Concert Programs 2012

"BackStage" gives you the background and expertise that makes the music and dance Cityfolk presents come alive in so many dimensions -- historical, societal, musical, personal and emotional. Look for new BackStages by music expert and writer Jon Hartley Fox two appear about two weeks before each concert. Programs are not created for club shows.

Jon Hartley Fox, a Dayton native now living in California, has been writing about music, pop culture and the arts for over thirty years. His first book, King of the Queen City: The Story of King Records (Music in American Life), was published in September 2009 by the University of Illinois Press.

October 4, 2011

Huun-Huur-Tu

Once upon a time, the Republic of Tuva, situated in the exact geographic center of Asia, nestled in the mountains of southern Siberia, was known to Westerners, if at all, for its bizarre postage stamps. Tuva was beloved by stamp collectors worldwide in the 1920s and 1930s for its large, colorful, oddly-shaped stamps, many depicting such local scenes as a woman milking a yak, Tuvan folk wrestling, an airplane stampeding a herd of startled reindeer and, my personal favorite, what seems to be a race between a camel and a low-flying dirigible.

That was the old days, though. The most famous cultural export of modern Tuva is “throat singing,” and the best known throat-singers are found in Huun-Huur-Tu, one of the most fascinating and compelling ensembles on the world music circuit. The quartet of highly skilled singers and instrumentalists, based in the Tuvan capital of Kyzyl, has emerged as the leading ambassadors of Tuvan culture, taking its traditional music around the world, amazing and completely entrancing audiences in the U.S., Australia, Japan, Russia and throughout Europe.

Music critics have been singing the praises of Huun-Huur-Tu for years, and, if the critics haven’t always known what to make of the music, they have gamely tried to convey its special magic. Jazz Times heard “a rustic joyousness and unadulterated expressiveness” in the music, while folk and world music magazine Dirty Linen hailed its dualistic nature as “both very spiritual and down to earth, grounded in a strong sense of place, yet its appeal is universal.” To the Chicago Tribune Huun-Huur-Tu “is unfamiliar yet very accessible, an other-worldly but deeply spiritual music that is rooted in the sound of nature.”

The idea behind Huun-Huur-Tu came from an unlikely place—the annual Rose Bowl Parade in Pasadena, California. Kaigal-ool Khovalyg, a young man already known as one of Tuva’s most accomplished throat-singers, and two other Tuvan singing horsemen had been invited to ride in the 1992 Rose Parade. As a result of the trip, the three Tuvans decided to form a band and try to preserve traditional Tuvan music and culture in the face of modernization and a half-century of Soviet suppression. The paranoid powers in the Kremlin saw throat singing as subversive.

Tucked between Russia and Mongolia, Tuva was already a thriving society when Genghis Khan conquered it in 1207. Mongol and later Chinese forces ruled Tuva for centuries before it was made a Russian protectorate in 1914. Tuva was part of the Soviet Union between 1944 and 1991. Approximately 305,000 people live in Tuva, many of them semi-nomadic sheep and reindeer herders. Spiritually, these herders observe a distinctive regional blend of Buddhism and animism, with a bit of Orthodox Christianity mixed in. Their music is a direct result of their animistic beliefs.

The original version of Huun-Huur-Tu consisted of Kaigal-ool Khovalyg, brothers Alexander and Sayan Bapa and Albert Kuvezin. The Bapa rothers and Khovalyg had previously worked together in a state-sanctioned ensemble during the Soviet regime. Kuvezin eventually left to form a progressive Tuvan rock band called Yat-Kha; he was replaced by, in turn, Anatoli Kuular, Andrey Mongush and Radik Tyulyush, who joined H-H-T in 2005. Alexander Bapa left the group in 1995 to focus on music production. He was replaced by Alexei Saryglar.

The group’s initial name was Kungurtuk, but was soon changed to Huun-Huur-Tu, which means, literally, “sun propeller.” The idea doesn’t translate exactly, but “sun propeller” is a Tuvan term for the refracted mountain sunlight seen at dawn and dusk. These vertical rays of light struck the musicians in the group as an analogy for the kind of “cultural refraction” they had in mind for their music.

The ability to produce two notes simultaneously is called “throat singing” or, more properly, overtone singing. In Tuva, it’s called khoomei (“throat” in Mongolian); singers of khoomei are known as khoomigch. The skilled khoomigch starts by singing a note in the middle of his range, as loud and steady as possible. This low fundamental note serves as a drone, like with a bagpipe.

Next, the basic idea is to use the tongue to divide and seal the mouth into two sound chambers. By positioning the lips, tongue, cheeks, jaws and mouth just so, a second note can be sounded, a higher-pitched harmonic of the first note. Once those two have been established, the singer can emphasize different harmonics, thus creating a tune, by “adjusting the tension and geometry of the mouth” (to quote one learned explanation).

Khoomei is representational to the extreme, intended to be nothing more than a faithful and accurate imitation of sounds in nature. This use of mimesis, basically imitation for aesthetic purposes, makes perfect sense given the herders’ cultural isolation and intimate ties to nature, as well as their long hours in the saddle with little to think about.

Throat singers not only imitate everything from bird calls to the sound of rushing water, they also construct what could be called sonic “maps” that use throat singing, whistling and other vocal techniques to share specific, detailed topographical information about a physical landscape. One herder might then sing this “map” to another. They also achieve such natural “effects” as reverb, by reflecting the voice off the face of a cliff, and vibrato, by singing into a waterfall.

Throat singing is not something that’s studied in Tuva. Singers aren’t really taught how to do it; they just pick it up. Khovalyg, who worked as a nomadic herder until he was 21, picked up throat singing from hearing his grandfather do it. As he rode for hours seated in front of his grandfather on the horse, the young boy not only heard the singing but felt it, absorbing the vibrations through every tissue of his body. He says the singing came to him naturally. Most Tuvans learn the skill as children. Throat singing is said to calm herd animals.

Cross-cultural collaboration has been a priority for Huun-Huur-Tu from the beginning. On the group’s first couple of U.S. tours, H-H-T performed or recorded with such musicians as Johnny “Guitar” Watson, the Kronos Quartet, Ry Cooder, the Chieftains, Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead and Frank Zappa, to whom H-H-T dedicated the song “Ching Söörtükchülerining Yryzy” (Song of the Caravan Drivers). The quartet has toured and recorded with the Bulgarian women’s choir Angelite, recorded with banjo master Bela Fleck on his Outbound album of 2000 and worked with Scottish pipers Martyn Bennett and Mary MacMaster.

Ry Cooder used H-H-T’s music in his soundtrack for the film Geronimo, and if Cooder’s conflation of Tuvan and Native American music confused some listeners, it made perfect sense to the Tuvans. According to a recent study published in Russia, Tuvans are genetically linked more closely to Native American peoples like the Eskimo, Apache and Navajo than to any other group. Tuvans believe that Native Americans originated in their area.

Since Huun-Huur-Tu was last in Dayton in 2006, the band has continued to expand the boundaries for traditional Tuvan music. H-H-T’s most recent album, Eternal (2009) is its most ambitious effort yet. A collaboration with Grammy-nominated electronic musician and producer Carmen Rizzo (known for his work with Coldplay, k.d. lang, Alanis Morissette, Seal and Paul Oakenfold) and composer/arranger Mark Governor, Eternal has been hailed as a masterpiece and a world music landmark, an album that “combines the primordial sound of the Tuvan steppes with a modern sound of electronic beats and strings” and “honors both the past and the future” (Dirty Linen).

The album began with H-H-T going into the famed Fantasy Studio in Berkeley, California, and recording a number of its signature songs and tunes using such native Tuvan instruments as the igil, a horse-hair fiddle; the shoor, a vertical flute; the bowed byzanche, an erhu-like fiddle with two sets of strings; and the dünggür (shaman drum). Rizzo was then hired to mix the album, but as he listened to the music, he saw an opportunity to create something entirely new and “began taking liberties,” as Rizzo puts it.

To call Rizzo’s efforts an “electronic remix” would be a vast understatement. He crafted elegant, provocative soundscapes around and out of the group’s pieces, creating a highly engaging synthesis that sounds neither forced nor contrived and really is unlike anything you’ve heard before. The members of H-H-T were thrilled when they heard Rizzo’s work, in part because it reminded them in places of one of their all-time favorite bands—Pink Floyd. “It was a good space around our music, with our music,” said Bapa Sayan.

While remaining as true to tradition as they could, Kaigal-ool Khovalyg and his mates in Huun-Huur-Tu have performed musical alchemy by converting amateur “at home” music into professional on-stage entertainment, transforming a solo form into an ensemble style, combining elements that wouldn’t normally be combined and creating a unique synthesis of separate vocal and instrumental traditions. Huun-Huur-Tu makes the best kind of world music—the kind that makes you shake your head and appreciate what a wonderfully weird old world we live in.

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October 22, 2011

bohola with dancers from the Richens/Timm Academy of Irish Dance

Chicago’s ongoing pre-eminence in the world of Irish music was boldly proclaimed by a pair of young Windy City musicians at the All-Ireland championships in 1975. Only a very few Americans had previously won All-Ireland titles in the “Senior” division, but fiddler Liz Carroll and piano accordion wizard Jimmy Keane blew the doors off that year, each winning a solo title and combining for a duet victory as well. Keane would win five consecutive All-Ireland titles on the piano accordion, eventually establishing himself as the reigning master of his instrument and, in the opinion of many, the best-ever piano accordion player in Irish music.

Often hailed as the “savior” of the piano accordion, Jimmy Keane (not to be confused with the Dublin-born button-accordion player James Keane) was born in London of Irish-speaking parents from Connemara and Kerry. The family moved to Chicago in 1958 and Keane lives there to this day. He got his love for traditional Irish music from his father, a fine sean nós (“old style”) singer, and took up the piano accordion in the late 1960s. He launched his career as a professional musician playing in a duet with Cityfolk favorite Liz Carroll.

Today, Keane stands as one of the most celebrated Irish musicians on the planet: in 2010, he was named “Male Musician of the Year” by the Irish American News; this year, Keane was honored with the “Male Musician of the Decade” award by Live Ireland and by the Irish American News, which asserted, “In the halls of Irish music, one musician is unanimously recognized as the best at his instrument. The best who ever was. Jimmy Keane on piano accordion has become what it means to be the best in any art form. It is not enough to say he is a master musician. When it comes to the piano accordion, he is the maestro…The best. Period. No argument.”

Jimmy Keane first appeared on record in the mid-1970s on Traditional Irish Music in America: Chicago, one of a series of albums on Rounder documenting the state of Irish music in the U.S. He has recorded solo albums and has performed and recorded with some of the biggest names in Irish music over the years, including Liz Carroll, Michael Flatley, Mick Moloney, Eileen Ivers, Seamus Egan, Green Fields of America, and Dennis Cahill.

One of Keane’s most notable collaborative ventures was a trio with multi-instrumentalist Mick Moloney and singer/guitarist Robbie O’Connell that recorded a pair of classic albums for Green Linnet in the mid-1980s, There Were Roses (with special guest Liz Carroll) and Kilkelly. Keane has done considerable work in film and television as well. He was featured in the highly acclaimed BBC TV series and recording, Bringing It All Back Home, and on the soundtrack for the award-winning PBS documentary Out of Ireland. He also co-wrote the soundtrack for the PBS documentary Irish Chicago.

Bohola, a little village in County Mayo in the west of Ireland, consists of a post office, two pubs and a Catholic church. The “other” bohola, the acclaimed, award-winning duo performing tonight, consists of Jimmy Keane on piano accordion and harmony vocals and Pat Broaders on lead vocals and bouzar, an eight-string bass bouzouki-guitar hybrid. This bohola came together in 1999, originally as a trio with fiddler Sean Cleland. The band made its Dayton debut in 2003 with an appearance at the Cityfolk Festival.

The highly distinctive music produced by the Keane-Broaders partnership—“this big, huge, raw and powerful sound that came out of nowhere,” according to Keane—has set the world of traditional Irish music on fire. “We are like a glove,” says Keane, “instinctively darting in and out of the music as if we were ‘as-one’ playing the same big instrument.”

The band’s recording debut in 2002 was hailed by the Irish Voice as “one of the most impressive debut recordings ever.” Popular singer Kat Eggleston was added for the follow-up, bohola 4. Their most recent release, Jimmy Keane & Pat Broaders, received lavish critical praise; the Irish American News noted that “Chicago’s own hometown world champions…are two master musicians in their day and in their prime…Pat’s vocals get better and better and better, and no one can touch Jimmy on that magical accordion of his.” The Chicago Sun-Times called the album “Irish music for the new century.”

Clearly, working with Broaders—a native of Dublin who moved to Chicago in the mid-1990s—brings out the best in Keane. “Pat has this acute sense of music and rhythm that enables him to ‘lock in’ his bouzar playing to whatever I might do musically and rhythmically,” says Keane. “The synergy that results spurs on bohola and draws in the audience. And his singing is brilliant—if I could sing, I’d love to sing like Pat. We really listen to and respond to each other when we play, bending, twisting and caressing the music as it flows along. We are here to serve this great music and bring out what we feel is the best nature in the tunes and songs we play. We try to always play from the heart and bring to the audience the core and the spirit of the music we play and sing.”

Remembering Ann Richens by Cityfolk Founder Phyllis Brzozowska

When I think of Folk and Traditional Arts treasures of Dayton, Ohio, Ann Richens is right there at the top of my list.

One of my fondest memories of Ann Richens is seeing her dance with John Timm on the stage of the Victoria Theatre. It was during one of the Rhythm and Shoes concerts that Cityfolk produced in the early nineties. She danced with such joy, grace, precision and the embodied beauty of the Master dancer and teacher she was. It was a rare treat to see her on the big stage. Her role as teacher usually had her standing in the wings or coaching from the sidelines or judging at a competition.

In 1978, before Cityfolk was formed, I was doing a Celtic music radio show on WYSO-FM and a band I knew from Pittsburgh called “Devilish Merry” was coming through town. They were a great dance band that played ole’ timey music and Irish traditional music and I thought, “they could probably do a great ceili.” So, I called up Ann and suggested the idea. Ann was all for it. Ann and I together organized what I think was the first ceili with live music in Dayton at the Dayton Leiderkrantz Club on E. Fifth Street.

In the very beginning years of Cityfolk, (the early eighties) a lot of the Irish music we presented was in bars, Gilly’s and Canal Street Tavern, even the long-defunct Sam’s. When we wanted to make the leap to go into a concert hall, I asked Ann and group of other local Irish and Scottish cultural supporters to act as “guarantors.” Ann lead the way and was the first to step up to the plate with backing money which allowed us to take the concert into the auditorium at the Dayton Art Institute. Ann and all the guarantors got their money back and the Cityfolk Celtic Series was off and running. In just a few years, it moved into the Victoria Theatre with our very first presentation of the Chieftains and of course, Ann was in the audience along with many, many of her dance students and their families.

Ann’s dancers have graced the stages of Cityfolk concerts and the Festival more times than I can remember.

I actually took some Irish dance classes, myself, with Ann for a few years. I remember loving it. Ann was an extraordinary teacher. It was inevitable that the World Champion John Timm would come from her school, along with numerous others after him qualifying and ranking as top Irish dancers in the world. She had the ability to perceive each person’s ability, communicate and demonstrate exactly what they needed to take them to the next level and to keep growing to higher and higher levels of excellence. Dedicated and hard working sound wimpy when used to describe the fierce focus she brought to her life’s passion.
I take some comfort in knowing that her incredible skills have been passed to the next generation of teachers. Still, the world has lost a most exquisite gem, a glorious emerald of an artist, cultural treasure and brilliant human being.

I only got to glimpse a small portion of Ann’s rich and full life but it seems to me, to paraphase Rumi, “the beauty she loved was what she did.” I know the gifts I received from knowing and working with Ann will always stay with me.

May the grace and beauty Ann cultivated and nourished continue to shine in the countless lives she touched and may that light surround and carry her as she “sevens and threes” now with God.

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Tribute to Jelly Roll Morton:

November 12, 2011 - A Solo Piano Concert by Aaron Diehl

November 19, 2011 - Dave Greer and the Classic Jazz Stompers with special guest pianist James Dapogny

Jelly Roll Morton -- The Original

Jelly Roll Morton was the first great jazz artist.

He was born in New Orleans October 20, 1890—as we now know after years of uncertainty—and grew up there, learning the musical traditions of the place that was in the forefront of the creation of the music that came to be known as jazz. He lived an eventful and musically productive and sometimes difficult life and died in 1941 just shy of his 51st birthday.

Born Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe, October 20, 1890, Morton grew up in a Creole family in New Orleans, with among other advantages, hearing some classical music in concert settings and formal piano lessons. His great-grandmother was largely responsible for raising him. When she found out that, as an early bloomer as a jazz pianist, he was working in New Orleans sporting houses, she expelled him from the family home in 1907, fearing he’d be a bad influence on his sisters.

For the next ten years he traveled throughout the U. S., working as a Vaudevillian pianist—onstage and as a pit musician—refining his abilities as a musician, and creating a portfolio of compositions. At times other activities—pool hustling, gambling, running small scams like selling harmless and worthless patent medicine—tided him over. He played residencies in Chicago, from which his JELLY ROLL BLUES, the first published jazz composition, was issued in 1915.

Los Angeles was his headquarters from 1917 to early 1923. He continued his work, and traveling, as a musician but here also made a home with Anita Johnson Gonzalez, whom he sometimes referred to as his wife, and her mother. Morton seems to have worked with his wife in maintaining a brothel.

He returned to Chicago in the spring of 1923 and began the most visible, successful part of his career as recording artist—pianist and bandleader, touring bandleader and publishing composer. He recorded piano rolls for a number of labels and his Red Hot Peppers recordings were among Victor’s best sellers, kept in print for years after they were first issued. In 1927 he married Mabel Bertrand, a dancer from New Orleans working in Chicago.

In 1928 he and Mabel moved to New York City, increasingly the center of jazz business activity as the Democratic reform movement in Chicago took over and began clamping down on organized crime, particularly bootlegging, and graft. He still toured, recorded and played in the City. In 1930, his Victor contract ran out, and like other jazz artists on what was now a record label fighting for its life during the early days of the Depression, Morton now no longer recorded for Victor, though until 1934 they continued to issue recordings he had made.

At first doing well performing, including as a sideman and having a radio show, Morton eventually lost money in other business enterprises and—in a reassertion of an element of his New Orleans roots—in an attempt to ward off the effects of a voodoo curse.

In 1935 he moved, without Mabel, to Washington, D.C. He began to play in, and manage, a small nightclub there named, among other things, the Jungle Club. Not at all a glamorous, well-known club, the place nevertheless allowed him to meet many people who would eventually help him and to begin to cultivate the image of a jazz pioneer who’d “been there” at the very beginning of jazz. Among those people were Roy J. Carew, who published some of his music and Alan Lomax who recorded him for the Library of Congress. It was there that he was stabbed, and as a result was ordered by a doctor not to play the piano.

Through the 1930s bands had continued to record some of his music, notably the decades-old musically prophetic KING PORTER STOMP, so his name hadn’t dropped to total obscurity, at least among musicians.
In the late 1930s, as jazz was as prominent a component of America’s popular music as never before or since, there was a movement to look back at the jazz past and to earlier musicians, such as Morton, who had first brought the music to a wider public. Publicity from the Library of Congress recording sessions and a controversy with blues composer and publisher W. C. Handy via Robert Ripley’s “Believe it or Not” radio show—both covered in Downbeat magazine—gave Morton’s “jazz pioneer” image a boost, and he returned to New York in December, 1938 to make a comeback.

In New York he made some good recordings, under the name “Jelly Roll Morton’s New Orleans Jazzmen” for Bluebird (a Victor subsidiary) in September 1939, and a solo album called “New Orleans Memories” on the small General label in December, 1939. These were both intended to work from the “jazz pioneer” persona, which Morton seemed to relish.

In early 1939 he assembled, rehearsed and auditioned for appearances with a big band of the instrumentation typical of the period: four saxes, five or six brass, and four rhythm. This put the band in the same realm as those of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Benny Goodman and the Dorseys, and signaled Morton’s intention to be thought of as a contemporary artist, not merely an interesting relic. But on the night that this band was to open, Morton collapsed from the heart aliment that was to dog him for the remaining two years of his life. As he underwent a three-week hospital stay and a long recovery until he could be active again, this big band disbanded and its music, except for five arrangements Morton had written for it and one written by someone else, disappeared.

As Morton recovered, he turned to the available “jazz pioneer” opportunities, making smaller-band New Orleans Jazzmen recordings and a solo piano album. In January of 1940, he made some small-band recordings for General, his last commercial recordings, and in July of 1940 he appeared on the NBC radio show “The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street,” playing an abbreviated version of his most famous piece, KING PORTER STOMP.

In November 1940, driving his Cadillac and towing his Lincoln, Morton left for Los Angeles—again leaving Mabel behind—partly to benefit from the better climate. Unwell enough to have someone else play piano, he organized a band there. But before anything could come of this and before the New Orleans revival that benefited many of his colleagues could help him, he died on July 10, 1941 in Los Angeles County General Hospital in Anita Gonzales’ arms.

Morton’s early solo piano recordings, impressive range of compositions, skill as an arranger and organizer, and Library of Congress interviews would each assure him an estimable position in the history of Jazz. But he did them all, and that’s what makes him a legend.

—Excerpted from an essay by Morton historian James Dapogny. Read the complete essay here.

Aaron Diehl
A native of Columbus, Aaron Diehl is the 2011 Cole Porter Fellow in Jazz of the American Pianists Association. Hailed by the New York Times as a “revelation,” Diehl’s distinctive interpretations of the music of Jelly Roll Morton, Scott Joplin, Art Tatum, Duke Ellington and other past jazz masters pay homage to the tradition while establishing his own original voice. Diehl has performed with the Wynton Marsalis Septet, Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Benny Golson, Hank Jones and Wycliffe Gordon and has been featured on Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz on NPR. Diehl made his recording debut in 2006 with Mozart Jazz and subsequently released Live at Caramoor. His latest trio CD is entitled Live at the Players. Diehl is a 2007 graduate of the Juilliard School, where his teachers included Kenny Barron and Eric Reed. His honors include Lincoln Center’s prestigious Martin E. Segal Award in 2004 and Outstanding Soloist at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2002 “Essentially Ellington” Competition. Immediately following graduation from high school, he toured with the Wynton Marsalis Septet.

James Dapogny

Pianist, bandleader, writer, educator and musicologist James Dapogny is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the life and music of Jelly Roll Morton. He is the author of Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton: The Collected Piano Music, and he wrote the liner notes for the Rounder box-set of Morton’s Library of Congress recordings. With his Grammy-nominated Chicago Jazz Band, Dapogny has recorded numerous albums of traditional jazz over the past 35 years, including three recordings, The Piano Music of J.R. Morton, Laughing at Life and Original Jelly Roll Blues, containing his brilliant interpretations of Morton’s music. In addition to his exemplary work with early jazz, Dapogny has also reconstructed two “lost” operas by legendary jazz pianist James P. Johnson, “De Organizer” and “The Dreamy Kid.” The holder of a doctorate of musical arts in composition, Dapogny has taught at the University of Michigan since 1966. A native of Berwyn, Illinois, Dapogny has also served as an editor and editorial board member for Jazz Masterworks Editions, a collaborative project of Oberlin College and the Smithsonian Institute.

Dave Greer’s Classic Jazz Stompers

Formed in Dayton in 1981 by banjo-playing attorney Dave Greer, Dave Greer’s Classic Jazz Stompers is now hailed as “one of the best jazz bands playing today” by The American Rag. This modern-day “territory band” specializes in jazz from the 1920s and 1930s, playing the timeless music of such titans as Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bix Beiderbecke, King Oliver, Sidney Bechet and their contemporaries from the time when classic jazz was evolving into small band swing. The exceptional combination of Chris Moore (cornet), Erik Greiffenhagen (clarinet, tenor and soprano saxophone), Gordon Moore (trombone) and Greg Dearth (alto saxophone, clarinet, violin) gives the Classic Jazz Stompers a formidable—and very versatile—four-man front line, a rarity in traditional jazz bands of this size. The band plays every Wednesday night at Alex’ on 725 Supper Club and has released seven albums on its own CJS label; the most recent is Bipolar Jazz (2007). Rough Wind and Darling Buds (2004) is the band’s tribute to Jelly Roll Morton.

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November 16, 2011

Bassekou Kouyate and Ngoni Ba

When it comes to music, there is traditional, and then there is really traditional. In bluegrass, for example, “traditional” refers to music made in the 1940s and 1950s; with jazz, it’s the 1920s. It’s a bit different in the West African nation of Mali, where Bassekou Kouyate, Mali’s foremost ngoni virtuoso, taps directly into musical traditions dating back more than 1,000 years. Perhaps that kind of grounding gave Kouyate the freedom to upend tradition and create a new old sound of his own, one The Guardian (UK) has described as “ancient and utterly contemporary…like some African answer to [Jimi] Hendrix.”

Born in 1966 in the village of Garana on the banks of the Niger River, Kouyate was a member of a respected musical family. His mother was a praise singer and his father was a virtuoso on the ngoni, a traditional variety of spike lute found (and known by many names) throughout West Africa. Kouyate grew up surrounded by ngoni music; the ancient instrument “was the toy of the children in my family,” he recalls. By his own estimation, he was a “master” of the ngoni by the time he was 12.

Kouyate has been pushing back musical boundaries since his teenage days. “I started to add more strings [to the ngoni],” he says, “and my father would say, ‘No. What are you doing? You can’t do that. It’s not a guitar.’ Of course, I respected tradition, the cultural heritage, but I knew it was also good to be creative. So I would politely nod in agreement with my father and add the extra strings anyway. Now I play with [the traditional] four, but also with seven or even nine strings.”

After moving to Bamako, Mali’s capital, when he was 19, Kouyate met kora master Toumani Diabaté and began playing in Diabaté’s trio. He recorded several popular albums with Diabaté, including Songhai and Djelika, culminating in 1999 with Kulanjan, a joint album with Diabaté and U.S. blues and world music icon Taj Mahal. The experience led Mahal to call Kouyate “a genius, living proof that the blues comes from [Mali].” 

No one has been more innovative with the ngoni than Kouyate, who has forever changed the perception of his chosen instrument. Kouyate, for example, was the first ngoni player to stand while playing, with the ngoni strapped on like a guitar. That may sound like a little thing, but it scandalized the traditionalists in Mali, who vigorously debated whether Kouyate should be “allowed” to make this change.

Kouyate’s most startling innovation was to assemble an ensemble with the ngoni as the lead voice. Having taken that step, he must have thought, “why not four?” Kouyate formed his band, Ngoni Ba (“big ngoni”), in 2005. Ngoni Ba, the first major ensemble to be built around the ngoni, has an instrumental frontline of four ngonis, two standard instruments, a lower-pitched “big ngoni” and an even lower bass ngoni; the latter two are Kouyate’s inventions.

The four-ngoni approach was truly revolutionary, but it works quite well, and as an NPR commentator pointed out, “This is Kouyate’s personal vision of his own rich, multicultural nation, and it feels as fresh and imaginative as it does authentic. He just explodes with ideas and energy.” The Independent in London calls Ngoni Ba “the best rock and roll band in the world.”

Augmenting the ngonis in Ngoni Ba are renowned vocalist Amy Sacko—often known, for what it’s worth, as “the Tina Turner of Mali”—and two percussionists, playing a West African pressure drum called a tama and various sizes of drums made from gourds called calabashes. (Sacko and Kouyate are married and when not working with Ngoni Ba, the two stay very busy performing at traditional wedding parties in Bamako and throughout Mali.)

“The ngoni allows any experience,” Kouyate says, “because it can be harmonized with all kinds of sounds and rhythms. With this instrument, you can play blues, jazz and classical music. The ngoni is one of the first instruments of Mali. It’s a mythical instrument full of history, and people are forgetting it. This instrument must not be neglected. It’s bound to the history of this country and of its people.”

The kora is the musical instrument usually associated with the West African griot tradition, but unlike the kora, which is only a few hundred years old, the ngoni has been used to accompany griot storytelling since way before the days of Sundiata Keita, the founder of the Mali Empire who died in 1255.

The body of the ngoni is a hollowed-out, canoe-shaped piece of wood with a dried goat skin stretched over it like a drum. “In the old days,” says Kouyate, “it was made with a calabash and the skin from the head of a cow.” The neck is a fretless length of dowel that inserts into the body; the ngoni usually has either four or seven strings. Because of the instrument’s sound, method of playing and drum-like construction, the ngoni is considered to be an African ancestor of the American banjo.

Bassekou Kouyate and Ngoni Ba have recorded two albums, both issued on vinyl as well as CD. The debut, Segu Blue, released in 2007 by a German record company, won the BBC Radio 3 World Music Award for Album of the Year, and appeared on world music charts all over Europe. The BBC award was especially important to Kouyate. “It puts Mali in the spotlight,” he says. “It’s a sign of respect.”

The band’s second album, I Speak Fula, was released in 2010 and licensed in the U.S. to leading independent label Sub-Pop. Featuring guests artists Toumani Diabate and Vieux Farka Touré and the soaring vocals of Amy Sacko, I Speak Fula was one of Mojo’s Albums of the Year and in the words of Spin, “effortlessly mixes the rapid-fire pluck of bluegrass, the doleful churn of the blues, the joyous pulse of Afropop, and the caffeinated whirl of high-velocity rock.”

Despite its groove-alicious nature, Kouyate insists his music is not just for dancing. “It’s to make people’s heads work,” Kouyate asserts, “to wake them up. We work with people’s thoughts and their morals. If they are ill, the music heals them.” On the other hand, “The new album was made with this young audience in mind,” he says. “It is for them that we have quickened the tempos on several numbers and added touches like the wah-wah pedal to bring more excitement.” 

Back in 1996, Kouyate and Djelimady Tounkara, the legendary guitarist from the Rail Band, were among a group of Malian musicians invited to Cuba to record an album with an all-star assemblage of Cuban musicians and singers. Producer Nick Gold’s idea was to showcase the two-way musical street of influence and ideas that has existed for centuries between West Africa and Cuba. For some reason(s), the Malians never made it to Cuba. Forced to jettison his original concept, Gold recruited additional Cuban musicians and recorded what became The Buena Vista Social Club.

Kouyate and Tounkara finally got their chance to record with the Cubans 14 years later, in 2010. Alongside his old boss Toumani Diabaté, renowned Malian griot singer Kasse Mady Diabaté and balafon player Lassana Diabaté, Kouyate recorded AfroCubism with singer and guitarist Eliades Ochoa, José Angel Martinez and Grupo Patria, one of Cuba’s most famous bands. “It was as though the musicians had been holding back their ideas and energy for that moment,” says Nick Gold, who produced the album. “After we’d waited so long, it all came together remarkably easily and spontaneously. The group had never played together before but the music just poured out.”

Kouyate has performed at the Royal Albert Hall in London, the WOMAD Festival, Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York City and throughout the world. He toured extensively as the solo ngoni player in Ali Farka Touré’s band and was one of the main musicians on Touré’s posthumous album Savane. In addition to collaborations with Taj Mahal, Vieux Farka Touré, Carlos Santana and bluesman Otis Taylor, Kouyate has appeared on Youssou N’Dour’s album Rokku mi Rokka and Dee Dee Bridgewater’s Red Earth, and was featured on Bela Fleck’s Grammy-winning album Throw Down Your Heart and Fleck’s subsequent Africa Project tours.    

Like the griots of old from whom he is descended, Bassekou Kouyate is a storyteller, a representative of his people and a reconciler of the ancient and contemporary. Kouyate’s mission has been to elevate the ngoni, and while he’s added a bit of rock stagecraft to do that, he has never disrespected the music or the tradition.“Kouyate’s music doesn’t sound as if it were diluted in search of some international crossover,” wrote a New York Times critic. “It’s activating kinships and lineages that were there all along, waiting to be plugged in.”

“We are a new generation now. I can’t just do what my father and grandfather did,” Bassekou Kouyate explains. “I listened hard. I worked hard. I thought if I did that, the music would do OK.”

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December 4, 2011

Natalie MacMaster: Christmas in Cape Breton

Christmas is the best time of the year for renowned Canadian fiddler and step-dancer Natalie MacMaster. As a girl growing up on Cape Breton Island, MacMaster was part of a large extended family and tight-knit community, and the holiday season was the high point of her year. Now that she’s a mother with a family of her own—and living several hundred miles from Cape Breton in the Ottawa Valley of Ontario—family and family traditions are even more important to her. With her husband, fiddler Donnell Leahy, they are creating their own new traditions for their growing family.

Natalie MacMaster’s newest holiday offering is Christmas in Cape Breton, a very special holiday celebration that joyfully recreates the Christmas customs of her family home on Cape Breton Island off the east end of Nova Scotia. The tuneful new program for the whole family blends familiar Christmas carols and songs with Cape Breton fiddle tunes, lively step-dancing and audience favorites. MacMaster and her band— Mac Morin (piano), Nathaniel Smith (cello), John Chiasson (bass) and JD Blair (drums)—will be joined for a few songs by the Kettering Children’s Choir.

“We have a lot packed into the show,” says MacMaster of Christmas in Cape Breton. “We offer a bit of a contemporary edge to some of our tunes, and other tunes are very beautiful and deep and more thought provoking. But for the most part it’s light, happy, joyful music. There’s lots of dancing, lots of Christmas music, there’s a local choir guesting, a couple of real tender moments where my mother speaks to the audience. There are some Christmas carols, of course, and Christmas melodies played on the fiddle, and some traditions I share with the audience of Cape Breton during Christmastime.”

The northern-most island of the Canadian Maritime province of Nova Scotia, Cape Breton Island is home to not quite 150,000 people, many of them of Scottish descent. The island, about the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined, is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean (on the south and east sides) and the Gulf of Saint Lawrence (north and west). John Cabot is considered the first modern European to visit the island, in 1497; he was greeted when he arrived by members of the native Mi’kmaq tribe, who are still a major presence on the island.

Cape Breton was initially under Portuguese hegemony, but was part of the French empire by the early 1600s. British and French forces traded control of Cape Breton back and forth over the next several decades until 1763, when it was merged with Nova Scotia (“New Scotland”) and became a part of the British colonies in North America.

Some of the earliest settlers on Cape Breton after English control were farmers from Ireland. In the first half of the 19th century, approximately 50,000 Highland Scots arrived, evicted from their land at home by the forced displacement now known as the Highland Clearances. These Scots became the dominant cultural group on the island and have had the biggest influence upon the evolution of the music, dance and traditional culture of Nova Scotia in general and Cape Breton Island in particular.

Born in 1972 in Troy, Inverness County, Nova Scotia, Natalie MacMaster was part of a musical family in a very musical environment; Natalie’s uncle, Buddy MacMaster, was one of the premier fiddlers in the area and the biggest influence on her fiddling. Natalie began playing fiddle at a young age, giving her first public performance at age nine. She recorded her first album, Four on the Floor, when she was 16, about the same time she began step dancing.

“That happened very naturally,” she says of her recording debut. “I just played, and people started asking me to play at concerts, and so I did, and one thing led to another. I remember when I was 16 hearing another 16-year-old on the radio who made a recording. I thought, ‘If he can do it, I can do it too.’ I listen to it now, and it really pleases me. I did the whole thing [recording and mixing] in a day. That’s kind of unheard of in this day and age. It was just a lovely little project back then, and I don’t think there’s been any record that’s meant that much to me.”

The traditional Cape Breton music that MacMaster began playing at a young age is dance music, community music (as opposed to “at-home” music) that’s primarily played on the fiddle and piano. “Its rhythms come from the dancing,” says MacMaster. “It’s dance music. The traditional Cape Breton style of dance has been partnered with the fiddle music for forever. A sign of a good fiddler is one who can accompany the dance and keep the beat. That’s why the very deep groove of the music stays.

“The Cape Breton style is almost like a genealogy, the music of our ancestors. I play, sing and dance to music that carries on a bloodline, and that’s very powerful.” The music is highly rhythmic and highly infectious. “It’s such a pure, honest music,” she asserts. “It doesn’t come from wealth and popularity. It comes from tradition and family. Therefore it has longevity. I don’t think it will ever stop being appealing to people of all walks of life.”

Even so, MacMaster prepared for a career as a teacher rather than as a musician. “It never dawned on me growing up that I’d be doing this as a career,” she says. “All the fiddlers I knew had day jobs.”
MacMaster followed Four on the Floor with a couple more self-released albums and then signed with Rounder; her label debut was No Boundaries, in 1996.

MacMaster’s most recent album, released November 1, is Cape Breton Girl, her first studio recording in five years. The album represents a return to MacMaster’s traditional roots in Cape Breton fiddling and is true to that high-spirited dance music. “While my other albums have included traditional music they have also been more exploratory, more arranged,” she explains. “It’s the piano and fiddle—the core instruments of Cape Breton music—that make up the bulk of the sound.”

In addition to the four members of her working band, Cape Breton Girl also includes contributions from one of MacMaster’s musical sisters-in-law, pianist Erin Leahy, and several old friends from Nova Scotia, including guitarists Dave MacIsaac and Scott MacMillan and Matt MacIsaac on whistle, flute and bagpipes.

With 11 highly acclaimed albums (and a concert DVD) to her credit, Natalie MacMaster is internationally regarded as the foremost standard bearer for the traditional Cape Breton fiddling style. She has collaborated on record and in performance with a dizzying array of musicians that includes Alison Krauss, Yo-Yo Ma, Carlos Santana, Paul Simon, Bela Fleck, Faith Hill, the Chieftains, Luciano Pavarotti, Mark O’Connor and numerous symphony orchestras. The Boston Herald says that “To call Natalie MacMaster the most dynamic performer in Celtic music today is high praise, but it still doesn’t get at just how remarkable a concert artist this fiddler has become.”

MacMaster has won numerous important musical honors in Canada and the U.S., including Juno and East Coast Music awards, and has earned Grammy nominations for several of her albums. She won her first Grammy last year, for her contributions to superstar cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s holiday album, Songs of Joy and Peace. In 2006, MacMaster was made a member of the Order of Canada, a lifetime achievement award (and Canada’s highest civilian honor) that celebrates accomplishment in a number of fields. She is one of the youngest recipients of that honor. She has also received honorary degrees from several institutions of higher learning.

MacMaster and husband Donnell Leahy are both on the road for much of the year (“We’re always on tour,” says MacMaster), and even though some or all of their four children are usually with MacMaster and/or Leahy, time together for the holidays is especially precious to them. MacMaster has recently been traveling with her two young daughters—ages 4 and 10 months—and her mother in tow; Leahy has lately had their two-year-old son on the road with him, traveling with his family band Leahy.

Natalie MacMaster loves touring and she loves performing. She loves being at home with her husband and children for Christmas even more. She says that these Christmas in Cape Breton performances help get her in the Christmas spirit and ready to celebrate with her family back home in Ontario. “We’ve done holiday songs and holiday shows, but this was our first more serious attempt at a Christmas show,” says MacMaster. “I think this is the best time of year. I will be baking and loving up my family. I am a Christmas girl.”

Kettering Children’s Choir
The Kettering Children’s Choir has established a local and national reputation of choral excellence and is one of the largest and most successful children’s choral programs in the state of Ohio. It was founded in 1986 and now includes over 200 singers from 9 counties and 30 Miami Valley communities. Singers are admitted to the program by audition. Four of the choirs rehearse weekly at Rosewood Arts Centre in Kettering.
The Choir performing tonight is the advanced treble Concert Choir, directed by Natalie DeHorn (co-founder and Artistic Director of KCC). These singers range in age from 13 to 18 and many have been in the Kettering Childrens Choir for many years.

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February 11, 2012

Dailey & Vincent

Very few bands, in any style of tradition-based music, have stirred up the commotion upon making its debut than the bluegrass outfit known as Dailey & Vincent did in 2008. Hailed by the Wall Street Journal as “a new dynasty in bluegrass,” Dailey & Vincent released its first album to rapturous acclaim, tore up festival and concert audiences across the country with exciting, high-energy performances and capped its first year by sweeping the 2008 International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) awards, winning seven awards, unprecedented for a new act. In additions to wins for Album of the Year and Vocal Group of the Year, Dailey & Vincent took home the awards for Emerging Artist and Entertainer of the Year, the only time that’s ever happened.

Jamie Dailey and Darrin Vincent had amassed years of high-level musical experience before combining forces in 2008. Dailey joined Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver as lead singer in 1998 and worked with that trend-setting band through 2007, during which time the band earned the IBMA Vocal Group of the Year Award seven times. He has also recorded with Dolly Parton, Ricky Skaggs and Rhonda Vincent.

Darrin Vincent is probably best known for the 10 years he spent as a member of Ricky Skaggs’ band, Kentucky Thunder, with which Vincent won five Grammy Awards and eight IBMA awards for Instrumental Group of the Year. Vincent began his musical career at age six in the family band, the Sally Mountain Show, along with his older sister Rhonda Vincent. In addition to Ricky Skaggs, Vincent has recorded with his sister and such artists as Earl Scruggs, John Hartford, Dolly Parton, Vince Gill and Emmylou Harris.

Though Vincent and Dailey had worked in the same musical circles for years, they didn’t really know each other until 2001, when they met for breakfast to discuss working together. Riding home, they began singing in the car. “When we heard that, it was instant,” says Vincent. “We knew it sounded unique, and really tight. Our voices just blend so uniquely together. It blows my mind. Where I’m weak, he’s strong. And where he’s weak, I’m strong. We think alike, and we sing alike. So it works out well.”

The band Dailey & Vincent—which consists of Jamie Dailey (guitar, bass, lead and harmony vocals), Darrin Vincent (mandolin, bass, guitar, lead and harmony vocals), Christian Davis (guitar, harmony vocals), Joe Dean, Jr. (banjo, guitar, harmony vocals), Jeff Parker (mandolin, guitar, harmony vocals) and Jesse Stockman (fiddle)—has recorded five widely acclaimed albums: Dailey & Vincent, Brothers from Different Mothers, Singing from the Heart, Dailey & Vincent Sing the Statler Brothers and most recently, The Gospel Side of Dailey & Vincent.

Dailey & Vincent topped the bluegrass charts in Billboard and Bluegrass Unlimited and produced three number one singles in “By the Mark,” “More Than a Name on a Wall” and “Sweet Carrie.” The subsequent albums have been equally successful. Brothers from Different Mothers and Sing the Statler Brothers both held the top position on the Billboard chart, and Sing the Statler Brothers won Album of the Year honors from the IBMA in 2010. The Gospel Side debuted at #1 on Billboard and is still there as of this writing.

The Statler Brothers tribute and the new gospel album are marketed exclusively through the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain, an innovative partnership that puts the albums in the chain’s 608 restaurants in 42 states and markets it online. Dailey & Vincent approached Cracker Barrel after Rounder, the label for the band’s first three albums, passed on the Statler Brothers album on the grounds that tribute albums typically don’t sell very well (a seriously incorrect assumption, as it turned out). Cracker Barrel execs were sold on the idea after attending a Dailey & Vincent concert at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville and watching the audience explode and give the band three standing ovations after a brief set of Statler songs.

Dailey & Vincent Sing the Statler Brothers is a perfect (and inspired) meeting of artist, material and style. The Statler Brothers sound, beginning with “Flowers on the Wall” in 1965, has been a huge—if generally uncredited—influence upon later generations of bluegrass, country and Southern gospel singers. “Darrin and I have always been huge Statler Brothers fans,” says Dailey. “They were my childhood heroes.”

“We wanted to preserve the thread of traditional bluegrass,” adds Vincent, of bringing the Statler repertoire to the style, “while extending a hand to people who haven’t heard us before and aren’t that familiar with bluegrass music.”

“When they came to us to get our blessing on this project, they explained it, and I said, ‘Can you make our music bluegrass?,’ recalls Harold Reid (aka Lester “Roadhog” Moran) of the Statler Brothers, one of only six acts inducted into both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Gospel Music Hall of Fame. “They said, ‘We can make any song bluegrass.’ They caught every trick we ever used. I mean, every little thing. And they either used it or improved on it.”

Dailey & Vincent’s vocal prowess and versatility have launched the band to the top of the bluegrass world in a few short years. Not together even five years yet, Dailey & Vincent has already won IBMA’s top award, Entertainer of the Year, three times.

The New York Times has called the band “the most celebrated new bluegrass act of the last few years,” and it’s hard to argue with that assessment. Billboard calls Jamie Dailey “the greatest pure tenor singer since Ira Louvin” (that’s high praise indeed), while that same Times review observed that “Dailey’s voice [is] cleansing, a high-pitched tenor that pierces through the band’s nimble, complex arrangements…Stunning.”  
      “We do feel like we’re chiseling away at it, and we’re having some success,” says Jamie Dailey of the band’s ascent. “We’re blessed to have the career that we have, but you can never take anything for granted,” adds Darrin Vincent. “We stay humble and keep it in the front of our minds that nothing lasts forever. We were lucky enough to find each other.”

with special guests Joe Mullins and the Radio Ramblers

If there is such a thing as destiny, surely Joe Mullins is living his. The son of the late Paul “Moon” Mullins, a legendary radio broadcaster and bluegrass fiddler, Joe Mullins was born into and brought up in the heart of the bluegrass world, where such folks as Ralph Stanley, Bobby and Sonny Osborne and the Boys from Indiana were not just musical influences, but family friends and regular visitors to the Mullins home.

Joe Mullins first made his mark playing banjo alongside his father in Traditional Grass, a band they formed in 1983 with singer-guitarist Mark Rader. A fine, hardcore bluegrass band, Traditional Grass toured widely and recorded four popular and critically acclaimed albums for Rebel, the best of which were I Believe in the Old Time Way and Songs of Love and Life. When Mullins decided to focus his energies on his radio career in 1995, Traditional Grass disbanded rather than reorganize without him.

Mullins resurfaced in 1997 as a member of the bluegrass “super-group” Longview, the all-star band that also included Don Rigsby, James King, Dudley Connell, Glen Duncan and Marshall Wilborn. Longview performed sporadically to wildly enthusiastic audiences and recorded three superb albums: Longview, High Lonesome and Lessons in Stone.

Cityfolk favorites Joe Mullins & the Radio Ramblers—which includes Joe Mullins (banjo, vocals), Mike Terry (mandolin, vocals), Adam McIntosh (guitar, vocals), Evan McGregor (fiddle, vocals) and Tim Kidd (bass)—was formed in 2006. The hard-working band, nominated for IBMA’s Emerging Artist of the Year Award in 2011, performed in almost 20 states and three Canadian provinces last year and has an even busier year scheduled for 2012.

Joe Mullins & the Radio Ramblers released a pair of outstanding albums in 2010, Rambler’s Call and Hymns from the Hills, both for Rebel. Hymns from the Hills, which takes its name from a bluegrass and country gospel program Moon Mullins used to host on WPFB in Middletown, is an outstanding all-gospel set that showcases the band’s fine vocal work and features such guests as Ralph Stanley, Doyle Lawson, Larry Sparks and Rhonda Vincent. A nice historical touch is the inclusion of Aubrey Holt’s “We Missed You in Church Last Sunday,” the title song from the 1974 debut album by Paul Mullins, Noah Crase and the Boys from Indiana.

In addition to his performing and recording work with the Radio Ramblers, Mullins is an award-winning broadcaster. Mullins bought WBZI, a struggling AM radio station in Xenia, in 1995 and revived the station with an astute combination of bluegrass and classic country music programming, hard work, smart promotion and an intensely local orientation that flies in the face of current industry trends. His approach seems to be working, as he’s added a couple more stations in recent years; Mullins’ Classic Country Radio Network consists of WBZI, WEDI in Eaton and WKFI in Wilmington. Mullins was named Broadcaster of the Year in 2011 by the Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Music in America.

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February 25, 2012

Genticorum

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April 24, 2012

De Temps Antan

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April 25, 2012

Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis

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