On August 9th, 2024, Compass Records Group will reissue trailblazing banjo player Alison Brown’s Grammy-nominated debut album Simple Pleasures. The album was produced by acoustic music purveyor and frequent Jerry Garcia collaborator, David Grisman, and recorded at Dawg Studio in Marin, CA.

It was recorded with the cast of Alison Krauss (fiddle), David Grisman (mandolin), Mike Marshall (guitar, fiddle, mandolin), Matt Eakle (flute), Joe Craven (percussion), and Jim Kerwin (bass).

Krauss wrote all the music on the album, which includes the first recorded versions of some of her most well-known compositions: “Mambo Banjo,” “Leaving Cottondale,” “Wolf Moon,” and “Weetabix.”

The reissue is available on limited-edition black and white swirl Vinyl, CD and all digital download platforms, and includes liner notes from Mike Marshall, recording engineer Dave Dennison, and Alison Krauss. The CD and vinyl download code versions also include three bonus tracks of never-before-released demos, recorded at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, CA in 1988.

The demos were produced by Richard Greene, who also played fiddle on the sessions, and feature David Grisman (mandolin), Mike Marshall (guitar), and Todd Phillips (bass).

Simple Pleasures was first released on Vanguard Records in 1990 but has been unavailable in all formats since the early 2000s. For the 2024 reissue, the original 8-track, 1” multitrack tapes were transferred at a resolution of 192kHz/36-bit, and remixed by Matt Coles at Compass Sound Studio in Nashville, the former Glaser Brothers Studio. The remixed album was mastered by Randy LeRoy at Tonal Park.