The Dangling Days

Abstract

The Dangling Days Steve Yarbrough (bio) I originally met the Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Alex Rainer in 2011, when he was living in Boston and had come by our house with my younger daughter. As luck would have it, a couple of folks from North Carolina were also visiting that night, and one of them happened to be the folk and bluegrass guitarist and mandolinist Danny Gotham. I knew next to nothing about Rainer at the time, except that he was the lead singer and trumpet player in a Boston-based reggae band. I figured he’d be uninterested if not appalled by the bluegrass jam Gotham and I started up after a few drinks, but in fact he asked to borrow one of my guitars and in no time had blended right in. At one point, when I laid down my mandolin, he picked it up, studied it for a moment or two, tentatively formed a chord, then joined us on whatever bluegrass warhorse we’d embarked on. I found out later that it was the first time he’d ever had his hands on a mandolin. Shortly thereafter, he acquired one and, in a day or two, became more proficient than I was, though I’d been playing the instrument for years. [End Page 698] There are plenty of musicians on both sides of Rainer’s family. His paternal grandmother played cello in the Westchester Philharmonic. And his father, in addition to being a classically trained pianist who studied with the likes of Murray Perahia, Alexander Petruska, and Nadia Boulanger, also played and taught violin and eight other instruments. But his interests were not limited to classical music. He loved blues and bluegrass and was an aficionado of Pete Seeger, whom Rainer met when he was young. His mother comes from Poland, and on her side there were five organists and the prolific composer Józef Furmanik, for whom a festival of sacred music in the Polish city of Kozienice is named. Whereas he received extensive instruction in the classical repertoire on both piano and trumpet while growing up, Rainer taught himself to play stringed instruments, starting around the age of fourteen with guitar. After I recently watched the livestream launch of his new album Time Changes, which I noted was attracting viewers from various parts of the country, along with others in Poland, Slovakia, Sweden, and the UK, I asked if he used learner’s manuals to tackle a new instrument. “Not really,” he said. “I mean, I remember that I had a book about the guitar, but it didn’t do much except name all the parts and tell you how it was tuned. But knowing scales made it easy for me to figure out chord formations up and down the neck, and the rest was just trial and error.” Though I am not in his league musically, I’ve jammed with him many times over the last few years, and during these sessions I’ve seen him play acoustic guitar, mandolin, mandola, the fiddle, the harmonica, and a biscuit cone resonator. He recently taught himself banjo, too. My suspicion is that if you stripped a car down to its chassis, strung wires between the axles, hung beer bottles from the wires and dumped a bunch of BBs into each one, he’d find a way to play music on the apparatus. The result would no doubt be impossible to categorize, just like [End Page 699] the music on Time Changes. I’ve listened to the album in its entirety on several occasions, and my ears hear plenty of Greenwich Village folk influence, the American primitivism of John Fahey and Robbie Basho, some blistering, edgy bluegrass bass runs, lots of lovely major seventh-soaked jazz textures, a hint of gospel, Mississippi John Hurt-style fingerpicking, the kinds of recurring patterns you hear in Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, and the additive rhythms so prevalent in the compositions of Philip Glass. One of the most distinctive aspects of Rainer’s music, I’ve always felt, is the interplay between what may seem the quiet simplicity of his lyrics and his dramatic melodic...