Tony Rice returns to MerleFest
Famed flat-picker plays Friday

A maverick of the flat-picked acoustic guitar, Tony Rice was the first instrumentalist to seize upon the innovations of guitarists like Clarence White and Doc Watson and propel them into new flights of rhythmic, harmonic, and textural virtuosity.

By doing so in the context of a bluegrass band, he redefined that instrument’s role in bluegrass, and raised the bar for a new generation of acoustic six-stringers.

While Unit of Measure - his first new album in six years - shows that his playing has maintained its inventiveness and precision, guitarists like Brian Sutton, David Grier and Scott Nygaard are creating music that would be unthinkable without Rice’s powerful influence. Rice was reared amongst musicians in southern California.

His father, an accomplished and active bluegrass musician himself, introduced his sons (who have recorded two albums for Rounder as the Rice Brothers) to both straight-ahead bluegrass and the more modern sounds of the Dillards and the Kentucky Colonels. The playing of the Kentucky Colonels’ Clarence White was a particularly powerful influence on young Rice.

Rice entered the bluegrass arena in the late ’60s with the pioneering ensemble Bluegrass Alliance. An early proponent of “newgrass” (a term they coined), the Alliance eventually fractured, with some of the members forming the extremely successful and long-lived group New Grass Revival. From the Bluegrass Alliance, Rice joined what many consider to be the most influential bluegrass band of the past three decades, J.D. Crowe’s New South, featuring Jerry Douglas on dobro, Crowe on banjo, and Ricky Scaggs on fiddle, mandolin, and vocals, the New South’s eponymous 1975 vocals.

It remains a cornerstone of contemporary bluegrass and a perennial best-seller. From Crowe’s band, Rice returned to California to join the newly forming David Grisman Quintet. A fascinating melding of Miles Davis, Bill Monroe and Django Reinhardt, the Grisman Quintet was a perfect fit for Rice’s broad musical influences and open imagination. Grisman’s jazz-oriented compositions introduced new harmonic expanses to Rice, and Rice rose to the challenge brilliantly. The early recordings of the original DGQ are still fascinating and invigorating in their fusion of the rhythmic and harmonic complexity of jazz and the free-wheeling abandon of bluegrass.

With the release of 1979’s Acoustics (a jazz-based instrumental disk) and Manzanita (a bluegrass-inflected, primarily vocal set), Rice established himself as a solo artist. It was not long before he was recognized as a visionary of the new acoustic music, which he was calling “spacegrass.” All the while, Rice explored the more traditional side of his repertoire as the leader and producer of a group of records by what eventually became known as the Bluegrass Album Band, which featured Rice, Crowe, Douglas, Doyle Lawson (on mandolin) and Bobby Hicks on fiddle.

The ’80s were a time of triumph for Rice, during which he released a series of Rounder Albums that demonstrated the maturing of his vision – a vision where Phil Ochs, Jimmy Martin, and Wes Montgomery elegantly and subtly mingled.This string of albums culminated in 1993’s Tony Rice Plays and Sings Bluegrass, a triumphant album where Rice revisited the music that he cut his teeth on, bringing to it a new maturity and sophistication.

In the past decade, Rice has remained active and inspired.Rice continued to perform as a solo artist and a sideman, his vigor and musical curiosity undiminished. After six years of exploring other avenues, Rice has unleashed Unit of Measure upon the world, and its impact has been substantial on all fronts. A sharp album of instrumental music that deftly blends jazz, bluegrass, celtic and folk themes, it features what may be the hottest version of the Tony Rice Unit yet.

“I look at this band probably the way Miles Davis might have looked at his band of Bill Evans and John Coltrane and Paul Chambers,” Rice said. “It was never anything he could put his finger on – it just worked.”

A better analogy could not be posed. Unit of Measure is only the beginning for this new phase of Tony’s career. With nothing left to prove, his newest recording archives new dimensions of subtlety and depth , a more introspective, emotional Tony Rice than we’ve previously been privy to. With grace, technical skill, and exquisite taste and timing, Rice is still growing.

Mountain Heart and Tony Rice will perform on MerleFest’s Watson Stage on Friday, April 24, at 6:15 p.m.