Upstairs at the Bluegrass Frat House

When I first rounded the corner onto Mapleton Street, the house, a careworn Victorian, blended in with its tidy suburban neighbors. It was only as I got closer that I noticed the eccentricities. The paint was peeling. There was a pair of leather recliners outside on the porch. Empty Bud Light bottles littered the ground.

Jordan Tice, a professional guitar player of the New Acoustic style, stood by the front door smoking a cigarette. He waved me over. As I followed him inside, I noticed that a small foyer set off the entry had been converted into a bedroom. “The banjo player who sleeps there has a PhD from MIT,” Jordan said. “You’d like him.”

Jordan is one of many musicians who come and go from the rental, squeezing themselves into any space that meets the technical definition of habitable. “Welcome to the bluegrass frat house,” he said, by way of explanation as we headed up to the second floor where he lives. Jordan’s room is monastic. Smaller than any dorm room I had at college, it’s just big enough for a twin bed and a simple pressboard desk. A Fender tube amp sits in one corner and a rolling luggage bag in the other. Most of his guitars, I assume, are kept downstairs in the common practice space, as I only saw one in the room, a beat-up Martin. We had to borrow a chair from another room so that we could both sit.

Jordan is twenty-four. In the world of traditional work this is young, but when you consider that he signed his first record deal while still in high school, it’s clear that in the world of acoustic music Jordan’s no rookie. He’s also painfully modest. One review of his third album, Long Story, began, “Music has always had its share of prodigies, from Mozart up to the current day.”¹ This is exactly the type of praise that Jordan would hate for me to write about. When I asked him why Gary Ferguson, a well-known bluegrass artist, chose Jordan at the age of sixteen to tour with him, he could only stammer, before lapsing into silence.

“It’s a big deal,” I pushed. “He chose you to be his guitar player. He had his choice of lots of guitar players, and he chose a sixteen-year-old.”

“I don’t derive any arrogance from that specific thing,” he finally answered.

Here’s what does excite Jordan: his music. When I asked him, “What are you working on today?” his eyes lit up as he grabbed an open composition book from his desk. On it were five lines of music, lightly penciled in—mainly dense runs of quarter notes spanning up and down the octave, punctuated with the occasional handwritten explanation. “I’m kinda working on a new tune,” he explained. “It’s going to be really fast.”

Jordan picked up his Martin to play me the new song. It had the driving beat of bluegrass, but the melody, which was inspired by a Debussy composition, happily disregards the genre. When Jordan played, he stared just beyond the fretboard and breathed in sharp, sporadic gasps. At one point he missed a note, which upset him. He backed up and started again, insisting on playing until he finished the full phrase without mistake.

I told him I was impressed by the speed of the licks. “No, this is slow,” he replied. He then showed me the pace he’s working toward: It’s at least twice as fast. “I can’t quite make the lead trail yet,” he apologized after it slipped away from him. “I guess I could do it, but I can’t get the notes to pop out yet like I want it.” He showed me how the successive notes in the lead tend to span many strings, complicating fast picking. “It’s really wide.”

At my request, Jordan laid out his practice regimen for this song. He starts by playing slow enough that he can get the effects he desires: He wants the key notes of the melody to ring while he fills the space in between with runs up and down the fretboard. Then he adds speed—just enough that he can’t quite make things work. He repeats this again and again. “It’s a physical and mental exercise,” he explained. “You’re trying to keep track of different melodies and things. In a piano, everything is laid out clearly in front of you; ten fingers never getting in the way of one another. On the guitar, you have to budget your fingers.”

He called his work on this song his “technical focus” of the moment. In a typical day, if he’s not preparing for a show, he’ll practice with this same intensity, always playing just a little faster than he’s comfortable, for two or three hours straight. I asked him how long it will take to finally master the new skill. “Probably like a month,” he guessed. Then he played through the lick one more time.