Biography

Tasty Licks

This is Northern Bluegrass. Maybe it hasn’t been around long enough to establish its own traditions, but it’s a force that’s arrived and produced its own hierarchy of good musicians and bands. Adventurous people like Roger Sprung, Bill Keith, and David Grisman began years ago to fuse southern vocal and instrumental styles with modern eclectic concepts of harmony and rhythm. Others took courage and began creating their own brand of traditionally-based bluegrass while simultaneously expanding its possibilities according to their individual tastes and ideas.

By the 1970s northern bluegrass had arrived. The past several years have seen a number of good groups emerge, though few have proved as exciting as this unique assembly of individual talents known as Tasty Licks. Its senior member is Jack Tottle who has been developing his personalized mandolin style for years. His first solo album (Rounder 0067) was released in 1976 and deservedly drew many plaudits. He is author of two widely circulated books, Bluegrass Mandolin (Oak) and How to Play Mandolin (Acorn). Likewise, dobroist Stacy Phillips has achieved several prior successes. He has mastered an original and complex technique which is revealed in depth on his solo album All My Friends (Revonah RS830) and has produced two books published by Oak, Bluegrass Fiddle Styles (with Ken Kosek) and The Dobro Book. This third lead instrument in Tasty Licks is the banjo of Béla Fleck, whose first name is a symbolic echo of both the 20th century’s greatest composer, Béla Bartok, and the oldtime Greene County, Virginia singer, Béla Lam. Fleck has already achieved considerable skill in his music although he’s still in his teens. Like Fleck, Robin Kincaid (guitar) and Paul Kahn (bass) are relative newcomers, and the rhythmic support they provide for the demanding settings of Tasty Licks’ songs show them to already be musicians to reckon with.

The music of Tasty Licks is characterized by a quality of restlessness, repeatedly expressed in these songs about back roads and highways, trains, and cars, other lovers and other places. Their outlook reveals a contemporary extension of sentiments voiced throughout popular music from early blues to the alienated musings of Bob Dylan. Restless feelings are especially keen to musicians, whose livelihoods are dependent on traveling new roads, sleeping in unfamiliar beds and playing before one crowd of strangers after another. Transience is an unavoidable element so their lives and a constant theme of their songs. One after another of those included here deals with restlessness, combining nostalgia for a special place or a special person with the inevitability of moving on.

Appropriately, Tasty Licks shows a restlessness of style.Music of their excitement is created by novel vocal harmonies combined with lightning chord changes and abrupt rhythmic transitions. Their music is chock full of these surprises, and full appreciation requires constant attention and alertness on the part of the listener. Yet Tasty Licks surely does not use this arsenal of devices for their own sake, nor are they used in order for each soloist to show off his own particular bag of tricks.What enhances their music more than anything else is the unity of vocal and instrumental work, and that the demanding load of their adventurous music is shared skillfully by all. If its individual soloists are impressive, more so is the degree to which each has pooled his talents for the sake of a unified expression. It is a rare achievement on modern bluegrass.

Another important ingredient is the ability of Tasty Licks’ individual members to generate good songs. All but 3? of the ones included here are from their own pens (that extra half is the uptempo portion of “Trains” which comes from a 1950s song by The Kelleys called “Leavin’ Tennessee” and included on Rounder’s Early Days of Bluegrass Series). One of Charlie Monroe’s songs is included, as is a hymn by the gifted North Carolina multiinstrumentalist Shannon Grayson. But even these songs have undergone changes as Tasty Licks reinterprets them for the 1970s, becoming part of a new musical statement which brings a uniquely adventurous approach to bluegrass music
--Dick Spottswood

Publishing Credits:
1. Ridin’ the Back Road (Jack Tottle/Happy Valley Music BMI) 2:41
2. Sweet Rhythm of Highway (Rhonda Kincaid/Happy Valley Music BMI) 2:30
3. Reading in the Dark (Bela Fleck/Happy Valley Music BMI) 2:36
4. Maize (Jack Tottle/Happy Valley Music BMI) 4:26
5. Listen to the Rhythm of the Fallin’ Rain (John Gommoe/Tamerlane Publ. BMI) 2:24
6. Trains/Leavin’ Tennessee (Robin Kincaid/Happy Valley Music BMI and The Kelleys/copyright control) 5:44
7. Make It All Right (Jack Tottle, Stacy Phillips/ Happy Valley Music BMI) 2:28
8. Sweetheart of Rainy Days (Robin Kincaid/ Happy Valley Music BMI) 2:25
9. Lathe Machine (Stacy Phillips/ Happy Valley Music BMI) 2:43
10.Why Did You Say Goodbye (Charlie Monroe/Unichappell Music BMI; counterpoint by Paul Kahn) 2:42
11. If You Don’t Love Your Neighbor (Tommy Coley & Shorty Sullivan/Sony ATV Acuff-Rose BMI) 2:20
12. Saturday Night Special (Jack Tottle/ Happy Valley Music BMI) 2:48

Jack Tottle – vocals and mandolin
Robin Kincaid – tenor vocals, guitar
Bela Fleck – banjo
Stacy Phillips – Dobro
Paul Kahn - vocals, acoustic bass
Bobby Hicks – fiddle on “Sweetheart of Rainy Day” and “Sweet Rhythm of Highway”

Thanks to Rod Roach for the loan of his bass and to George Nelson and John Nagy for the loan of their guitars.

Production and mixing by John Nagy and Tasty Licks
Mastering by John Nagy, The Mixing Lab
Recorded at Dimension Sound and The Mixing Lab
Photography by David Gahr
Design and typography by Pat Alger
Prepared for digital release by Emmet Nowlin.
For other music of this type (and a whole lot more), please browse www.rounder.com

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