Mandolin Moments

By Reidar Falch

The duo of Tim Connell and Mike Burdette call themselves Rio Con Brio. Recently, they released two albums. Caprice is their third choro album. Fado/Fate is Alexandra Coutinho's debut album featuring Rio Con Brio.

Tim Connell and his Arrow mandolin

Tim Connell is a mandolin man involved in several projects, in several styles. He really got into choro back in 2005 after meeting Mike Marshall, Hamilton de Holanda and later Dudu Maia and Danilo Brito at the Mandolin Symposium in Santa Cruz, California. "I looked all over for choro musicians to play with in my hometown, Portland Oregon, but couldn't find any‚ we're a little far from Rio I guess! But what Portland does have, strangely enough, is a vibrant gypsy jazz scene, guitarists going after the sound of Django Reinhardt and his musical progeny over in Europe."

"I met Mike Burdette at one of these jams back in 2006 and he was one of the many djangophiles I was persuading to learn some choros. For awhile there about 5-10 choros could be heard regularly at the gypsy jazz jams in town; I know that Desvairada and Receita de Samba still pop up from time to time," Tim says.

Tim Connell and Mike Burdette

Mike had just moved to town from California and was working as a luthier and Django-style rhythm guitarist, playing with the best groups in town. "He was the one who learned the most choros and kept coming over to play with me after work, partly a stroke of luck that his fret shop was only a mile from my house. Plus we really hit it off, so we formed a duo. We started very modestly – playing background music in winebars and restaurants, fleshing out our set of only about 10 choros with Django tunes, jazz standards and French musettes. In fact, if you listen to our first CD, Whispering, Mike's accompaniment is played in the gypsy bossa style, with a big fat jazz manouche pick strumming the chords instead of the Brazilian fingerstyle. In the past six years, we've expanded to about fifty choro tunes and have largely dropped the gypsy jazz from our act, though we still play pick-up Django gigs with folks in town."

They have recorded three Rio Con Brio CD's, "ditched the winebars for stages and house concerts and later got hooked up with Alexandra Coutinho, an amazing fado singer from Portugal, so now we split our time playing duo gigs and accompanying Alexandra in her performances. We've also become the best of friends along the way and have had a lot of laughs together!"

"Alexandra hails from just outside of Lisbon, Portugal but now lives in the United States, in Portland. She was originally a child gymnastics prodigy, very serious, on the Portuguese Olympic team and everything," Tim says.

Tim Connell, Alexandra Coutinho and Mike Burdette

He continues, "During college she started getting into the traditional music of Portugal, fado, a music she had originally learned from her grandmother and had thought of as old-fashioned, but which suddenly spoke to her. She realized she had a real gift for the fado vocal technique in addition to being a passionate performer, something honed interestingly enough by her work as a top-level gymnast."

"At any rate, by the time we met, she was a dynamic, polished performer of this amazing music and a magician with entrancing an audience, so I jumped right into learning the tunes and figuring out the Portuguese guitar lines on my mandolin, even stringing up a faux gitarre Portuguese out of an old octave mandolin, which can be heard on several tracks on Fado/Fate," he says.

Tim explains the Portuguese guitar, "The "guitarra Portuguesa" is a twelve-stringed instrument most notably associated with fado music. With it's double-course strings, it is much more like a mandolin than a guitar. It has a distinctive look, due mainly to the Preston tuners which flare out from the top of the headstock. Many of the courses are tuned an octave apart like a 12-string guitar, and the tension is very loose, so it is played with a lot of vibrato. The tuning is radically different from the mandolin, as is the right hand technique which uses finger picks. But the body of the instrument was the primary influence on Jacob do Bandolim's redesign of the Brazilian bandolim, and he modeled his famous slides and vibrato on the fado style of guitarra Portuguesa."

"While the mandolin was popular in Portugal, it is rarely if ever heard on traditional fado recordings. There is currently an amazing mandolinist named Edu Miranda who plays fado instrumentals in his set, I'm not sure if he accompanies singers with his mandolin. In the early days there was a lot of back and forth between Portuguese and Brazilian music, between choro and fado, and as I said before, the modern Brazilian bandolim certainly owes its look and sound to the guitarra Portuguesa," he says about the mandolin connection.

They started out really only planning to make one CD, "it would be Rio Con Brio's third album, with a shift of focus from Brazilian choro to the music of Portugal, in which we would feature Alexandra on half of the tracks. But as we kept recording tracks, we realized we had two albums on our hands, Alexandra's solo debut Fado/Fate and our third album of choro, Caprice."

They recorded most of the tracks live, with semi-isolation, "so most of what you hear on both albums were full takes. I take a pretty low-key approach to production. Pre-production was largely unnecessary, as the three of us had just spent a year playing out a lot, so we knew the arrangements very well. Since we're just a duo instrumentally, the tone of the of the guitar and mandolin are extremely important to me, and most of the tech time was certainly spent on mic positioning, mixing and playing with reverb and EQ for each instrument. But after that we pretty much let the tape roll."

"Rob Stroup at 8Ball Studios here in Portland is a great musician and producer and he was always the extra set of ears when we needed perspective. I brought in two great musicians: Ben Blechman who plays a 5 and 6-string violin, who sweetened several of the fado tracks with overdubbed string arrangements, mostly just improvised on the spot it took very little editing to get these to sound gorgeous and fully arranged! And Simon Lucas, a wonderful percussionist who brought in his pandeiro for the two full-band tracks on Caprice and snuck around the edges of the Fado/Fate tunes to give them some more lift and magic," Tim continues.

Tim is extremely happy with the result, "Mike and I have come a long way since our last album, and we've learned what are some of my favorite choros which are on Caprice, including my all-time favorite, Ingenuo, as well as Cadência and A Ginga do Mane. Plus, I've learned a lot more about how to make my Arrow mandolin sound better, more expressive and about how to mix it, so I'm pretty psyched."

He has known Alexandra for years, and has been planning to record with her for ages, "I'm glad that she finally has her debut album so that the world can hear what fado sounds like on the far shores of America!"

"I'm most proud that our CDs really sound like what we do onstage - they're very honest, I've seen lots of folks who've known us only on CD come to a show and get very excited to hear the familiar songs in real life," Tim says.

Tim is involved in several projects. He talks about the agenda, "Several things at once! I'm working on an album of new arrangements for solo mandolin, an eclectic mix, some Beatles tunes, some choro, some jazz. And if I can get my Sibelius skills together in time, I'd like to make available sheet music for the arrangements."

Tim's Solo Arrangement of Floraux

There is a new recording, "I'll also finally be recording an album with Eric Skye, who I've played with for the past four years up and down the West coast, just guitar and mandolin, fairly eclectic, some jazz, some funk, a few fiddle tunes. We're inspired a lot by what David Grisman and Jerry Garcia had going with their duo and band recordings."

Tim playing Summertime with The Eric Skye Trio

"We're working on getting the Ger Mandolin Orchestra back to Europe, and setting up some gigs in America as well. Being an 11-piece (what do you call an 11-piece anyway!?), it's a bit unwieldy and unaffordable to get on the road, but it's been a great project with the greatest of players, so hopefully that will keep me busy as well this year," he continues.

Tim playing with the Ger Mandolin Orchestra at the Singer Festival in Warsaw

There is more, "I also have a mandolin duo with a great young prodigy named Jack Dwyer. We're both very inspired by Mike Marshall's two-mandolin recordings with Chris Thile, Hamilton de Holanda and Caterina Lichtenberg, and we're taking our own humble stab at that configuration, with a bit more Irish and African music focus. We'll be teaching a workshop and touring together in Alaska in June. I've never been to Alaska before so I'm very excited about this!"

Tim and Jack Dwyer: Shalom Aleichem and Tipsy Gypsy

There is even more, "Another thing that I'm working on is getting back to Europe again this summer. In addition to the Ger Mandolin Orchestra's trip to Poland, I played a few concerts with the great plucked-string trio, Mando Nuevo, comprised of the Dutch brother and sister duo Marijke and Michiel Wiesenekker and German multi-instrumentalist and mando-manaical magician Oliver Waitze, and just had a wonderful time."

Tim performing Naquele Tempo with Michiel Wiessenekker

Tim lived in Germany for a year as a student, "it was really great to be there again after so long and getting to speak German again. I adore Europe and love meeting people from different cultures. I really enjoy the language barrier and how it forces all of us to abandon more familiar cultural references and really communicate with one another. I also loved the German and Polish audiences - so receptive and enthusiastic!"

"I'd like to give encouragement to everyone who is working on learning to play the mandolin - it's not easy, especially the genres many of us seem to gravitate toward: choro, swing, classical, bluegrass. I've struggled over right-hand technique, proper pick and string gauge, tone, speed and fluency worse than anyone, but if you keep at it, relax and be patient and don't try to play too fast or too loud, it is a beautiful and expressive instrument, and folks really seem to love it across cultures and styles of music. I'd also like to thank every teacher, student and audience member who has ever given me a word of encouragement along the way - they have all been very important to me," Tim concludes.

Caprice - Review

Fado/Fate - Review

Tim Connell

Rio Con Brio