By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Grant Flick grew up as a musician on the stages of the Black Swamp Arts Festival. Back in 2011 when he was still a pre-teen fiddle phenom he played with his dad, Don Flick, in the band Acoustic Penguin. Since then every couple years or so he returns to update his local fans on his development.
When he comes this year with the band Westbound Situation, they’ll get to meet his new musical passion. Flick, who be starting his third year at the University Michigan’s Jazz Studies Program, has added the Swedish keyed string instrument the nyckelharpa to his arsenal of fiddle and mandolin.
That adds yet another color to the quartet of fellow string virtuosos.
Westbound Situation will play three shows at the festival on Saturday, Sept. 7 — noon on the Main Stage; 2:45 p.m. on the Family Stage; and 5 p.m. on the Community Stage.
Flick heard the instrument while listening to the Swedish folk group Vasen, and was fascinated. It has four basic strings, and then a dozen more that resonate and provide sympathetic harmonies. The design, he said, is “silly,” but it’s the only way the instrument would work.
He joined a nyckelharpa Facebook group, and through that found one for sale in Illinois. “I checked it out. I had no idea what I was getting into but I loved it and took it home and started trying to figure out how to do the technique,” Flick said.
Though used mostly in Swedish folk music, Flick has brought it into different contexts, including playing jazz on it as he did on bassist Jacob Warren’s masters recital at University of Michigan. Warren has collaborated with Flick for several years, appearing with him at the BG festival in 2016 and 2017.
The nyckelharpa “made me think in a lot of different ways,” Flick said. “It’s another voice to play around with.”
He plans to compose a concerto for orchestra and nyckelharpa, which will involve Westbound Situation as well. The concerto will expand on the group’s sound.
The idea for the concerto was inspired, he said, by a gig the quartet did in Marquette, Michigan, playing with an orchestra. He busted out the nyckelharpa and it sounded so good, he wanted a whole piece devoted to it.
This is just one twist in the evolving sound of the group.
Westbound Situation has its roots in the Acoustic Music Seminar held in conjunction with the Savannah Music Festival. Every year, the seminar brings together about a dozen rising musicians. Flick kept in touch with the musicians he met there, and wondered about forming a band with Warren, Matthew Davis, who plays five-string banjo, guitar and piano , and Zach Brown, cello. “No other place would I meet players my age interested in putting this crazy thing together.”
Westbound Situation first came together in March 2017 in Nashville where Davis lives.
“We put all these crazy ideas together,” Flick said. “It’s super weird to write for this group because you have all these instruments that can have all these roles, and all these styles and coming from different directions.”
While the band mates share a love of acoustic music and open mindedness about styles, each have arrived at this point by a different path.
For Flick, who started playing violin in fifth grade at Conneaut, it started with a few blues scales and simple bluegrass tunes, and blossomed into a love of progressive bluegrass and Gypsy jazz.
Davis comes out of the bluegrass tradition. Warren has a foundation in classical music, but also loves fiddle tunes. Brown is also rooted in classical music, but he also loves soul and funk, and brings those grooves to the band.
The music comes together through collective effort. Someone may bring in a melody and suggested harmonies, then they’ll develop it together, adding variations and new sections. None of it is written down.
Most of what they play is original, though they do have a few covers. Flick said they even did their own arrangement of Jacob Mann’s big band opus “Kogi,” adding a few sections to best show off what they can do.
Westbound Situation first unveiled this eclectic mix in June 2017 in a performance in Ithaca, NY, where Brown had just graduated from Ithaca College. A year ago they signed a management contract with the Great Lakes Performing Artists agency. “We’ve been really busy since then,” he said.
They recently recorded their debut album in Ypsilanti, and that should be out in the fall.
Brown is the only member without a Michigan connection. He went to graduate school at SUNY Purchase. The other three studied jazz and improvisation at Michigan.
“It’s super cool,” Flick said. “The jazz department is not just jazz, it’s an improvisation department.”
Sometimes they play straight-ahead bebop, other times they engage in free improvisation. And he has the opportunity to study classical music.
As a trio, Westbound Situation won the Briggs Chamber Music Competition, the first non-classical ensemble to do so.
Flick said instead of presenting the judges with a score they gave them program notes to guide them through the piece, including those sections composed on the spot.
The university’s openness to that approach is just one way in which University of Michigan proved the right place for Flick to further his education.
The goal “is to really continue finding out what my sound is.”
It provides fertile ground to encounter people he wouldn’t have met before, both students and faculty. He studies with Andrew Bishop, a noted jazz saxophonist who has collaborated with BGSU jazz faculty, and also is a composer. He’ll provide guidance for the nyckelharpa concerto. Flick has also gotten a chance to work with Matt Albert, the chair of the chamber music department.
“It’s given me a bigger network to hear different kinds of music and to work with different musicians and get their input and just to hunker down and shed,” he said. That’s “shed,” as in “woodshed,” as in practice.
Then there’s the vibrant music scene. He said he can go to a show every night, whether on campus or venues such as the legendary folk club The Ark.
Not to mention that it’s close enough to Bowling Green, so he can come home and just hang out.
That’s all the better when he can come back to share his newest musical discoveries at the Black Swamp Arts Festival. “It’s super fun,” Flick said. “It’s really cool because this festival is a gem. You get a world class festival downtown every year. You can’t beat it. It’s really cool to be here and bring the guys I really love playing music with. This is where I grew up.”
