An Evening with the Carolina Chocolate Drops
In early 2012, Grammy award-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops released
their studio album Leaving Eden (Nonesuch Records) produced by Buddy
Miller. The traditional African-American string band's album was
recorded in Nashville and featured founding members Rhiannon Giddens and
Dom Flemons, along with multi-instrumentalist Hubby Jenkins and cellist
Leyla McCalla, already a familiar presence at the group's live shows.
With Flemons and McCalla now concentrating on solo work, the group's
2014 lineup will feature two more virtuosic players alongside Giddens
and Jenkins - cellist Malcolm Parson and multi-instrumentalist Rowan
Corbett -- illustrating the expansive, continually exploratory nature of
the Chocolate Drops' music. Expect a new disc from this quartet in
2015.
The Chocolate Drops got their start in 2005 with Giddens, Flemons and
fiddle player Justin Robinson, who amicably left the group in 2011. The
Durham, North Carolina-based trio would travel every Thursday night to
the home of old-time fiddler and songster Joe Thompson to learn tunes,
listen to stories and, most importantly, to jam. Joe was in his 80s, a
black fiddler with a short bowing style that he inherited from
generations of family musicians. Now he was passing those same lessons
onto a new generation. When the three students decided to form a band,
they didn’t have big plans. It was mostly a tribute to Joe, a chance to
bring his music back out of the house again and into dancehalls and
public places.
With their 2010 Nonesuch debut, Genuine Negro Jig—which garnered a
Best Traditional Folk Album Grammy—the Carolina Chocolate Drops proved
that the old-time, fiddle and banjo-based music they’d so scrupulously
researched and passionately performed could be a living, breathing,
ever-evolving sound. Starting with material culled from the Piedmont
region of the Carolinas, they sought to freshly interpret this work, not
merely recreate it, highlighting the central role African-Americans
played in shaping our nation’s popular music from its beginnings more
than a century ago. The virtuosic trio’s approach was provocative and
revelatory. Their concerts, The New York Times declared, were “an
end-to-end display of excellence... They dip into styles of southern
black music from the 1920s and ’30s—string- band music, jug-band music,
fife and drum, early jazz—and beam their curiosity outward. They make
short work of their instructive mission and spend their energy on things
that require it: flatfoot dancing, jug playing, shouting.”