Eliot Grasso, Maryland Piping Master
by Earle Hitchner
published in the Irish Echo
CEOL
[This “Ceol” column by Earle Hitchner was published in the February 11, 2004, issue of the IRISH ECHO newspaper in New York City. Copyright Earle Hitchner. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the author.]
In my “Ceol” column of Nov. 26, I focused on the past resilience and present surge of Irish traditional music in Chicago, which can give any other U.S. city a run for its jigs and reels.
But there’s another region where Irish traditional music has also kept moving from strength to strength, especially among younger players: the geographic corridor connecting Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and northern Virginia.
Anyone who attended the Washington Irish Folk Festival during its 24 years of operation will recall a popular segment entitled “Next Generation.” It was often the first public performance in front of a large crowd by musicians still in middle or high school. Nerves never seemed to affect their ability to perform with poised enthusiasm, and it was always a toss-up about who were more impressed: their audiences or their teachers.
Among “Next Generation” players from that region were Seán and Pat McComiskey (Billy's sons), Jesse Smith (Donna Long's son), Matthew and Aran Olwell (sons of famed flutemaker Patrick), Lily Smigen-Rothkopf, Brendan and Seán Callahan, Matthew Mulqueen, Eliot Grasso, Jim Eagan, Paddy League, Arjuna Balaranjan, Margo Herman, and Peter, Rosie, and Teddy Shipley.
Since then, Jesse Smith, Jim Eagan, and Brendan Callahan have all made fine solo albums, and now Baltimore’s Eliot Grasso has come out with his own self-issued solo debut, “Standing Room Only.” With it he upends the notion, attributed to Dublin's Séamus Ennis, that it takes seven years of practice and another seven years of playing to make a competent uilleann piper.
A 20-year-old junior at Goucher College in Towson, Md., Grasso took up the uilleann pipes at age 11. In 1999, at age 15, he beat Ennis’s timetable by 10 years when he contributed three tracks to “A New Dawn: Uilleann Piping, Another Generation,” an album from Dublin’s Na Píobairí Uilleann. He was the youngest uilleann piper and the sole American on that CD.
Grasso, who also plays flute, whistle, and piano, is a former piping pupil of Paul Levin and Kieran O'Hare. In addition, he studied with or listened intently to such pipers as Robbie Hannan, Seán Óg Potts, Gay McKeon, Mick O'Brien, Willie Clancy, Paddy Keenan, and Jerry O'Sullivan. Those influences, especially Hannan’s inventive fingering on the chanter, coalesce in Grasso's own distinctive style.
It's fitting that he opens his solo CD with “Miss Susan Cooper,” a reel learned from Hannan and also recorded for "A New Dawn." The chanterwork is fleet and fiery on that reel and on the two that Grasso pairs with it, “The Sandpiper” and “Boys of the Lough,” as Zan McLeod ably drives the rhythm underneath on guitar.
The ornamentation and the rise and fall in register from Grasso on three of his own tunes, “O’Hare’s Tilt/The Chiaroscuro Jig/Jig of Quills,” are executed with exceptional cleanness and control, and his nipping propulsion on the reels “Barry’s Trip to Paris/Hilda’s Choice/Tommy Peoples’ ” will leave listeners slack-jawed in admiration.
Like Hannan, who occasionally teams up with Paddy Glackin, Grasso has an unusual aptitude and affinity for playing with fiddlers. Two of them, fellow Baltimorean Jim Eagan and Brooklyn-born Patrick Mangan, return the favor of Grasso’s guesting on their solo albums last year by guesting on his solo CD for two tracks each.
These cuts are exhilarating. The teasing weave of bow and chanter by Mangan and Grasso on “Dave Normaway MacDonald’s Wedding/Toss the Feathers/The Monaghan Twig” and by Eagan and Grasso on “Garrett Barry’s/An Rogaire Dubh/Fraine an Phoill” conveys a joy capped only by imagination and good judgment. Grasso, Mangan, and Eagan are clearly having a ball.
Add in the Baltimore uilleann piper’s expressive, unaccompanied playing of “The Satin Slipper” slow air and his skillful negotiation of the tricky “Tailor’s Twist/Cuckoo's Nest” hornpipes, and you have a superb solo debut combining a maturity and a mastery that belie his youth. Eliot Grasso’s piping is never less than expert and is frequently brilliant on a CD that should help to attract “standing room only” audiences everywhere he plays.
For more about Grasso and his new album, visit http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/eliotgrasso.
From noon to 2 this Sun., Feb. 15, 2004 he'll be celebrating the release of his solo CD with a party and concert at J. Patrick’s Pub, 1371 Andre St., in South Baltimore’s Locust Point neighborhood. Later that day, at 8 p.m., Grasso will also perform at the pub with guitar/mandola player Andy Thurston, another accompanist on his recording. Call 410-244-8613 for more information.
