Back Burner will be on center stage tonight in Everett. The regular participants at the Maltby Bluegrass Jam will share the evening with Doug Bright and Marc Bristol, the Gumbo Twins.
“Our band philosophy is to try our best to make everybody sound good, have high mutual dignity and respect, and keep pushing the boundaries in our bluegrass-oriented music,” co-founder Loren Postma said.
Back Burner’s musicians include Everett’s Postma on Dobro, Snohomish’s Lou Allen on guitar, Bothell’s Brad Hull on bass and fiddle, Woodinville’s Dave Campbell on five-string banjo and bass, and Port Townsend’s Al Bergstein on mandolin.
Allen is out of town today, so mandolinist Doug Bright will fill in.
Postma and Allen founded the band in 1991. Allen owned an Everett video store on Evergreen Way and the two would jam in the back room.
“We hit it off and have hung together ever since,” working with many musicians who migrated through the band, Postma said.
The name Back Burner fits the band’s style.
“We basically play for fun. The music is on the back burner. When we get together … we turn the fire up under the kettle and get the soup really going,” Postma said.
Like most bluegrass bands, Back Burner shuns electrical instruments, but the song selections are more diversified than a bluegrass-only outfit.
“We’re basically a mix of country and western, Western swing, bluegrass, jazz, folk, and some blues, but primarily out of bluegrass instrumentation,” Postma said.
“We’re not very confined. We’re one of the more open bands, not locked into one particular musical expression.
“We all sing bluegrass, so we sing leads and bluegrass harmonies. We do a few a cappella songs (which) is not unusual in bluegrass, particularly bluegrass gospel,” he said.
“All of us have had a lot of musical training so working out of different keys and different chord formations is not foreign to any of us. And everybody has contributed one or two originals.”
Postma’s introduction to music was with piano lessons in the second grade, and he stuck with bands through the University of Washington.
His instrumental focus for 39 years has been the Dobro.
“It’s almost like a singing instrument,” Postma said.
| 7:30 tonight, Flying Pig, 2929 Colby Ave., Everett; $5-10; all ages; 425-339-1393. |
“You can bend the notes … there are no real set places (for notes), not like frets where musical notes are locked in. You can make it like a crying sound, do Hawaiian-style sounds.”
Dobro is a trade name originally used by the Dopyera brothers. Now it’s often used to refer to any acoustic guitar with a metal resonator set into the body.
It’s the resonator that produces most of the sound and makes that style of guitar louder than standard acoustic guitars.
Resonator guitars are usually played with a slide instead of using fingers to push the strings against a fret.
Josh Graves (Flatt and Scruggs) introduced resonator guitars to bluegrass music in the 1950s, but they were used in country blues as early as the 1920s.
Back Burner performs tonight at the Flying Pig in Everett.
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