FUN FACTS ABOUT Mr SUN

Aidan, our bassist, lives on the 5th floor of a building in one of America’s major cities; Coincidentally, Darol, our fiddle player, lives in a 5 room house!

None of the Mr Sun members have any medical degree whatsoever. Also coincidentally, none of them are doctors!

The Mr Sun band is evenly divided between player of fretted instruments and instruments with no frets at all. Which half of the band worries the most?

Aidan, our bassist, was born and raised in Scotland and has a charming Irish accent. Why doesn’t he announce all the tunes in concert? Many people are saying that his wife pays the band a small stipend to keep him from talking during shows. True? Just asking.

The band was named after an image on a banner which appears in the very first band photo taken in a children’s library. That image, in reality, happens to represent the largest object in the entire school system, with a mass 300 thousand times larger than the earth!

Amazingly, 75% on the Mr Sun band was born in the same country. Out of the entire band, ONLY Aidan, our bassist, was born in a different country. What are the odds?

Joe is 44 this year, Grant is 42. Aidan, our bassist, is 43, Darol is 71. Which one doesn’t fit?

Numerological fun fact: If you add up the total ages of the 3 youngest musicians in Mr Sun, you get a total of 129. 1+2+9= 12, the VERY SAME age that Darol started playing the violin! Amazing!

The combined number of years that the Mr Sun band members have been practicing their instruments comes to 149 years of experience. If you subtract bathroom and meal breaks, you get about 130 years. If you subtract sleep breaks, you get about 80 years. When you subtract school time and homework, you get about 50 years. Take away youthful crappy day jobs, we get 25 years. If you subtract driving to-and-from-the-gig time, you get about 18 years. If you subtract procrastination time, you get about 12 years total practice time for four people. Astonishing! It’s a wonder these guys can play at all!

In this article we always identify Aidan, our bassist, as “our bassist”. Yet he has the most largest and visible instrument of all. Why do we need to do that?

To Our Loyal Orbiteers:

Greetings, all you discerning musical gourmands! Thanks for your help in making it possible for us to play our music in public, for over ten years now.

Mr Sun, having biologically reproduced this year, is soon going to start working this fall on their next project: a recording of either originals or standards.

What would our loyal Orbiteers want to hear? We now put that very question "out here". Anyone got a preference? New originals? Standards from any and every musical tradition? “Should-be” standards?

We're also getting ready for some autumn concerts and more Holiday Gladness with the Ellington Nutcracker... tour dates soon.

In the meantime, all you Bostonians, Look for us spiraling through at Club Passim on September 10!

thanks…

The Bannnnnnnnnd

Darol & Mr Sun Premiere Duke Ellington's Nutcracker at Freshgrass

We did it! “Mr Sun Plays Duke Ellington’s Nutcracker Suite” debuted to a packed house at FreshGrass on Friday. Gratitude to the FreshGrass Foundation for commissioning the work, and special thanks to Leo Austin-Muehleck, Dan Bui, Ella Bebe Jordan, Kathleen Parks, Clara Rose and Caleb Swan, aka the Hollywood Honk, for rounding out the “big band.” We couldn’t have done it in such style without them!

AND special huge thanks to Dave Sinko for being there to engineer.

The album comes out December 1 on Adhyâropa Records,

but you can preorder vinyl, downloads and CDs at mrsun.bandcamp.com

Mr Sun records the Ellington/Strayhorn/Tchaikovsky NUTCRACKER

Mr Sun Conjures Ellington’s Nutcracker 
in March of 2023, Darol Anger, Joe K. Walsh, Grant Gordy, and Aidan O’Donnell went into the recording studio to transmogrify the legendary Ellington/Strayhorn Nutcracker Suite into the Acoustic String Band, as Mr Sun.  

Their studio of choice was Mass/MOCA Recording studio #9 in North Adams, Massachusetts, a state-of-the art recording facility built by the Mass/MOCA Art Museum.  The recording engineer was the equally legendary David Sinko, who has recorded many of the most important and innovative acoustic string bands of the last 40 years.  The mixing process is almost complete as of this date, and the recording will be mastered in June by David Glasser. Artwork for the physical package is going forward.

On Mr Sun's new recording, the pieces of the Suite range from close interpretations of Billy Strayhorn’s original charts to intense extrapolations based on the spirit of the material.

On the recording Mr Sun generally played original improvised solos, though some crucial musical statements by giants such as Johnny Hodges and Paul Gonsalves were transcribed directly and played in their spirit. Most of Strayhorn’s startling original horn voicings have been preserved in bowed strings, with multi-mandolin parts adding a wholly new punchy edge.

There is one new additional piece, drawn directly from Tchaikovsky's Ballet, setting three themes from Act 1’s Snow Scene in classic “Dawg Music” format. Jerry Douglas interprets an iconic Lawrence Brown trombone solo on Dance Of The Floreadores, now re-titled “(don’t) Walk On The Flowers”. The Russian Dance is now hilariously full-on Bluegrass with banjo guest Alison Brown while still using the spy-movie intros, outros, and background lines of Strayhorn's original.

Mr Sun will premiere the work at the Freshgrass Festival at Mass/MOCA in September of 2023, concurrent with the release of the recording. The Project has been generously underwritten by the Freshgrass Foundation.

Tchaikovsky’s extraordinary Nutcracker Suite contains some of the most beloved and familiar melodies in the Western world. Mr Sun has seized upon the inspiration of Duke Ellington’s brilliant, sly, & urbane re-interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s Suite as an opportunity to salute and re-invent this wildly multi-faceted work anew, through the lens of the American String Band, a musical format which now encompasses many styles and is presently engaged in a marathon upheaval of innovation and expansion.

THE SUITE:

Overture 5:09

(don’t) Walk On The Flowers 5:21

Peanut Brittle Brigade 4:46

Yangtze Dawdle 2:41

Sugar Rum Cherry 5:26

Entr'acte 1:39

Reedy McReady’s Rootin Tootin Pipey Gripey Waltz 5:13

Shovasky’s Transmogrifatron 3:46

Arabica 5:49

Russian Fox Chase 3:18

Grant's a Cover Dude

Our intrepid and pioneering guitarist, Grant Gordy, just made the cover of Acoustic Guitar magazine! that means his income has skyrocketed to three figures annually! We’re thrilled for Grant and he’s getting some recognition for his radically intense and very very human guitaring.

In Other News, Joe’s incredible solo recording If Not Now, Who? is now available on his Bandcamp page or as a shippable CD or vinyl disk! This is a truly great musical experience, featuring Joe’s darn-close-to-perfect compositions, Joe’s great and subtle mandolin expressions, and Grant’s inimitable moody guitar. https://joewalsh.bandcamp.com/album/if-not-now-who

Mr Sun's work is cut out for us this year!

Mr Sun’s work is cut out for us this year!

Mr Sun Plays Ellington Plays Tchaikovsky... 
We have transmogrified the legendary and mind-blowing Ellington/Strayhorn Nutcracker Suite into a recording by our Acoustic String Band, the one and only Mr Sun. It’s been beyond fun. We’ve gotten additional string players on there for the big horny sound. We skipped the drums, but there’s plenty of acoustic rhythms including a full menu of the violin percussion popularized by Darol over the last 25 years. We’re not going to rule anything out, including cellos, mandocellos, dobros & banjos. Maybe.

The Project has been generously underwritten by the Freshgrass Foundation, and we used the spectacular Mass/MOCA recording studio #9 in North Adams, MA. Mr Sun will premiere the work at the Freshgrass Festival in fall 2023, with an expanded ensemble made up of the most talented Berklee String Department undergraduates.

Tchaikovsky’s extraordinary Nutcracker Suite contains some of the most beloved and familiar melodies in the Western world. Mr Sun has seized upon the inspiration of Duke Ellington’s brilliant, sly, & urbane re-interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s Suite as an opportunity to salute and re-invent this wildly multi-faceted work anew, through the lens of the American String Band, a musical form which now contains many styles and is presently engaged in a marathon upheaval of innovation and expansion.

This Suite seems to be pretty popular with the big bands. Aidan O’Donnell, our bassist, even toured this in Europe early in his career with the Scottish National Jazz Band. But it is still pretty much undiscovered material for strings. Maybe we can change that. Strayhorn's treatment of The Nutcracker is so excellently radical, funny, loose, and personal that it just seemed right up Mr Sun's alley. Using new and self-invented rhythm techniques combined with modern string ensemble sounds, the Mr Sun band will add a new facet of artistic musical thought to this work.

Lots of arranging, translating, transposition, further adaptation and inspiration have brought this music to a new life as a string band. Just as Strayhorn and Ellington completely re-imagined Tchaikovsky's monster hit, Mr Sun has done the same, in the tradition of The Hot Club Of France, the David Grisman Quintet, the Turtle Island String Quartet, and the Republic Of Strings.  

The pieces range from close interpretations of Strayhorn’s original charts to intense extrapolations based on the spirit of the material. Mr Sun generally played original improvised solos, though a few beautiful statements by giants such as Johnny Hodges and Paul Gonsalves were transcribed directly and played in their spirit. Much of the startling original horn voicing have been preserved in bowed string and multi-mandolin parts adding a punchy edge. There is one new additional piece, drawn directly from Tchaikovsky's Ballet, which takes three themes and sets them in classic “Dawg Music” format; and the Russian Dance is now hilariously full-on Bluegrass with banjo guest Alison Brown, but still using the spy-movie intros, outros, and background lines of Strayhorn's original. Jerry Douglas will interpret one of the iconic Lawrence Brown trombone solos on Dance Of The Floreadores, now re-titled “(don’t) Walk On The Flowers”.

The Ellingtonian versions of The Nutcracker feature both Billy Strayhorn's wide-ranging arranging genius and the interpretive genius of the band’s members, all major musical figures in their own right. The American string band tradition, which draws from a rich well of traditional fiddling melody and African rhythm and has steadily incorporated all the streams of American popular music, is a fertile new fold in the monumental origami of this evergreen masterpiece.

Mr Sun looks back on 2022

Well, yeah! It was a really good comeback year for Mr Sun. We got another recording out on Compass Records, and played a bunch of beautiful festivals such as Wintergrass, Grey Fox, Redwing Roots, and more. We toured the Pacific Northwest, Northern California, Colorado, all over the Northeast (twice) and the Midwest. Two of the band members completed fantastic solo albums. Aidan and his wife Mary produced another child! We started compiling new original music, and Joe had a wonderful idea: Re-interpret the Duke Ellington version of The Nutcracker Suite.

So we’re slingshotting into 2023 with a Big Project: Mr Sun Plays Ellington Plays Tchaikovsky. We’ll premier the record, with special guests, at Mass MOCA’s Freshgrass Festival in September, which is underwriting the project! And we’ll hit some of the other cool festivals this year, appearing in California in the spring at the Berkeley Bluegrass Festival and the Strawberry Festival. and at Grey Fox, Grand Targhee and the Green Mountain Festival… so far, so good. And we’ll Keep On Keepin’ On.