Willie, Phish Man Join Tin Hat

San Francisco's impossible-to-peg Tin Hat Trio will release The Rodeo Eroded, their third album of classical, folk, world and jazz music, on September 10th. As with 2000's Helium, which featured Mike Patton and Tom Waits, the band got some help -- this time from Willie Nelson, Phish drummer Jon Fishman, and Medeski Martin and Wood's Billy Martin.

Tin Hat Trio -- accordionist Rob Burger, guitarist Mark Orton, violinist Carla Kihlstedt -- once described their sound as "music for the shotgun wedding of Astor Piazzolla and Django Reinhardt with Charles Ives as the flower girl." This time out, the Trio primarily take their cue from Ives, the sole American component of that equation.

"In the beginning we were sticking pretty closely with a guitar, violin and accordion," he says. "Certainly all three of those instruments are found in any kind of traditional American music dating back hundreds of years. But because Rob has gotten into saloon-piano kind of sounds, I've started playing a lot more dobro, we were thinking of some of the singing cowboy stuff, and having Willie on it played into it."

Accompanied by harpist Zeena Parkins (Bjork), Nelson sings on "Willow Weep for Me," a 1937 song composed by Anne Ronnel for former teacher George Gershwin after his death. Orton, who did the orchestral arrangement, describes the track as "a strange, posthumous love song."

"I've always imagined the kind of arrangement that was something like a singing cowboy and Tin Pan Alley and [Nelson] was just he ultimate singer," Orton says. "We're just lucky to have gotten him involved."

With everything from violins to toy pianos to harmonicas, accordions and banjos all over their records, the Tin Hat Trio evoke the sounds and images of saloons, circuses and the Old West. The same combination of image and instrument informs each piece of music. For "Happy Hour" and "Under the Gun," the trio enlisted John Fishman. "We'd been listening to a bunch of saloon pieces," Orton explains, "but to kind of turn it on its head we were thinking of Sun Ra playing in a saloon kind of thing with John Bonham playing drums -- Fishman's got a really big drum sound and seemed like the logical choice."

And on "Holiday Joel" featuring Billy Martin, Orton says, "We wanted this to sound like some little Brazilian pop thing played through a broken speaker on AM, and we knew he'd like that idea."

Outside of their own albums, film scores -- most recently, The Good Girl, the new movie starring Jennifer Aniston -- have given the Tin Hat Trio an opportunity to delve into more contemporary sounds. And, despite his group's distinctly antique sensibilities, Orton admits to once enjoying Rush, Led Zeppelin and, after a pause, Billy Joel. "Truthfully, we're as influenced by contemporary things as anything old," he says, laughing. "It's not like I was some strange kid in my high school with a straw hat."

CHRISTINA SARACENO
(August 13, 2002)