Sawing On The Strings

No vocals, no lyric to anchor the ear — just five musicians deciding to find out exactly how fast and clean and deep their instruments can go together. "Sawing On The Strings" is an instrumental showcase in the most honest sense: it is not a song dressed up as a showpiece, it is a showpiece that has the structural integrity of a song. The fiddle drives with a fierceness that earns the title, not scraping but genuinely attacking the strings with a force that produces a sound somewhere between delight and urgency. The mandolin weaves through the spaces the fiddle leaves, never competing but always complicating, adding harmonic information that keeps the piece from ever settling into the predictable. The rhythm section — bass and guitar locked together with the kind of precision that only comes from years in the same room — creates a pocket so solid the melodic instruments can take risks without any danger of falling. What makes the piece remarkable is that despite the technical demands it makes on every player, it never sounds effortful. It sounds like play, in the serious adult sense of the word: total absorption, total commitment, total unselfconsciousness. It belongs to the tradition of American instrumental music that uses virtuosity not as self-display but as a form of conversation, a way of saying things that language is too slow and imprecise to express. Reach for it when you want to feel the sheer physical pleasure of music made by people who have devoted their lives to getting good at something and have genuinely succeeded.