The hyper-eclectic Big Ears music festival returned to the clubs and streets of Knoxville for its eleventh edition in late March. And amid the acid jazz, contemporary classical, and brain jangling avant-garde, the duo of Larry & Joe stood out like a bouquet of flowers in a mosh pit.
On the festival’s closing Sunday, Joe Troop, the globe-trotting American banjo and fiddle player, and Larry Bellorín, multi-instrumentalist from Monagas, Venezuela, flooded the joy zone at the Knoxville Museum of Art. While Big Ears audiences can often adopt a cerebral posture towards the music, this crowd beamed and leaned in and sang along and threw themselves at the feet of one of the most charismatic and culture-crossing acts to come out of roots music in the past decade.
Troop, based in Durham, NC, established himself in roots and folk circles through his founding and leadership of Che Apalache, a bi-national bluegrass band born in Argentina. So his string band chops and keen vocals in both English and Spanish are well known. When he met Larry just over three years ago in his home state, musical sparks flew, and the duo we saw that Sunday was born.
Larry turns your head before playing a note, standing at his arpa jarocha, a full sized harp, and wearing a bright blue cowboy hat. His mastery meshed intricately with Joe’s fluid five-string banjo to light up “Caballo Viejo,” a classic Venezuelan folk song. They performed the Flatt & Scruggs bluegrass standard “Rolling In My Sweet Baby’s Arms,” with Larry on maracas supporting the rhythm of Joe’s banjo. Their original “Nuevo South Train,” the title track from their debut album of 2023, is an uncanny mix of Latin and American, with bluesy train sounds and quick-patter harmony vocals in Spanish. Here, it was guitar and bass from Joe and Larry respectively. They raved up in Spanglish on the grassy tune “Going Back To The Blue Ridge Mountains.” And they drew one of their many standing ovations with “The Dreamer,” a song they composed about an immigrant from North Carolina. The duo carried the energy between songs with fluid stage banter that found Joe translating Larry’s quick-witted dialogue for the crowd without any sense of delay.
That’s how I felt interviewing the pair outside of a coffee shop in downtown Knoxville a day before this performance. I don’t speak Spanish, but the telepathic communication of Larry and Joe made me feel as if I did. Our conversation ranged from the origins of Joe’s life as a border-crossing banjo explorer and band organizer to Larry’s journey as an asylum seeker in a country that recently became far more hostile to and precarious for working immigrants like himself. Few acts have explored pan-American fusion with as much mutual passion and respect. They are progressive thinkers who tend to at least two massive national music traditions. They’re global citizens who thrive on local engagement. And they’re political activists in the most personable way. “Existence is resistance,” Troop says in this conversation.
Troop grew up in Winston Salem and fell for bluegrass in his teens, adopting instruments like he’d adopt languages later on. He launched his world travels through a foreign exchange program while attending the University of North Carolina, and in the coming years he lived in Spain, Japan, and Argentina. There, during a decade in Buenos Aires, he formed Che Apalache with some of his music students.
“I wanted to bring them up for a cultural exchange in the United States. And before we came up, this concept of doing something more authentically us was born. So we started fusing Latin American folk music with bluegrass instrumentation, and that was Che Apalache’s whole M.O.” Troop says. “And now, as I've come back to the states in the past five years, and I met Larry, I've been able to have the inverse experience, where he is doing what I did. He's teaching his folk music traditions in North Carolina, and I am learning from him like my students did from me. So it kind of feels like my life has gone full circle, in a way.”
Che Apalache toured widely and earned a Grammy nomination, but its momentum was blown up by the pandemic. That crisis brought Troop home to NC, where he filled his time and made a living with a new line of work assisting asylum seekers. And that led to a tip that there was a fellow working heavy construction machinery in Raleigh who happened to be a Spanish-speaking folk music master, who had to give up his art to support his family in the US. Troop called Bellorín on the worksite and struck up a conversation.
“It was something special because of the kind of music that (Joe) played. So I got home after that call, and I started looking through his music,” says Larry, as translated by Joe. “And when I heard that musical style bluegrass, I was completely surprised and in shock. I was like ‘Hey I’ve heard this kind of music - in movies!’ I imagined this dude on horseback with a cowboy hat and a gun. But I immediately fell in love with it, because I felt like it was mine, as if I knew it profoundly.”
Their first gig, even without rehearsals due to Joe catching a nasty case of Covid 19, went beautifully, and a partnership was forged. Larry and Joe are very much like brothers now, burning up the road and playing ever-more video and radio sessions. Their second album Manos Panamericanos came out last fall, and it’s a more layered production than the quickly-made first project. And as I see it, it’s something of a test for an Americana community that for years now has purported to be actively practicing diversity and inclusion, yet not really coming through for folk-related projects that make heavy use of Latin traditions of Spanish language. The music is magnificent. The live show, which I’ve seen twice now, is mesmerizing.
And possibly most important, Larry Bellorín embodies one of the most pressing issues of our time in modern America - whether the government will honor its commitments to asylum seekers who have done everything by the book. As we wrapped up our interview in Knoxville, I ask about this delicate issue, one that’s casting a shadow over Larry’s future and the success that his duo has enjoyed so far. Joe Troop doesn’t mince words.
“Hopefully nothing will happen, you know, but if they revoke asylum and temporary protective status for people, and they become undocumented, then it would enable law enforcement and ICE to knock on people's doors,” Troop says. “This feels like a Nazi state. It's a round ‘em up. And as a White person in the Americas, I want to be a good ally and say, shame on you. You have no heart. You have no soul, you know? How can I say that? Well, I can say that with love, and I can try to shine through that darkness…We're gonna keep fighting.”
All this and more gets elaborated on in the audio conversation presented here. I have edited out only Joe’s translations of my questions for Larry, who gets to speak for himself with Joe translating. This feature rounds out a recent focus on the music scene and history of Durham, NC. The String featured a visit to the city and its new Biscuits & Banjos festival. The Old Fashioned recently cast a spotlight on Sugar Hill Records following the death of its founder Barry Poss.
Larry & Joe this week release "Hermano Migrante" in honor of World Refugee Day on Friday, June 9.
