Nighthawk (Crossroads, 2014)
Danny Roberts
Reviewed by John Lupton
However, in the "chip off the old block" scheme of things (and with all due respect to Andrea, in this case she's in the role of the "old block"), the star is their 12-year-old daughter Jaelee who steals the show on "Oh, Atlanta," the Mick Ralphs/Bad Company tune of years gone by that helped catapult Alison Krauss to stardom when she covered it in the mid-1990s. The kid flat out nails it, and in his role as producer, dad wisely pares down the arrangement to his mandolin, Tim Surrett's bass and Tony Wray's guitar, not unlike Krauss' arrangement. It's a keeper.
As for the rest, Danny Roberts nicely avoids the common trap on instrumentally-oriented bluegrass discs of making everything too fast, too fancy, too everything. In fact, this is a nicely varied disc, from straight-ahead fare like "Derrington Drive" to the liltingly Celtic "Coppinger's Creek" to the self-descriptive "Swing-a-Long" (all of them Roberts compositions).
Perhaps the best cut, in the vein of "ess is more, is "Danielle's Waltz." Those who immerse themselves in bluegrass and old time music are often surprised to learn how fond instrumentalists of the caliber of Roberts and his Grascals sidekick Kristin Scott Thomas are of waltzes, but it's a big part of the tradition, and the two of them with just mandolin and banjo is just about as good as it gets.
CDs by Danny Roberts
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