(Editor’s note: a reprise of Dave’s interview with Larry Chung from April of 2018)
Larry Chung is no stranger to Bay Area bluegrass circles. He is a music teacher and plays most every instrument at virtually every venue and festival in the area. Whether jamming at festivals, teaching at Gryphon Strings or serving on the Board of Directors at the Freight & Salvage, his passion for the music is strong. I sat down with him for a chat one Sunday afternoon.
db: Hi Larry, I see you playing at festivals with many different age groups. What do you think of the CBA youth?
lc: One of the great things I noticed about the Fathers Days Festival this year was the many age groups represented out there. I was surprised since I hadn’t been to the FDF in about five years. Congratulations to CBA and us as a community for helping to make that happen.
db: It seems many of these kids, just like our bluegrass heroes, play other styles.
lc: Kenny Baker is known as Bill Monroe’s fiddle player and is of course a great old-time and bluegrass fiddle player, but a lot of the songs he plays are swing influenced. There are also tapes of the great fiddler Paul Warren playing a bunch of swing stuff. Others like Jesse and Jethro clearly knew that genre well. Don Reno played a bunch of Tin Pan Alley stuff on banjo.
db: It seems the Fathers Day Festival has become a mix of traditional bluegrass, old time and modern new grass.
lc: Yes. It’s curious that we in Northern California have a somewhat traditional take on bluegrass. The songs in the repertoire and the artists that we emulate are generally fairly conservative or traditional. I’ve gotten looks after calling tunes at festivals by the Country Gentleman, who at this point are over 40 years old, but since it wasn’t Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers or Flatt and Scruggs, it was not ok.
db: How is that different than other regions you’ve visited?
lc: It’s funny and ironic. When I go back east and call tunes, if they’re not Seldom Scene, Jim and Jesse, or maybe the Johnson Mountain Boys, you might get those same looks. It’s ironic because California has a reputation for being progressive and certainly a liberal state, yet we’re playing a very traditional song selection from the early years of the genre.
db: This seems to tie in to the ‘60s when folk and roots music was being rediscovered.
lc: We might be thinking about this stuff too deeply and you know it came from people who just played music on their porches. That said, it gives us an appreciation of it as an art form not unlike studying Picasso or Plato, but it’s a point in time, a finite entity. You can learn a lot from it, but you have to bring it into contemporary times. That’s true for all traditional art forms, how much you try to emulate versus trying to create something different.
db: Aren’t the kids playing more modern stuff?
lc: Sure, there are a lot of people really regardless of age that might listen to Dawg, the String Dusters, the Deadly Gentlemen, the Bea Eaters, and Crooked Still. That’s fantastic, but the prevailing winds in the Bay Area still seems to be blowing from a traditional and more conservative place on the bluegrass spectrum.
db: Don’t you think it is true in other parts of the country?
lc: Not really, I think if you asked 20 people at the FDF and 20 people at, say, Denton, the Doyle Lawson festival in North Carolina or Bean Blossom what their musical interests were, you might be surprised.
db: Tell us about your music background?
lc: I’ve played lots of different styles of music over my lifetime since I was 5 or 6. The thing that moves me is the tone. I started with piano and then ragtime and show tunes. I had a couple of years of formal piano training in my hometown in Freeport, Illinois. After that I started branching out to different classical composers and eventually hit upon Scott Joplin, but I was most intrigued by the different rhythms and feels. I know a lot of people in many styles of music that have had that same experience.
db: Did you study instruments besides piano when you were young?
lc: I started violin in fourth grade, and one of my teachers knew enough about fiddle music to teach me Soldier’s Joy and Devils Dream 20 years before I knew what bluegrass or old time was.
db: What do think it is that makes those type tunes so “cool” in this modern age?
lc: Well, the thing that attracts me to fiddle tunes is that they have a very particular form and structure that appeals to us as human beings. They’re repetitive and identifiable and therefore satisfying, and because of that you can reproduce them with your friends. That to me is the basis of the music that we play.
db: When did the appreciation for the words and songs hit you?
lc: My musical skills developed faster than language, so I was always thinking in terms of tones and rhythms. The music I listened to while growing up – disco, heavy metal, rock ‘n’ roll – was all about the sound, not the lyrics or story. I didn’t start taking notice of that until I started playing swing. Songs and the story are recent for me, which I think is different from most people’s experience.
db: Tell us how you came to play other bluegrass instruments?
lc: I did some guitar repair work for a friend in the late ‘80s, and as payment he gave me an old Kay 50’s-era banjo. It was bare bones but you could get a roll going on it. It wasn’t until later after living in the DC area and hearing a lot of banjo music that I got it back out and learned it. The sound of the banjo in ensemble and the harmonies are what drove me into bluegrass music. Then I did a lot of research, bought a lot of records and was just hooked so to say.
db: Did you do a lot of improvising?
lc: Yes. I’d been doing lot of improvisational music, jazz, blues, and country. I developed to a point where I was playing some melody. Even though it was fun it was really not very satisfying. You could take any of my solos from any of those styles and put them in any of those styles and it probably would’ve sounded the same. Jimmy Martin said if you take a banjo player throw them in a paper bag, to the less trained ear all banjo players sound the same. It’s like playing a lot of notes and without any idea of what any of these songs really sound like.
db: How and where in the Bay Area did you develop beyond that?
lc: I started going to a jam session at the 5th String in Berkeley and I was going down to Redwood City for Sunshine and Lou’s Friday night jam session, which is still happening. I started to rub elbows with people who were very invested in the music and had been playing it for a long time. It was clear there was a whole new dimension to this music that I wasn’t appreciating. It’s not surprising that is when I took an interest in singing.
db: Who were some of those players you learned from?
lc: Larry Cohea, Butch Waller, the High Country guys, and Ed Neff were all very inviting.
db: I assume you also learned bluegrass rhythm guitar in this period.
lc: Yes. When I first started, it seemed odd that there’s no drummer in bluegrass to keep time. Bluegrass rhythm is an art. What’s more interesting to me on guitar is playing expressive rhythm lines, something that compliments the sound. I certainly understand guitar players who come into this music fresh and the first thing that catches their ear is Doc Watson or Tony Rice or someone else’s guitar licks, but there’s a further refinement where you’re always going back to the song.
db: What songs and albums were you influenced by in that period?
lc: The main one was the first Bluegrass Album. It has many powerful and influential songs with so much musical stuff going one. Each song was so expressively sung and tells a full story in like three minutes. That was my first exposure to JD Crowe’s great banjo. I still pattern my baritone singing from Tony Rice and secondarily from Lester Flatt who influenced those guys. This album was a launching point for me into all the other artists, including those original Monroe recordings from 1946 through ‘49.
db: Talk about that Monroe period.
lc: It was fabulous. There’s a lesson in every track. Not just from mandolin but the bass lines, tempos, and waltzes that represent the entire blueprint for bluegrass ensemble playing. If you listen to all of that stuff, including the B-sides, it’s been said that Monroe was piloting the whole thing not unlike many notable classical composers.
db: How was this different for you from the Bluegrass Album?
lc: As much as I love that album, the Monroe stuff in its own way is like a Picasso or Melville and is as timeless as the Beatles. You listen to it and it’s all there. It’s an art form. It’s this wonderful thing that has so much yet changes meaning as you listen to it again and again. At first, it was all about Earl. That’s the best banjo I think I’ll ever hear. Then you listen to the mandolin work. Monroe’s leads were bluesy and expressive and he did all that tremolo back-up stuff that’s amazing. Listen to the last chorus of Going Back to Old Kentucky and it’s Dixieland. It’s absolutely beautiful. If you’d asked me that 10 years ago, I would have said what Dixieland section?
db: How much of that do you think is intentional or just a sum of his musical travels?
lc: Well if you listen to a lot of that stuff, all of the other member’s solos were the same but his were always different. He was thinking in broad conceptual brushes. Every song is about an emotion and you can feel it. Those recordings are just as vibrant and fresh as Abbey Road or Benny Goodman’s Carnegie Hall recordings. It’s very exciting to me. It’s still so very fresh and an envelope that wraps the music.
db: What about the vocal aspect of his music?
lc: Monroe had a huge vocal range. It’s fascinating because he could sing all the parts in a single song and you could hear all of the harmonies. If you want to study vocals, Monroe is the best place to start.
db: Tell us about your involvement at the Freight and Salvage in Berkeley.
lc: I’ve been on their board for a couple of years now. My main interest is helping to expand the educational studies and curriculum. That is a wonderful facility and they built it with classrooms and all of the other requried infrastructure for this so it really is just a matter of working with the board and community to make it happen.
db: As a music teacher, so how do bring this rich history to your students?
lc: I’m really lucky to have a great group of students who are excited to study the process of learning music. It’s important to me to bring students into the music. Most students are actually not bluegrass students, they’re just people who want to play music. I spent time working with some great teachers at a school where learning differences were really encouraged. That was critical because it helped me discern how someone is learning something. A good teacher is a good observer and listener. As much as I would like to show the world how to play great licks, I’m much more fascinated by watching how somebody learns something, and I tailor instructions from that.
db: Thanks for sharing your unique bluegrass history.
lc: Thank you, Dave.
