Hawktail: More Than Words

The term “supergroup” has been thrown around liberally for decades, used every time an accomplished artist, from Eric Clapton to John Hiatt to Scott Weiland, joined forces with another big name. So, supergroups were bound to appear in modern acoustic music circles as well, one of the most successful recently being I’m With Her, with three of acoustic music’s finest female talents in Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O’Donovan and Sara Watkins. Now comes Hawktail, featuring musicians who have worked with Punch Brothers, Dave Rawlings Machine, Crooked Still, and other notable progressive acoustic and Americana acts.

Fiddler Brittany Haas, bassist Paul Kowert, and guitarist Jordan Tice had recorded one album as Haas Kowert Tice before they enlisted mandolinist Dominick Leslie to form Hawktail. On the group’s new instrumental album, Unless, Hawktail builds on influences from the bands they’ve been part of, as well as from their ancestors and predecessors in acoustic music innovation. The result is a collection of nine compositions, composed by the trio before Leslie joined the group, that are lively while introspective, familiar while being groundbreaking.

Unless, produced by Punch Brothers guitarist Chris Eldridge, combines studio cuts, recordings made in an old Nashville church, and live tracks to introduce a group that will invite comparisons to mandolinist David Grisman’s stellar bands of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and even to the San Francisco-based Kronos Quartet. But the members of Hawktail cite other influences that touched them in their developmental years.

“I’d say that especially Paul and me were influenced by a lot of the music of the late’ 80s and early ’90s,” says Tice, a Maryland native who plays a Collings D1A acoustic. “Players like [bassist] Edgar Meyer and [banjoist] Bela Fleck. Some of the Grisman stuff came out of a more improvisational tradition, but I think we were more interested in the ensemble-oriented playing, and in the interesting composition-type angle on progressive acoustic music. The album’s songs were really pretty collaborative between me, Paul and Brittany.”

Kowert, best known for his upright bass work as a Punch Brother, agrees. “There haven’t been any rules, and each song on the album kind of happened in a different way,” he says, “but there’s a certain single-mindedness that comes from our particular interests, our particular niche. We’re about the same age so we grew up listening to the same bands, the same music, listening to records by people like Bela Fleck for instance. Dominick is a few years younger, but for all intents and purposes we’re the same age, because Dominick was around at a young age at all the same places we were.”

Haas, who has appeared as the fiddle player in the house band of A Prairie Home Companion, has a slightly different take. “My contribution is definitely coming out of older fiddle traditions that I’ve studied. Growing up I was part of this amazing fiddle community that would center around music camps. A lot of my learning was learning melodies from all over the world, the various fiddle traditions. I have a pretty melodic-centric brain. While I love the Dawg [Grisman] stuff, I’m more interested in Bruce Molsky, the great old-time fiddle player who’s tapping into the Appalachian tradition, for example.”

Kowert says that, while the material on the album was written before the several-years younger Leslie was tapped to join up, the mandolinist will probably be involved in the compositional aspect of future Hawktail projects. “It’s definitely something we’re looking at going forward,” Kowert says. Indeed, Leslie has his own set of writing chops, and has written for The Brotet, his project with bassist Sam Grisman, David Grisman’s son.

“The recording process of Unless was a bit of a whirlwind for me,” Leslie says about tracking on short notice with what was already a tight and accomplished trio. “I had been on tour for most of the summer with another band, and as soon as I was able to find a couple day break, Paul told me to book the flights. We had only played together as a quartet twice and had only tried two or three of the six tunes we were about to record in that two-day session in Nashville. So I was honored by their trust in me to show up and jump in the studio essentially unrehearsed.”

Much of Haas’ focus throughout her career has been on chops and technique, but she said being in Hawktail has steered her to paying more attention to the compositional aspect of music. “I wasn’t really writing a lot of music during my developmental stage. I was just trying to be the best fiddle player I could be, trying to learn all this great material and traditions. But being in this band has definitely taught me a lot more about writing. I’ve written, but this has definitely become my main vehicle for that, for developing it and exploring deeper into what I could write and how I could write it. Being in this band compositionally has really expanded me in great directions in terms of learning what can really be done with music.”