Sam Grassie :: Grassie & Band, live
Folk blues live set: a fingerstyle guitarist hands his songs to a band.
A live record sold to help pay for the next studio one is a modest document, and Sam Grassie claims nothing more for it. It records a solo guitarist’s songs being shared out among other players.
Grassie & Band, Live appeared on Bandcamp on 27 October 2026 with no label named: twelve tracks, about forty-three minutes, and a single line explaining that these recordings will help fund the next studio album. Neither venue nor date is given. It arrives six months after Where Two Hawks Fly, the debut Grassie released on Broadside Hacks in April, and draws largely on that album’s songs. Grassie is a fingerstyle guitarist from Glasgow, based in London since 2022, and the Bert Jansch Foundation took him on as one of its Young Artists in 2020.
Fingerstyle playing of the kind he learned lets one guitarist do the work of a band: the thumb keeps the bass moving while the fingers carry the tune. This record tests what happens to that habit when other players join him. Herbie Loening, Toby Shaer and Alfie Jones are credited on the first four songs, where flute, double bass and electric guitar come and go. Nathan Pigott’s saxophone enters on four of the later ones, a vocal trio called Two Hawks takes one song, and Daisy Rickman another. Three tracks credit nobody but Grassie, so the band of the title changes from song to song.
The set opens with “Cheating Monday”, which Grassie first released, with the Jansch Foundation’s backing, as a single by Avocet, his trio with the singer and harpist Iona Zajac. The traditional “Polly Vaughan” and “The Burning of Auchindoun”, a Child ballad about the Gordon and Mackintosh feud of 1592, come next, then “Kishor’s to Sandwood”, which runs the instrumental “Kishor’s” straight into Dave Goulder’s “Sandwood Down to Kyle”. This is where I would start: the flute recalls the arrangements on Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left.
John Martyn’s “Bless the Weather” goes to Daisy Rickman, a singer from the far west of Cornwall. Davy Graham’s “Anji”, listed here as “Angie”, the spelling Bert Jansch used, is the bolder choice. Since the early sixties it has served as a test piece for British fingerstyle guitar, a demonstration of what one guitar can do unaided. Here it moves to a country-jazz rhythm with electric guitar alongside, and Pigott’s saxophone comes in halfway through with a solo that leaves the tune’s character in place and enriches it with ease.
The record’s Bandcamp tags are folk, folk blues, Takoma and Celtic guitar, Takoma being John Fahey’s label and now the name for a whole American school of solo steel-string playing. Graham had already brought blues and non-Western modes into British folk guitar decades ago, and the track title “Glarabi” follows that road further. “Jarabi” is a Mande love song, Grassie’s 2025 release Jarabi, Winter Has Gone was presented as a marriage of Celtic trad and Malian blues, and the new title reads like a later turn of the same idea.
The record closes on “The Blacksmith”, the traditional song about a lover who courts a woman for nine months and then breaks his word, sung in the deep baritone that carries the ballads throughout. Until the next studio album, this is the fullest account we have of the Where Two Hawks Fly songs in a band’s hands.
