Bluegrass is demanding music. Band leaders and featured artists have powerful and emotional voices with a lot of range. And that’s where a lot of folks focus their attention, whether they love or don’t love the high lonesome sound. But fans of the music are also keenly aware of the musicians and their highly developed chops. It’s why the IBMA bestows awards each year in six instrumental categories, from bass to banjo, as well as an annual Instrumental Group Of The Year prize.
Andy Leftwich shared in five of those group awards during his years with Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder, and indeed he’s a key reason for those wins. As a mandolin player and fiddler, he’s in rarified company at the top of bluegrass and acoustic string band music. While that high profile band - where he spent 15 years - put him firmly on the national bluegrass map, Leftwich has pursued other projects over the past decade, including a couple of tightly constructed instrumental albums, The American Fiddler (2022) and Aced, which was released in mid April. Andy’s transition took shape around a calling.
“What led me to move away from a full-time stint with Kentucky Thunder was my wife and I were very dedicated at our church, and so we started getting opportunities to do ministry stuff, and I felt compelled to make myself available for that in whatever capacity that was going to be,” he says. “So I released a hymns CD, and then Rachel and I released a gospel CD together. And we did that for about six years. And then I felt like it was time to sort of take off the shelf the American Fiddler project that I had started.”
Some of that music had been sitting on tapes since 2011, so the momentum to finish one carried over to this new album a few years later. The big difference he tells us is that while American Fiddler was patched together at various sessions with many musicians, Aced is 11 tunes, mostly original, performed by the same four guys: Andy on fiddle and mandolin (often both via overdubbing in the studio) with guitarist Cody Kilby, banjo player Matt Menefee and bass player Byron House. It’s a sleek and varied package, with progressive bluegrass, Django-style string jazz, contest style fiddling, and more.
Andy is from White House, TN, just north of Nashville. As you’ll hear, he got the fever to play for a living before he was 10 and came up honing his skills at a network of fiddle contests in the region and around the country. At 15, he achieved the apex of that career by winning Winfield, Kansas’s Walnut Valley Old Time Fiddle Championship, one of the most prestigious of its kind. Around that time he got his first job playing with middle TN bluegrass artist Valerie Smith, and when he was 19, he got hired by Ricky Skaggs.
The career-shifting move came with a learning curve. “In the contest world, you try to have your arrangement down,” Andy says. “You didn't want to just spontaneously do something. You wanted to make sure that you had a plan, and you wanted to execute that plan the best way you could to win. So, when I finally got out of the contest world and started playing bluegrass for a living, it was totally different. It was all spontaneous, it was all improvised. So there was a little bit of a learning curve, for sure.”
Andy’s run with Kentucky Thunder included fascinating collaborations, including an album and tours with pop pianist Bruce Hornsby. It included a half dozen Grammy Awards. And it gave him time to pursue some side projects, like the innovative improv trio Three Ring Circle with bass player Dave Pomeroy and resophonic guitarist Rob Ickes. We talk about all of that, as well as the high regard for his fellow musicians that led to the title of his newest opus.
“The thought occurred to me in the studio, like, man, these guys are such aces at their craft, and so the thing I'm most excited about this project is that it features them just as much as it features me. It's like a band unit through the whole thing from top to bottom. And being an ace on your instrument just took on a whole new meaning. So that's why we decided to name the record Aced. I want to be an ace at my craft, and whatever it is, whatever I'm doing, I want to be an ace at it.”
