Tuesday's Earful: Cornmeal

By: David Schultz

Chicago; one of the most fertile breeding grounds for the blues, a Petri dish for the evolution and urbanization of the Mississippi Delta blues on the northern side of the Mason-Dixon line. With the Blues Brothers and Buddy Guy being amongst the Windy City’s most recognizable icons, a double-take upon hearing praise heaped on a Chicago-based bluegrass band might not be unwarranted. Atypical purveyors of the Southern genre, Cornmeal expand on the traditionally twangy conception of the genre, giving it a weighty, almost psychedelic heft.

At the 2008 Jammy Awards, I got my only exposure to Cornmeal when Allie Kral sat in with a patchwork quilt of a group that included Tea Leaf Green, Todd Park Mohr of Big Head Todd & The Monsters and Glenn Tilbrook of Squeeze. The crowded stage didn’t provide the best showcase for Kral’s remarkable stage presence. Cornmeal’s set last week at New York City’s Mercury Lounge offered a much better opportunity to see why people rave about the Chicago based band and, in the absence of another Jammy Awards, get a close-up view of the New Groove of the Year emeritus.

Like Railroad Earth, Cornmeal gets a robust range of Americana-drenched drama using all acoustic instruments. Chris Gangi works the standup bass in an unconventional style, Kris Nowack plays an unrelenting acoustic guitar and Kral is about an exciting a fiddle playing as you will ever come across. (Wavy) Dave Burlingame plays a mean 21st century banjo, giving many of Cornmeal’s jams an aura reminiscent of the mystical reverb of “No Quarter” and Houses Of The Holy era Led Zeppelin. Capable of playing in a more traditional style, the true fun comes when they accelerate into a hurricane gale that bluegrass' easy-picking originators could never have fathomed. It's like a non-stop version of "I Know You Rider" that constantly threatens to careen off the rails.

Even though she’s not set up to be the star of the show, it’s hard to take your eyes of the lovely Kral while she’s on stage. One of my pet peeves about reading account of shows in when the reviewer describes someone’s playing as effortless. I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean. Did they play without sweating? Did everyone else on stage look like they were struggling with their parts? If it sounded so good while they weren’t making an effort, could it have sounded better if they tried? That all being said, parts of Kral’s performance actually did see effortless. Not the times where she furiously tore into the fiddle solos, stirring the crowd into a mild frenzy but more the parts where she stepped back and blended in with the rest of the band, letting her fiddle drop from her chin and truly making a difficult instrument seem easy to play.