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High Bar Gang celebrates Juno nomination

Bluegrass band playing Centennial Theatre Feb. 24
HBG
Old-timey bluegrass ensemble the High Bar Gang (Kirby Barber, Rob Becker, Shari Ulrich, Wendy Bird (seated), Colin Nairne, Dave Barber and Barney Bentall) plays Centennial Theatre on Friday, Feb. 24. Their album, Someday The Heart Will Trouble The Mind, released by True North Records, has been nominated for a 2017 Juno Award. Old-timey bluegrass ensemble the High Bar Gang (Kirby Barber, Rob Becker, Shari Ulrich, Wendy Bird (seated), Colin Nairne, Dave Barber and Barney Bentall) plays Centennial Theatre on Friday, Feb. 24. Their album, Someday The Heart Will Trouble The Mind, released by True North Records, has been nominated for a 2017 Juno Award.

High Bar Gang, Centennial Theatre, Friday, Feb. 24, 7:30 p.m. Tickets $28. For more information visit highbargang.com.

Her siblings got piano lessons. She didn’t.

Almost 60 years later Shari Ulrich still doesn’t know why. (“They weren’t musical, maybe that’s why they needed the lessons,” she says of her siblings with a laugh.) But she remembers skulking outside their practice room, intercepting melodic transmissions like a Russian spy and sitting at the piano to translate her intel into keys and chords.

It’s early Friday morning and Ulrich is narrating as she stirs milk into her coffee.

“I’ve almost got my first sip of coffee in me so I’m hoping my brain will work,” she says.

The coffee is effective.

One sip and she’s off and running, talking about why she prefers Joni Mitchell to Jimi Hendrix, leaving home at 18 with a violin and her sister’s flute, and the challenge of writing music (“We aren’t great friends, me and songwriting.”)

But when the conversation circles to the “core music” that insinuated itself into her genetic code as a teenager, Ulrich answers in a word: “Beatles!” She then quickly offers that she “never had fantasies about Ringo and George.”

Ulrich is part of a dispersed musical tribe that trace their ancestry to Sgt. Pepper and the Ed Sullivan Show like a river of origin. Their music pulled her in, quite literally.

“I put my head into the speaker of my mother’s suitcase stereo to hear the harmonies,” she recalls.

These days Ulrich is harmonizing with the High Bar Gang, a bluegrass ensemble consisting of Barney Bentall, Dave Barber, Kirby Barber, Rob Becker, Wendy Bird, Colin Nairne and Ulrich.

But while Nairne is a bluegrass student who nursed visions of an “original, hardcore bluegrass” band for years, Ulrich classifies herself as “not really a student of anything.”

Still, much like Kool or Scooby, she joined the gang.

“I find that in my career I generally always say ‘Yes.’ Particularly if I’m scared.”

She stayed scared.

 “I felt like a complete sham,” she explains.

Bluegrass, she felt, was something “only the most brilliant players can play.”

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Musical pioneer Bill Monroe once remarked: “Bluegrass is wonderful music. I’m glad I originated it.”

The sound was distilled in the Appalachian hills like a vat of ‘shine, infused with the folk music of Scottish and Irish immigrants who held onto melodies while fleeing poverty and Oliver Cromwell.

Monroe gave the genre its name, and with fellow Blue Grass Boys Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, helped define it. But that banjo Earl Scruggs’ picked so expertly may have originally been borrowed from a gourd instrument played by African American slaves and taught to white southern musicians, according to Appalachian State University instructor Cecelia Conway.

Usually featuring an upright bass, fiddle, guitar, mandolin and banjo, there’s something simple about bluegrass, even inside its rapid tempos and alternating solos.

“It’s music that finds its way deep into your soul because it’s strings vibrating against wood and nothing else,” bluegrass singer Alison Krauss once noted.

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Carrying on the bluegrass tradition was a daunting one, Ulrich reports.

“The first couple of shows I really struggled. It was all psychological,” she says. “I thought: ‘I have to play it in that style … and I’m not that good.’”

But when she dug past the genre’s virtuosos Ulrich found music that was: “Out of tune and very raw.”

It was the revelation she needed.

Ulrich has immersed herself in bluegrass, singing about jail, god, trucks, ex-cons and following mother to the graveyard.

The one song she thought she’d turn down was “Sinners,” a tune exhorting bad folks to pray or find a flame-retardant soul.

“I have no Christian roots whatsoever,” she says. “I thought, ‘I can’t sing this.’”

But sing it she did, along with a collection of gospel tunes that became the High Bar Gang’s first album. The group’s second release, Someday the Heart Will Trouble the Mind, may be a prelude to a third album of murder and mayhem, according to Ulrich.

“When you have seven people in bluegrass music, you’re not doing it for the money, that’s for sure,” she says. “We love playing together and we love the music.”