Crumm's musical flame burns brightly: Trumansburg producer pushing ahead after studio leveled by fire
The Ithaca Journal Wednesday, April 26, 2006
By ANTONIA SAXON, special to the Ithaca journal
TRUMANSBURG - Chad Crumm and his wife Katie live in a Gothic farmhouse on a dirt road just outside of Trumansburg. Crumm's new recording studio sits just behind it. The new building replaces a smaller one that burned to the ground a year ago last December, taking his music, his instruments, his books, and pretty much everything else he owned with it. Asleep in the farmhouse, he and Katie awoke in the middle of the night to a slow rumble outside their bedroom window. "It took me a while to find my shoes because I was shaking so much," he remembers. "When I got out there, it looked just like the fire in that old Disney movie, 'Dumbo,' with these perfect flames shooting out of every window."
The catastrophe could have sunk him but it didn't. Instead, Crumm says, "I learned that sometimes the world works the way it's suppose to." He'd lost things he'd never be able to replace, but somehow, the sun kept rising every morning.
"It's not the end of the world," he said. "You still have to get up and do stuff. You still have to eat."
Now, on the same foundation, he's built a real recording studio, with isolated rooms and slanted ceilings to deaden the sound, and long views of woods and fields out every window.
He's done a few dozen albums with musician's like Jennie Stearns and the Old Crow Medicine Show. He's just started work on a solo album for old-time singer-songwriter Sarah Hawker, better known as half of the Lonesome Sisters, a duo whose haunting mountain harmonies have won wide attention after a string of festival appearances. Crumm also engineered the Lonesome Sisters' first two albums, and he's just finished a project with the Ithaca band The Settlers, a husband-and-wife team whose sound he loves.
"I think they're the best new band in Ithaca," he says.
The feeling is apparently mutual. The Lonesome Sisters said that, after all the work they'd done with him, they'd started to think of him as their lonesome brother.
VETERAN MUSICIAN
Crumm has had a long recording career himself. In the 1980's he played with the Chicken Chokers, an old-time band that made 2 hard-driving albums for Rounder Records.
"That was a big deal," he says, a remarkable success in the small universe of old-time music
During the '90's, the Hix, his next band, took old-time music into atmospheric, "techno-billy" territory, "just when other bands were starting to pare down," he says. They put two CD's out on the Tritone label. He still plays with The Hix, The Moles and an array of other musicians, his fiddle playing occupying territory somewhere between irony and wonder.
Crumm says he met his most important fiddle teacher while he was still a teenager. This man, Dave Molk, had figured out, among other things, how to play the harmonica and the fiddle at the same time.
"He was kind of like a little prince with these wild purple pants. He taught me all these bowing tricks at a time when I was completely stuck, and it just unlocked everything. We spent three days together just playing and playing and playing, and finally I said, "Hey, you know, what can I give you? Do you want me to pay you?' He was this little pale guy, a vegetarian, and he said, "No, that's OK...bu could you get me some lettuce."
Crumm started out playing the piano as a child, then the trumpet. Next he founfd an old banjo in his father's closet and taught himself to play. "I had Art Rosenbaum's book, "The Old Time Mountain Banjo," and I worked my way through it systematically. I wouldn't let myself go onto the next page until I could play everything on the pages before perfectly."