Jordan Tice

He grew up in Annapolis with parents who both played bluegrass; his mother, Sue Raines, had performed and recorded in the 1970s with the Buffalo Gals, one of the earliest bluegrass bands of women. After playing in rock bands he was drawn into the acoustic scene at the festivals his parents went to, and he studied jazz guitar and then majored in composition at Towson University. His first album, No Place Better (Patuxent, 2005), mostly his own instrumentals, was made with Ron Stewart on fiddle, Akira Otsuka on mandolin, Mike Munford on banjo and Mark Schatz on bass, with his mother fiddling on one track; it includes “Cuckoo’s Nest.” Long Story (Patuxent, 2008), again original instrumentals, had Casey Driessen, Noam Pikelny, Andy Hall, Mark MacGlashan and Schatz. In 2008 he also recorded as a trio with the banjo player Wes Corbett and the hammered dulcimer player Simon Chrisman.

As a sideman he played lead guitar on Frank Wakefield’s Ownself Blues (Patuxent, 2009), with Audie Blaylock, Mike Munford and Michael Cleveland, on pieces such as Wakefield’s “New Camptown Races,” and he worked with Tony Trischka and the Duhks and played mandolin on the Dave Rawlings Machine’s Nashville Obsolete (2015). With Trischka he played the music for Steve Martin’s score to As You Like It at New York’s Shakespeare in the Park in 2012. He lived in Boston from 2009 and in New York from 2012 to 2015. The Secret History (Patuxent, 2011), credited to the Jordan Tice Trio, was an instrumental album for guitar, bass and hammered dulcimer that drew on his composition studies.

After moving to Nashville in 2015 he made Horse County (Patuxent, 2016), the first of his records with his own singing, co-produced with Chris Eldridge and played by Kowert, Leslie, Mike Witcher, Haas, Shad Cobb and Pikelny. With Haas and Kowert he had formed the trio Haas Kowert Tice, which released You Got This in 2014; adding Leslie on mandolin, they became Hawktail, and recorded Unless (2018), Formations (2020), whose “The Tobogganist” is credited to all four members, and Place of Growth (2022) for Kowert’s Padiddle label, then Väsen & Hawktail (2024) with the Swedish group Väsen.

Motivational Speakeasy (Padiddle, September 2020), produced by Kenneth Pattengale of the Milk Carton Kids, began as another string-band record; Pattengale encouraged him to tighten his guitar parts and play alone, and the album leans on solo fingerstyle guitar in the line of Mississippi John Hurt, Bert Jansch, John Fahey and Leo Kottke, with songs such as “Walkin’” and “Bad Little Idea” and the instrumental “Ghost Story.” The instrumental EP Yesteryears (October 2021), five pieces recorded in a day with Kowert producing and playing bass, followed. He played guitar on The John Hartford Fiddle Tune Project, Vol. 1, nominated for a Grammy, and with Andrew Marlin of Watchhouse on two instrumental albums released in February 2021: Witching Hour, on “Hawk Is a Mule” and “Woodland Star,” and Fable & Fire, recorded at Echo Mountain in Asheville, on guitar and bouzouki. On 11 October 2024 he, Marlin and the fiddler Christian Sedelmyer released Wild Rose of Morning, a trio album of traditional songs and instrumentals including “Diamond Joe,” and in January 2025 Padiddle issued his EP Badlettsville, after a November 2024 single on the same label, “Mean Old World,” featuring Aoife O’Donovan and Marlin.