It may not be as popularly touted as polka in Milwaukee’s old-timey musical history, but the city’s identification with the sounds of the mandolin orchestra goes back to the 1880s. And, to judge by the number and age range of listeners who filled Anodyne Coffee Roasting Co.’s Bruce Street location for Sunday night’s performance by local septet New Vintage Frets and some of their friends, interest in the music made by this family of instruments remains strong.
Yes, that’s a family of instruments. The cousin of the guitar has bass, cello and viola variations as well, all of them tuned in the manner of their upright, bowed namesakes. All four mandolin types feature among New Vintage Frets’ instrumentation, alongside piano and acoustic guitar. One of the visual highlights of the night was seeing bass mandolinist Jason Spottek lift above his head the bass mandolin that well dwarfed his torso.
Spottek transfers the discipline of his other musical persona as a jazz double bassist into the Frets. Most other Frets members come to the group with other musical involvement as well. First mandolinist/band director Mikhail Litvin and classically trained guitarist Irina Yanovskaya also join forces in the duo Serenata. Likewise, mando-cellist John Nicholson and tenor mandolinist, violinist and vocalist Susan Nicholson comprise the principals of Milwaukee folk group Frogwater. Along with pianist Olga Volodarskaya and second mandolinist and recent Nicolet High School graduate Elly Bird, they seek to faithfully perform late-19th and early-20th century repertoire from a time when mandolin music was a national craze that firmly took root in Milwaukee.The city remains the home of the longest-standing mandolin orchestra in the U.S., founded in 1900. The Frets’ members number about half of those currently comprising the Milwaukee Mandolin Orchestra, yet they exhibited no less soulful virtuosity. Much of their program Sunday derived from the ensemble’s debut album, The Wisconsin/Vega Project—a kind of tribute to the Vega company which produced instruments that abetted mandolin music’s mass popularity about a century ago. Fittingly, some members of the group play vintage Vega pieces.
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Though a few of the implements plied to make New Vintage Frets’ sweet music are the genuine articles, at least a couple of substitutes were made for the concert. Master mandolinist and “dawg music” innovator David Grisman contributed a solo to the rendition of E.M. Hall’s ”Blue Ribbon March” that leads off Project, but Bird handily matched it. The first of Susan Nicholson’s two vocal turns was her take on Carrie Jacob Bonds’ 1918 hit, “The End of a Perfect Day.” Nicolson preceded the song with the story of its origin and also spoke of other numbers and their composers throughout the course of the group’s two brisk sets.
That included an introduction to the second set’s opener, a medley of mostly downcast pieces that included her second vocal, “The Blind Fiddler.” This duet between her and John Nicholson preceded a few numbers where the Frets were assisted by several other musicians, including flautist Brad Lipshutz and singing percussionist Rick Kieffer, whose slightly maniacal whimsy could have been a fine fit for Spike Jones’ City Slickers in an earlier era.
Acts such as New Vintage Frets may not be making music for the enormity of consumption their predecessors did, nor are they here necessarily to contribute new material to the style they inhabit, but it’s reassuring to know their musical tradition is lovingly kept alive and curated for audiences like the one that packed a coffee house on a Sunday night.
