Band of Jypsies

It’s 5 p.m. on a rainy weekday afternoon, and the four siblings known as Jypsi are roaring through “Minor Swing,” a rollicking jazz tune written in the 1930s by gypsy guitar legend Django Reinhardt. If it seems strange that they’re playing it on the tiny window-front stage of the Lower Broadway honky-tonk Layla’s Bluegrass Inn, you can’t tell it by scanning the crowd, a mix of tourists and locals caught up in the moment. Backed by drummer Gregg Stocki, whose touring gig is with Tracy Lawrence, and bassist Darren Theriault, who’s backed several charted country acts, Jypsi are producing their acoustic wall of sound amid a whirlwind of color and motion. They look like nothing so much as four manifestations of a single entity. Amber-Dawn, at 26, is vibrant and tomboyish, bouncing in place like a punkster with an aerobics instructor’s physique, her fiddle technique clean, crisp and classic, reflecting the band’s bluegrass origins. Scarlett, a model-pretty 24-year-old, tosses sheets of long hair back and forth across her face as she sways over her mandolin, picking out the song’s melodic theme and finding the improvisational sweet spot, as she does on everything from the Louvin Brothers to The Beatles. Frank, who’s 20 and looks like an unkempt desert mendicant or a member of Big Brother & the Holding Company, joins the rhythm section in anchoring the sound with his well-worn Martin between lightning-quick leads.

All three are superb musicians with deft touches and a great collective stage presence, but if there is an element that takes Jypsi from wonderful to jaw dropping, it is their youngest sister, Lillie Mae. Even at 16, she has a distinctive fiddle style, a bluesy and sensual counterpoint to Amber-Dawn’s more solidly traditional approach. And, she’s a captivating physical presence, slinky and sinuous, her legs and shoulders churning as she plays, her body moving like a candle flame in a drafty house. She is, at the moment, channeling pure gypsy soul.

A Jypsi show is an adventure, a wide-ranging tour through an open landscape of popular music. They’re versatile enough to cover Gram Parsons and George Jones, The Band and Billie Holiday, Del Shannon and Waylon Jennings. If their musical eclecticism makes them noteworthy, it’s the look that makes them one of a kind. Their calling card is a fashion sense that is unique and, in country music at least, not for the faint of heart, looking something like a cross between the Pussycat Dolls and the Mamas and Papas. Miniskirted, wrists laden with bracelets, wearing scarves, bandanas, big earrings and footwear that ranges from towering heels to green gumboots, the girls are a symphony of color and movement swirling around Frank, the slightly disheveled anchor of their sound.

No one familiar with country music would doubt that the combination might be a hard sell, particularly when it comes to radio, but Joe Galante, chairman of Sony BMG Nashville and one of the music industry’s most pragmatic balancers of art and commerce, is gladly taking on the challenge. But in a conservative genre that considered the Dixie Chicks “out there,” it won’t be an easy task.

For much of the past five years, Amber-Dawn, Scarlett, Frank and Lillie Mae Rische have spent four hours a day, six days a week on the stage at Layla’s, honing prodigious childhood talent into one of the most impressive combinations of sight and sound the street’s fabled honky-tonks have ever known.

They began the period as Silk ’N Saddle, when Lillie Mae was just 11 and the four of them looked like not much more than street urchins. Their parents had just divorced and the family band they had grown up with—led by their bass-playing father—was history. Lillie Mae, Frank and another sister, McKenna Grace, who had dropped out of the band, were living with their mother; Scarlett and Amber-Dawn were in their own apartment.

“They had nothing,” says Galante. “Their vehicle had broken down. They were really living off their tips. But they did what you’re supposed to do—they came to this town to play music and that’s what they were doing.”

Label A&R head Renee Bell took Galante to Layla’s on a weekday afternoon more than three years ago to watch them perform. They listened for a while, then walked outside.

“Why don’t we just go back in there and tell them we want to sign them?” said Galante. The excitement the siblings felt about the offer was muted by the fact that they had seen their share of promises and contracts over the years, and the end result was that they were broke and playing on Lower Broad. A friend had told them someone from RCA was coming, but they had no idea who Galante was, or that he and Bell were two of the most powerful and astute executives in the industry. They learned soon enough, landing on the label group’s Arista Nashville subsidiary along with Alan Jackson, Brooks & Dunn, Brad Paisley and American Idol winner Carrie Underwood, who had just been signed.