Music/Bug Music Inc. (ASCAP) / Yerba Azul Music, admin. by Bug Music (BMI) / Eggbert Music / Hendon Music Inc. (BMI) except as noted.
____________________________________________________________
Yo-yoma.com
punchbrothers.com
sonymasterworks.com
____________________________________________________________
(C) & (P) 2011 Sony Music Entertainment. Logo is a registered trademark of Sony Corporation. Used under license. / Distributed by Sony Music Entertainment / 550 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10022-3211
FBI / Anti-Piracy Warning: Unauthorized copying is punishable under federal law.
Back to Top
Yo-Yo Ma
Stuart Duncan
Edgar Meyer
Chris Thile
The Goat Rodeo Sessions
Sony Classical
88697 84118 2
____________________________________________________________
1. Attaboy
(Edgar Meyer/Chris Thile/Stuart Duncan)
Stuart Duncan: Fiddle
Chris Thile: Mandolin
Yo-Yo Ma: Cello
Edgar Meyer: Bass
2. Quarter Chicken Dark
(Edgar Meyer/Chris Thile/Stuart Duncan)
Stuart Duncan: Fiddle
Chris Thile: Mandolin
Yo-Yo Ma: Cello
Edgar Meyer: Bass
3. Helping Hand
(Edgar Meyer/Chris Thile/Stuart Duncan)
Stuart Duncan: Mandolin
Chris Thile: Fiddle
Yo-Yo Ma: Cello
Edgar Meyer: Bass
4. Where's My Bow?
(Edgar Meyer/Chris Thile/Stuart Duncan)
Stuart Duncan: Fiddle
Chris Thile: Fiddle
Yo-Yo Ma: Cello
Edgar Meyer: Bass
5. Here And Heaven
(Edgar Meyer/Chris Thile/Stuart Duncan/Aoife O'Donovan)
Chris Thile Music/Bug Music Inc. (ASCAP) / Yerba Azul Music, admin. by Bug Music (BMI) / Eggbert Music/Hendon Music Inc. (BMI) / Cosmic Seed Music (ASCAP)
Stuart Duncan: Fretless Banjo, Fiddle
Chris Thile: Gamba, Mandolin
Yo-Yo Ma: Cello
Edgar Meyer: Gamba, Bass
Aoife O'Donovan, Chris Thile: Vocals
6. Franz And The Eagle
(Edgar Meyer/Chris Thile/Stuart Duncan)
Stuart Duncan: Fiddle
Chris Thile: Mandolin
Yo-Yo Ma: Cello
Edgar Meyer: Piano
7. Less Is Moi
(Edgar Meyer/Chris Thile/Stuart Duncan)
Stuart Duncan: Plectrum Banjo
Chris Thile: Mandolin
Yo-Yo Ma: Cello
Edgar Meyer: Bass
8. Hill Justice
(Edgar Meyer/Chris Thile/Stuart Duncan)
Stuart Duncan: Fiddle
Chris Thile: Mandolin
Yo-Yo Ma: Cello
Edgar Meyer: Bass
9. No One But You
(Edgar Meyer/Chris Thile/Stuart Duncan)
Stuart Duncan: Fiddle
Chris Thile: Mandolin
Yo-Yo Ma: Cello
Edgar Meyer: Piano
Aiofe O'Donovan, Chris Thile: Vocals
10. 13:8
(Edgar Meyer/Chris Thile/Stuart Duncan)
Stuart Duncan: Fiddle
Chris Thile: Mandolin
Yo-Yo Ma: Cello
Edgar Meyer: Bass
11. Goat Rodeo
(Edgar Meyer/Chris Thile/Stuart Duncan)
Stuart Duncan: Fiddle
Chris Thile: Mandolin
Yo-Yo Ma: Cello
Edgar Meyer: Bass
____________________________________________________________
Produced by Steve Epstein
Executive Producer: Ruth E. DeSarno
Engineer: Richard King
Assistant Engineer: Brian Losch
Mixed at MSR Studios, New York City
MSR Assistant Engineer: Brett Mayer
Recorded June 12-15 and August 8-12, 2011
at The Barn, Lenox, Massachusetts
Main Microphones for The Goat Rodeo Sessions:
DPA 4006TL Omnidirectional microphones
For Sony Masterworks:
General Manager: Alex Miller
A&R Executive: Cathleen Murphy
A&R Manager: Lynn Lendway
Art Direction: Roxanne Slimak
Design: Roxanne Slimak & Long Vu
Photography: Jeremy Cowart
Product Development: Laura Kszan
Marketing: Leslie Collman-Smith
____________________________________________________________
Sunlight streams through the windows of the barn-turned-recording studio, set back in the Western Massachusetts woods. The quartet of musicians is set up in tight formation, not much farther apart than if they were sitting around a kitchen table. The music that's emanating from the four sets of strings feels both new and familiar—it's composed and improvised, uptown and down home, funky and pastoral. It is uniquely American.
Though these players are among the finest in the world, the songs they are recording are challenging for them to execute. Multiple conversations break out between takes, all frequently interrupted by laughter, trying to work out how best to navigate a tricky passage. “Well,” says one of the quartet, “this is the magic that makes it a goat rodeo.”
According to the website urbandictionary.com, a goat rodeo is “a situation that order cannot be brought to (at) any time” or “about the most polite term used by aviation people (and others in higher risk situations) to describe a scenario that requires about 100 things to go right at once if you intend to walk away from it.” When Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer, Chris Thile and Stuart Duncan ran across this term, they knew they had found the title for the ambitious and groundbreaking project they were planning.
From the outset, the very idea of bringing these musicians together required some innovative thinking. Yo-Yo Ma is simply one of the pre-eminent musicians alive; the seventeen-time Grammy Award winner has been honored with the National Medal of Arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But he has also sought to find new contexts for his cello, and has played alongside musicians from Bobby McFerrin to Astor Piazzolla to the honking Muppets of Sesame Street.
One of Ma’s previous collaborators is MacArthur Award-winning bassist Edgar Meyer. The two musicians, along with Mark O’Connor, recorded the acclaimed Appalachia Waltz in 1996 and its 2000 follow-up Appalachian Journey. Meyer introduced Ma to young mandolin wizard Chris Thile, best known as a member of the alt-bluegrass groups Nickel Creek and the Punch Brothers, and the three preformed together on several songs for Ma’s 2008 holiday collection Songs of Joy and Peace.
When Ma approached Meyer and Thile with the idea of making an album, they suggested adding one more voice—fiddler Stuart Duncan, a top-call session musician who has recorded with virtually every superstar in Nashville, from Dolly Parton and Reba McEntire to Alan Jackson and Tim McGraw. Ma was suitably impressed.
"They're all so excellent at what they do," says the cellist. "They're not only supreme masters on their instruments, but in a particular, rooted genre, and really devoted to that."
Still, virtuosity does not assure chemistry, and the first issue was whether these very different personalities would mix. But observing a session on a mid-summer day at James Taylor’s home studio in the Berkshires, it’s remarkable how much they carry themselves like a band. They’re comfortable enough to needle and support each other in equal measure. The jokes, dirty and otherwise, stop only when the music starts. Ma unself-consciously massages Duncan’s wrist and fingers during breaks.
So the first hurdle in the Goat Rodeo was cleared; these guys could work together. Now what were they going to play? It was determined that the material for the album would all be original, and so Thile, Meyer, and Duncan set off to write some songs. Despite the disparate backgrounds involved, they maintain that the composing directive was clear.
"The music kinda wrote itself," says Thile in the studio's kitchen (where a hand-written sign reads "If Yo-Yo ain't happy, ain't nobody happy!"). "It was a matter of finding the center of what all of us could do. Yo-Yo doesn't improvise, and Stuart doesn't really read music. So it was kind of easy given the boundaries we had—while also trying to make it sound like it didn't have any boundaries at all.”
Not that the songs are simple sketches designed to let these virtuosi flaunt their finger-power. “These arrangements have just enough twists and turns that you really can’t let your guard down,” says Meyer. “Each little thing has to go right—if I trip on one thing, that’s gonna throw off Chris, and then that’s gonna throw Yo-Yo, and then Stuart’s gonna have to make up a whole new part…”
Adding to the complexity, three of the players are gifted multi-instrumentalists, and so half of the songs that eventually made the album break from the standard set-up of Ma on cello, Meyer on bass, Thile on mandolin, and Duncan on fiddle. For "Franz and the Eagle" and "No One But You," Meyer moves to the piano. On "Where's My Bow?" Thile and Duncan (who first played together on Thile's debut album, recorded when he was twelve years old) both pick up the fiddle. On "Here and Heaven," all bets are off: Duncan brings along a banjo, Thile and Meyer both play gambas, and vocalist Aoife O'Donovan (who also sings on "No One But You") gets added to the mix.
"In creating a primarily instrumental record," says Meyer, "I think for an average listener things can sound rather monotonous after awhile." Adds Duncan, "we wanted to any kind of sameness from to track."
The results are both gloriously divers and solidly cohesive, shifting not just from song to song, but from moment to moment. Sublime melody spins into the muscular swing of the finest bluegrass. Arrangements swell and recede, jaw-dropping solos spiral upward, long lines create loose, dreamy moods. The songs are dense—Duncan described one part that Thile wrote for him as "a snowstorm of information"—but never cluttered. It may not be easy (in terms of logistics or sensibility) to harness these musicians for a session, but in the end, no one else could have made these recordings.
As they started giving the compositions names, a theme developed: Most of the working titles included the word “rodeo”. There was the “Dutch Rodeo”, the “Jewish Rodeo”, the “Piano Rodeo.” Meyer’s long-time copyist read these and suggested a term that he and his wife often use—which was, of course, “Goat Rodeo.” When the bassist took it back to the team and they looked up the meaning, it struck a chord with the knotty circumstances around this undertaking, and The Goat Rodeo Sessions was christened.
Yo-Yo Ma may have initiated this scheme, but he's actually the wild card here, and throughout the sessions, he's the one asking questions non-stop, trying to comprehend the bluegrass tradition and vocabulary that the other three share. Yet he insists that, despite the album's title, the challenges were really no different than any other music he makes.
"If Emanuel Ax and I were playing a Beethoven sonata, we would be doing the same thing," says Ma. "We would be saying, 'OK, what's the purpose of this, what is this about, are we telling the story in the same way?' All the different categories bluegrass, jazz, classical music, R&B, whatever—they're really just temporary placeholders. What we're trying to do in the end is to simply make music, and to have the music transcend whatever roots or categories it starts from.
"As a musician, my job is to create memories," he continues. "That's the most basic thing that has to happen—and if that doesn't happen, then why do it?"
- Alan Light
Alan Light is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and Rolling Stone. He is a former Editor-in-Chief of Vibe and Spin magazines.
____________________________________________________________
Thanks to: Richard Alcock, Christin Canterbury Bagnall, Angela Barkan, Brandon Becker, Noelle Bell, Sue Berger, Michael Block, Tara Bruh, Mark Cavell, Jason Colton, Mark Dillon, Dieta Duncan, James Eglehofer, Scott Farthling, Francia Forrester, Jennifer Liebeskind, Mark Ludlum, Brian McKenna, Elisa Peimer, Brian Reaney, Jason Raditch, Bogdan Roseie, Steve Schoen, Jesse Sklar, Larissa Slezak, Darin Soler, Tammy Van Aken, Scott van Horn.
Special thanks to the Taylor Family: James, Kim, Henry and Rufus for welcoming us to your amazing studio and your home. To the great folks at The Barn: Ellyn Kusmin, Dave O'Donnell, Troy Smith, David Kusmin and Peter Whitehead for making The Barn a perfect experience for this project. Chris Ruigomez, Steve Carver and our friends at the BSO for the stunning piano. To Michael Roller and everyone at Samel's Catering for feasts fit for kings (and goats!).
To Richard Gordon and the crew for capturing a true goat rodeo in action.
____________________________________________________________
Stuart Duncan wishes to thank Dieta Duncan for her enthusiasm, encouragement, and culinary delights, and Joshua, Jonathan and Darcy for their patience and support.
Yo-Yo Ma wishes to thank Cristin Canterbury Bagnall for nurturing the idea.
Edgar Meyer wishes to thank Grace "Ya-Ya" Bahng, Eberhard Ramm and Nancy Jackson.
Chris Thile wishes to thank The Punch Brothers and Jordan Tyce.
All songs published by Chris Thile Music/Bug Music Inc. (ASCAP) / Yerba Azul Music, admin. by Bug Music (BMI) / Eggbert Music / Hendon Music Inc. (BMI) except as noted.
____________________________________________________________
Yo-yoma.com
punchbrothers.com
sonymasterworks.com
____________________________________________________________
(C) & (P) 2011 Sony Music Entertainment. Logo is a registered trademark of Sony Corporation. Used under license. / Distributed by Sony Music Entertainment / 550 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10022-3211
FBI / Anti-Piracy Warning: Unauthorized copying is punishable under federal law.
Back to Top
