Roger Mason

Breakfast Special, a group of experimental bluegrass musicians from New York City active in the mid-1970s, had Tony Trischka on banjo and pedal steel, Andy Statman on mandolin and saxophone, Kenny Kosek on fiddle, Stacy Phillips on Dobro, Jim Tolles on guitar and Richard Crooks on drums, with Mason on bass. Its album Breakfast Special (Rounder 3012), recorded at Blue Sea Studio in Baltimore and Dimension Sound in Boston, has him singing lead on “Sugarbee” and harmony on other tracks, some alongside Joe Val. The same circle backed Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard on Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard (Rounder 0054, 1976). Mason played bass with Gerrard, Kosek, Phillips and Crooks on Dickens’s “Working Girl Blues,” cut at House of Music in West Orange, New Jersey.

In 1978 Peter Rowan and the fiddler Tex Logan formed the Green Grass Gringos, with Lamar Grier on banjo, Barry Mitterhoff on mandolin and Mason on bass. Two songs the band recorded in April 1978 at Zaz Studios in San Antonio, Texas, are on Rowan’s first Flying Fish album, Peter Rowan. Mason then went to Japan with Rowan, Richard Greene, Trischka and Statman as the Red Hot Pickers, and the five recorded at Nippon Columbia’s studios in Tokyo. Two albums came out on the Better Days label in 1979: Hiroshima Mon Amour, under Rowan’s name, with songs such as “Come All Ye Tender Hearted” and “Rosalee McFall,” and the Bluegrass Album by Rowan, Greene and the Red Hot Pickers, which includes a bass solo by Mason. More of the Tokyo recordings, among them “Willow Garden,” “Jimmy Brown the Newsboy,” “Old, Old House” and “Hobo Song,” were issued in the United States as Peter Rowan with the Red Hot Pickers (Spindrift, 1984).