Ramble on

PICK UP YOUR FEET and uh one, two, three; we’re taking you back in time and on into the hills with Bud Branch of The Arcane Ramblers. The Ramblers are an Old Time (“With a capital O and capital T,” Branch says) trio featuring Branch on banjo and mandolin, Robert Quijano on the six-string guitar and Matt Mallwitz on the upright bass. You might’ve seen the guys holding steady with their fiddle tunes at the John Dunn shops by the plaza in summer, or on The Burger Stand patio last fall, or most recently caught them at their show this past Sunday (Jan. 9) at LUN + OJO bringing the soft instrumental whispers of the Appalachians to the Sangre de Cristos.

PLAYLIST How’d you three link up?

I started playing at the Taos Retirement Village on a regular basis with those

residents four years ago. Sometimes I’d invite friends of mine to join me. One time I invited Robert and it was

like immediate magic when we played

together. We synced up really nicely. We

shared songs from our deep catalogue of tunes that we love and got in a

process of repetitive practice with successive weeks playing at the rest home and busking in John Dunn. Robert and I have a mutual friend, Matt, who

picked up on the bass a couple years ago. (These activities have been put on hold because of the “wrinkle of the pandemic,” as Branch calls it. But they

hope to do more outdoor shows for the residents when it’s warm again.)

How long have you been playing music?

I grew up in Virginia and have been

playing string instruments for 50 years. My mom forced me to play piano between ages six and 12 and then she said “you’re free,” so I asked for a guitar for Christmas. James Taylor is who really got me interested in music. I covered a

lot of his early stuff. In Virginia, I participated in lots of old time jams, weekly and monthly. Those jams are 50 percent musical and 50 percent social. I started

solo busking using the banjo at Farmers Markets. The banjo is an instrument

that’s hard to ignore. Passersby can

really connect to it, which is a feeling I can’t get enough of. Just like last week, when the temperature got to 45 degrees, I figured it was warm enough for me to

go and start picking.

What draws you to this type of music?

I find it really sweet. They’re simple

tunes. No complex musical ideas. There’s a pulse about them. A danceable pulse. They’re a little bit hypnotic. You can fall into a nice groove playing

them over and over again. It’s nearly a religious experience. You go deeper

into the song with the repetitiveness, and you notice what your partners are doing then what you’re doing. [The Arcane Ramblers] have a lot of fun when we play. When we play for an audience, I always think about something that Tim O’Brien (of bluegrass group, Hot Rize) — one of my favorite vocalists and

musical hero — said: “We really appreciate the audience being here, but we

have to tell you we’d be playing anyway if you weren’t here…”

What’s a song you play that you really love?

The first tune Robert and I locked in on is called “Old Grimes.” That’s a fiddle

tune. Now, none of us are playing the fiddle. The designation of a “fiddle

tune” is about the form of the tune as much as the instrument you use to play. There’s an “A” part repeated twice and “B” part repeated twice and then you repeat the whole thing over and over and over. You trade back and forth between who’s playing the lead and rhythm. “Old Grimes” is one of 100 tunes that we

can run through.

Are all of you singing?

Usually the songs are instrumental, but

if there are lyrics, I usually take lead and the other two harmonize with me. I sang in a church choir, the concert choir in high school. There’s something

special about singing. It’s a little more of a generous offering to the people listening than just playing an instrument. A

little more earnest. If we had more time to rehearse, we’d do more vocal stuff with harmony. I used to sing duets with a woman for 10 years. I miss that. We called ourselves “Applejack Jam” and covered a lot of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.