Produced by Mike Marshall, Brown moves in several new directions, showing off the breadth of her talent while keeping the composition at the center of her playing. Jazzier, yet also more relaxed, than her debut. Maura O'Connell provides vocals on a traditional Irish song. ~ Michael McCall, All Music Guide

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Five-string banjoist Alison Brown deftly incorporates Cajun, Celtic, Caribbean, and Native American music into her progressive bluegrass sound, making for a cleanly played set that's as crisp as white sheets on a springtime clothesline. "View From Above" is a shuffling, lightly jazzed number that plays Brown's banjo off of steel pans, while the title track glides along on a cloud that's more substantive than adult contemporary, but still palatable to that audience with its tasteful soprano   [ read more ]

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Alison Brown, believe it or not, is a five-string banjo player. The rest of her quartet is a standard jazz ensemble consisting of piano, bass, and drums, and you can be confident that there's nary a bluegrass lick anywhere on this album. Like her compadre BTla Fleck (to whom she must be absolutely sick of being compared), Brown figured out some time ago that the banjo is a fully chromatic instrument with every bit as much melodic flexibility as a guitar, and that its clear, crisp tone is perf   [ read more ]

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Sometime back, Alison Brown established herself as an innovative banjo stylist and founded her own record label (Compass). It's easy to forget that she started off playing with another Alison, Alison Krauss that is, and recorded a number of solo albums for Vanguard. Best of the Vanguard Years draws from Brown's four Vanguard albums, recorded in the early to mid-'90s. As with her later recordings, she has composed material that stretches the limits of the banjo and traditional acou   [ read more ]

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Banjoist Alison Brown isn't an innovator along the lines of, say, BTla Fleck -- she doesn't play a tricked-out electric instrument or go off on electro-jazz fusion excursions. What she plays is mostly fairly straight-ahead modern jazz with elements of traditional American and British Isles music threaded through it. What makes her playing unique is its blend of chromatic sophistication and melodic inventiveness. When jazz players take on a Christmas music project, they too frequently use the familiar    [ read more ]

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It's a long trip down the career path from a top investment banker to a bluegrass banjo picker. But that's the path this very talented lady chose to take. To be honest, she has kind of traveled that path backwards, and more than once. Even before her teens, Alison Brown was winning contests for her skills on the banjo. One of those landed her a chance to perform on {#The Grand Ole Opry}. She even did some recording before heading off to college -- to Harvard, no less. After finishing her schooling and   [ read more ]

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Jazz banjo virtuoso Alison Brown has carved out a unique musical niche for herself by combining a number of conventional elements in a personal way: her style of jazz is quite straight-ahead without sounding either old-fashioned or even really traditional, and her compositions are richly complex without ever sounding avant-garde or even self-consciously progressive. Perhaps most impressive of all, she never seems defensive about the fact that she's using a five-string banjo to play jazz -- her jazziest m   [ read more ]

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Banjo virtuoso Alison Brown, whose primary group is a jazz quartet, returns to her bluegrass roots on this beautiful and exhilarating album. Well, sort of. The instrumental format is certainly bluegrass, given guest artists like Stuart Duncan and Darol Anger on fiddles, guitarists Mike Marshall and Tony Rice, and mandolinist Sam Bush, and with Brown's fiery five-string picking front and center. But much of this is bluegrass music of a type that Bill Monroe might not recognize; while    [ read more ]

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While Alison Brown has received credit for her banjo innovations, she's often been crowded out by hotshot picker Bela Fleck. That's unfortunate, because there's more than enough room for two pioneering banjo players, and besides, both players have different gifts to offer. First of all, the Alison Brown Quartet approaches acoustic jazz from a different, perhaps more traditional, standpoint than Fleck & the Flecktones. Brown's banjo vies with John R. Burr's piano for fancy lead work, whi   [ read more ]

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Founded in 1950 by brothers Seymour Solomon and Maynard Solomon just as the LP format was taking hold (it had been introduced to the market two years previously), Vanguard Records took full advantage of the longer playing time afforded and began life as a classical label, moving easily into jazz, then gospel, bluegrass, blues, and folk (as Joan Baez's label, they had a high profile during the 1960s folk revival), eventually experimenting with rock groups like the Frost   [ read more ]

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Gifted, genre-hopping, and endlessly creative, Alison Brown has been endlessly compared to her male equivalent, BTla Fleck. While she shares the same broad view of bluegrass as well as the bottomless pit of talent, her warm, plucky, and distinctly melodic style of banjo playing is far more reminiscent of Nitty Gritty Dirt Band legend John McEuen. On Stolen Moments, the Grammy-winning multi-instrumentalist dishes up 11 slices of Celtic, jazz, and newgrass that effortlessly blend the r   [ read more ]

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