Some guys are so good that their warmup surpasses someone else’s peak performance, and the applause that greeted Don Stiernberg and John Parrott Friday night after their one sound-check tune at the Old Town School of Folk Music attested to the quality this pair brings to everything they touch.
Stiernberg can play practically anything with strings, but for this set he stuck exclusively to the mandolin, through which his muse sings most sweetly.
The purpose of the show was to pay tribute to Stiernberg’s musical mentor, the late mandolin giant and celebrated comedian Jethro Burns. Burns’ final recordings, with Stiernberg providing backup on guitar, were recently issued on the CD “Swing Low, Sweet Mandolin.” It was from this disc that the majority of the evenings songs were chosen.
Parrott’s steady pulse on guitar provided Stiernberg and his mandolin with an ideal setting for his deeply melodic improvising, which was employed most fully on the gorgeous standard, “If I Had You.”
During “You Win Again,” Stiernberg’s elastic cross-rhythms exploited the song’s inherent swing, while “Fiddleobia”-with its roller-coaster patterns scurrying up and down the mandolin neck-drew bubbly, Jesse McReynolds-style crosspicking from the mandolinist.
Burns’ famous chord/melody style of playing was at the center of Stiernberg’s rendition of “Body and Soul,” while the influence of Django Reinhardt on Stiernberg was obvious in the duo’s sultry reading of “Nuage.”
Jethro Burns the jokester was also present in spirit. Before launching their first number, “That’s A-Plenty,” Stiernberg remarked that “the next tune is very difficult, so we’d like to have our applause right now.” Later, after a hysterical country version of “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” elicited applause and uproarious laughter, Stiernberg said to Parrott, “This audience is so good, it makes me wish we had a better act.”
But as Burns’ Homer-and-Jethro routine could never quite disguise just how spectacular a player he was, Stiernberg’s jokes and humorous reminiscences were secondary to the wit and imagination of his mandolin playing.
The second half of the show found Stiernberg joining a septet led by Ingrid Graudins, a local singer-songwriter with an abundance of solid material and an arresting, fluid voice.
This full yet flexible ensemble was equally adept with blues and delicate ballads like the languid “Lilac House,” a high point of Graudins’ set.
