"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.
Jon Hartley Fox, a Dayton native now living in California,
has finished his first book, King Of The Queen City: The
Story of King Records, to be published next year by the
University of Illinois Press. He has been writing about music,
pop culture and the arts for over thirty years.
September
16, 2006
Aurelio Martinez
The story of fast-rising star
Aurelio Martinez and his music
begins almost 400 years ago with a shipwreck.
In 1635, a pair of Spanish slave ships wrecked
off the coast of the Caribbean island of St. Vincent.
The ships were loaded with men, women and children
from what is now Nigeria. Many of the slaves escaped
from the sinking ships and swam to the island,
where they were welcomed and sheltered by the
Arawak, the Carib Indians who inhabited St. Vincent,
an island in the Lesser Antilles due north of
Venezuela.
Over time, the Africans intermarried
with their Arawak hosts, creating a new Afro-Carib
ethnic group known collectively as Garinagu
(“Black Caribs” elsewhere in the region).
Garifuna is the more commonly used term
for this group of people in modern times, though
technically Garifuna is the word for
an individual member of the larger group and also
the name of their traditional language.
As part of an ongoing squabble
with France, the English attacked and conquered
St. Vincent in 1796 and then applied a harsh and
shamefully racist punishment for the vanquished.
The British sorted the Garifuna into two groups.
Those who looked “more Indian” were
judged non-threatening and allowed to stay.
Those who looked “more
African” were exiled to the island of Roatán,
off the coast of Honduras, more than 1,000 miles
away. Fully half of the 4,000 exiled Garifuna
died on the trip; the survivors quickly moved
to the mainland, where they found employment as
soldiers for the Spanish.
There are today an estimated
200,000 Garifuna living in the Central
American countries of Honduras (home to more than
half of the total), Belize, Nicaragua and Guatemala,
and in several U.S. cities. It varies by country,
but most Garifuna speak Spanish and/or
English, as well as, in much lesser numbers, Garifuna,
the traditional language.
The distinctive music of the
Garifuna, including such styles as
punta and paranda, has become popular
throughout the world over the last 20 years or
so. And that brings the tale back to Aurelio Martinez,
one of the handful of younger musicians in the
region working to preserve this traditional music.
Born in 1970 in a remote fishing
village on the coast of Honduras, Aurelio Martinez
is one of the foremost traditional musicians in
Central America. The acclaimed singer, songwriter,
guitarist and percussionist was the youngest of
10 children born to a musical Garifuna
family. Aurelio was playing guitar and drums by
the time he was six. He was encouraged and inspired
by his father, mother and grandmother and learned
many songs under their tutelage. “I have
been very fortunate to learn so much of my traditions
and culture from my parents,” says Martinez.
“Unfortunately, many young people now don’t
even speak the language [Garifuna].
The traditional form of music
that most appealed to Martinez was paranda,
a guitar and percussion-driven style that sounds
something like a blend of American blues, guitar
music from Mali and Senegal, Cuban son
and Afro-Caribbean drumming. There is a striking
similarity between this music and the music of
such West African guitarists as Ali Farka Toure
and Mansour Seck. When American writer Dan Rosenberg
asked musician Jursino Cayetano about this connection,
Cayetano (reportedly the last living parandero,
or paranda master, in Guatemala) was
matter-of-fact in his reply. “Of course,”
he said. “We are Africans.”
Martinez moved while still a
teenager from the isolated village of Plaplaya
to the larger port city of La Ceiba. But while
paranda was what moved his soul, it was
about as non-commercial as music can be, and offered
very little potential for a career-minded musician.
So like bluegrass fiddlers in the U.S. earning
a living playing in country bands or jazz musicians
paying the bills by playing R&B, Martinez
turned to punta rock, another exciting
musical hybrid that had taken root among the Garifuna,
especially in Belize, in the late 1970s and early
1980s.
Led by the musician Penn Cayetana
in the late 1970s, punta rockers took
the traditional punta drum rhythms of
the Garifuna and added electric guitars
and basses to the mix, adding synthesizers and
elements of electronica a few years later. In
addition to being popular dance music with a young
audience in Central America, the music also sparked
a revival of interest and pride among the Garifuna
people and made some ripples in the world music
marketplace.
With his many talents, boundless
charisma and sense of stagecraft, Martinez was
a natural for punta rock. By the early
1990s, he was working with Los Gatos Bravos, one
of the hottest punta rock bands in Honduras.
Martinez toured extensively with Los Gatos Bravos
and Lita Gariran, a band he subsequently founded,
performing throughout Central America and in Mexico,
France, Japan and the U.S. He became a major star
in the genre with the 1994 release of Lita Gariran’s
Honduras: Songs of the Garifuna (JVC).
Aurelio Martinez returned to
his roots in 1997, when he contributed three songs
to Paranda: Africa in Central America
(Stonetree) a landmark anthology that presented
three generations of Garifuna musicians
from Belize, Honduras and Guatemala. Martinez’
original song “Africa” was one of
the highlights of the album and his duet with
renowned punta rocker Andy Palacio on
“Lanrime Lamiselu” established Martinez
as the major contemporary voice of traditional
Garifuna music.
Martinez was surrounded on Paranda
by legendary—and much older—musicians
Paul Nabor, Jursino Cayetano, Junior Aranda and
Gabaga Williams, an awe-inspiring experience for
Martinez, the youngest person on the album. “In
a symbolic way,” notes Martinez, “I
feel like they are passing me the torch to carry
on the tradition.” Considering that only
a couple dozen parandero survive, and
that most of them are in their 70s and 80s, the
torch was passed just in time. Even more important,
it was passed to the right person.
Martinez’ first solo parandero
album, Garifuna Soul, was hailed as one
of the ten best CDs of 2004 by Afropop Worldwide,
which described the album as “a deeply satisfying
and consistently superb set of songs.” Afropop
Worldwide also named Martinez its “Newcomer
of the Year.” RootsWorld was equally
enthusiastic about the album, noting that Martinez
“takes the music into the future without
compromising the cultural foundations of his inspiration.
No hype or derivative artifice here, just contemporary
roots music true to its hybrid cultural origins,
untainted by misrepresentations and commercial
excess.”
Like most creative traditional
musicians, Martinez adds to the tradition at the
same time he works to preserve it. “I’m
one of the very few paranderos of my
generation,” he correctly points out, “who
writes conscious lyrics dealing with social problems
that face our communities. Music is very important
for the Garifuna people. We probably
consume more music than food. Through our songs,
we can learn about our problems and find ways
to improve.”
Martinez is far too gracious
to knock the punta rock that made him
a star, but he is clearly happy that the success
of Garifuna Soul has offered him the
unexpected opportunity to make his living as a
parandero. He gives full credit to his
Belizean record company, Stonetree, for this turn
of events and is candid about his art and his
job. “If I had to choose between punta
rock and paranda,” he says, “I
would choose paranda because it’s
the music I love the most. Paranda is
what touches my soul the most.”
Following in the socially conscious
footsteps of musicians Ruben Blades in Panama
and Gilberto Gil in Brazil, Aurelio Martinez has
added another job to his crowded resume: national
politician. He is now serving in the National
Congress of Honduras, the first Garifuna
ever elected to represent his district. Martinez
sees his election as quite an honor—both
personally and because he feels it validates his
musical efforts. “I’m not there for
my political experience,” he admits honestly.
“Politics is not
my strong suit, but rather the projection of social
realities through music. People have identified
with me and given me their respect for that…We’re
not going to let this Garifuna culture
die. My number one ambition is to continue working
with this culture of my grandparents, of my ancestors,
to continue teaching the world about it. I want
to defend my people in the National Congress.”
Though serving in congress takes
time and energy away from his musical activities,
Aurelio Martinez seems poised for an imminent
breakthrough to major international acclaim. Martinez
made his Dayton debut a couple of months ago with
a torrid performance at the Cityfolk Festival
and left a group of true believers in his wake.
Another superb album or two, and Martinez will
ascend to the top tier of world music stardom.
Garifuna music,
especially the mournful paranda style,
is teetering on the brink of extinction. An articulate
and impassioned spokesman for the Garifuna
people and their traditional ways of life, Aurelio
Martinez is fighting to save that music, one performance
at a time. It’s not going to fade away quietly,
at least not on his watch.
back to top
October
14, 2006
April Verch Band
April Verch
is a daughter of the Ottawa Valley, a beautiful
region in Ontario that runs from the city of Ottawa
west to the Algonquin Park. The fiddler, singer,
dancer and songwriter was born in Pembroke, just
across the Ottawa River from Quebec. The area
has a rich musical tradition that mixes the music
of the Irish, Scottish, French, German and Polish
immigrants who settled the Ottawa Valley, and
Verch has emerged over the last several years
as the foremost standard-bearer of this unique
regional tradition.
Verch grew up listening
to and playing the fiddle tunes of such esteemed
Canadian fiddlers as Graham Townsend, Don Messer
and Reg Hill. Building on that foundation, she
has added formal classical and jazz training,
as well as self-guided explorations of all types
of traditional fiddling, from other regional Canadian
styles to bluegrass and old-time country fiddling
from the U.S. to music from as far afield as Brazil
and Finland. She is today a complete and sophisticated
fiddler, with impeccable intonation and technique
and a confident, powerful approach to music that
belies her youth. And she can step-dance while
fiddling.
Verch had the future
figured out by the time she was three. She wanted
to play the fiddle like her father and she wanted
to step-dance like her older sister. And she wanted
to pursue them simultaneously—a foreshadowing
of her future. Her parents thought that might
be a bit much for a three-year-old, so Verch began
her artistic odyssey with weekly step-dancing
lessons.
“Because
we were out in the country, my [older] sister
had no friends to play with,” Verch explains.
“So my parents put her into step-dancing
so she could meet some other kids. When I came
along, I started dancing just to be like her.
I started lessons when I was three. My mom always
says I danced before I walked.
“As
soon as I heard fiddle music, I was drawn to it.
I saw the fiddle players and immediately wanted
to be one. And my parents didn’t believe
me; they thought it was a phase I was going through,
and they thought I wouldn’t have enough
of an attention span, that young, to practice
two things. So they didn’t get me a fiddle
till I was six. Then they finally gave in. I guess
I had bugged them long enough that they decided
to let me give it a try.”
After several years
of studying with a local fiddler, she began taking
classical violin lessons. She progressed rapidly
enough that at age 14, she was invited to join
the Deep River Symphony Orchestra. Verch thus
spent her high school years shuttling between
parallel universes, practicing the violin pieces
of Bach and Bartok during the week, then competing
in fiddle contests almost every weekend, driving
all over Canada with her parents. Verch won several
hundred competitions, including the Canadian Grand
Master and Canadian Open championships.
Verch had recorded
and released two albums of her fiddling by the
time she finished high school. Springtime
Fiddle, her 1992 debut, was financed by her
contest winnings. Though she had a tempting offer
to join a leading band right out of school, Verch
decided to continue her education at the prestigious
Berklee School of Music in Boston, where she studied
with boundary-stretching fiddlers Matt Glaser
and Darol Anger. She left after one year to launch
her professional career, but describes her Berklee
experience as invaluable to her development.
“Growing
up where I did, even though you’re not exactly
closed off from the rest of the world, there aren’t
that many opportunities to explore,” she
says. “So being at Berklee, with a student
body that was 80 percent international, opened
my ears to things I’d never even thought
about. Maybe that’s why I’m so passionate
now about looking into lots of different styles.
Every couple of months I’m onto something
new. People ask me, ‘Who are your musical
heroes?’ And my answer is, it depends on
when you ask.”
Verch moved to
Saskatoon in western Canada and began working
and touring with country acts (including Tommy
Hunter), while also doing some touring on her
own. Her world expanded dramatically in 2000,
when Ken Irwin of Rounder Records signed Verch
to a recording contract after hearing a single
performance at a Folk Alliance convention. Rounder
has been quite successful with such fiddle-playing
women as Natalie MacMaster and Alison Krauss,
and Irwin presumably heard some of that same magic
in Verch’s music.
Her first Rounder
album, Verch-uosity, was released to
widespread critical acclaim and radio airplay
in the U.S. That buzz led to appearances by Verch
at some of the major folk and bluegrass festivals
in this country, as well as performances at such
celebrated venues as the Kennedy Center in Washington,
D.C. Verch-uosity was nominated for a
Juno Award, the Canadian equivalent of the Grammy.
With Rounder’s
encouragement, a new side of Verch emerged on
From Where I Stand, released in 2003. For
the first time, April sang on an album. Her dazzling
fiddling was still front-and-center on tunes ranging
from bluegrass to the Ottawa Valley, but Verch
revealed an assured and very appealing vocal touch
on five of the album’s 14 cuts. The standouts
included the country and bluegrass classic “I’ll
Be All Smiles Tonight” and her original
“A Riverboat’s Gone,” a tribute
to the late John Hartford.
Verch felt a special
musical kinship with Hartford, and not just because
he also danced and fiddled at the same time. His
music changed her perspective on fiddling. “His
fiddle playing,” she says, “[is] not
technically perfect at all. And yet, of all the
people I’ve heard play the fiddle, his music
touched me in a way that nothing else ever has.”
Hartford was at his best on crooked old tunes
like “Bumble Bee in a Jug,” which
Verch recorded to go with “A Riverboat’s
Gone” on the album.
A contest-winning
step-dancer in her childhood, Verch decided one
day a few years ago to try to play the fiddle
and step-dance simultaneously, as Natalie MacMaster
does. It came slowly at first, but the combination
soon became an integral part of her music. “I
have to not think about it,” says Verch.
“I have to put both things on automatic
pilot.
“Often
you’re playing the opposite rhythm—the
counterpoint, I guess—of what you’re
doing with your feet. But they do enhance each
other, and it’s a lot of fun, once you get
into it. They feed off each other, the dancing
and the fiddling. It’s like the difference
between playing a fiddle tune alone and playing
it again with another musician. You think of licks
that you wouldn’t have otherwise. Your feet
are instruments, too.”
Released earlier
this year, Take Me Back feels like the
proverbial “breakthrough” album for
April Verch. Her fiddling continues to mature
and grow, and again forms the backbone of the
album. She ranges widely, from bluegrass and old-time
country (“Tennessee Wagoner,” “Tom,
Brad & Alice”) to an original jazz tune
(“Monarch”) to, of course, several
tunes from the Ottawa Valley, including “The
Short Grass,” “The Logger’s
Jig,” “The Chateauguay Reel”
and “The Eclipse.”
But it’s Verch’s
singing that sets Take Me Back apart,
and who would have imagined that five years ago?
Verch chose material that fit her voice perfectly,
covering three songs each by songwriters Julie
Miller (“Take Me Back,” “I Still
Cry” and “Cruel Moon”) and Claire
Lynch (“All In A Night,” “Wings
To Fly” and “Bride of Jesus,”
one of the very few songs you’ll ever hear
written from the point of view of a nun). The
Boston Herald calls Verch “a delicate
sweetheart of a singer.”
Between the singing,
dancing and fiddling, there’s a lot going
on and a lot to like in Verch’s music. But
one of the most impressive (and admirable) aspects
of her musicality is more subtle—her absolute
respect for the musical integrity of each of the
traditional styles she incorporates into her fiddling.
She’s avoided
a snare that has entrapped other young instrumental
virtuosos, that of pouring her myriad influences
into a musical blender and coming out with “the
April Verch sound,” which is then applied
to all tunes regardless of their origins. Verch
instead maintains the stance of a respectful visitor
to those traditions outside the one she grew up
with in Ontario. She retains the essence of each
tune’s heritage while still making it her
own. As she puts it, “I don’t put
a pop drum beat on an Ottawa Valley tune.”
April Verch admits
she sometimes has to pinch herself to believe
what’s happened so far in her career, but
she’s ready for more. “I want to be
able to share my music with people all over the
world,” she says. “I also want my
audience to know where I come from, to understand
that the music I play is a part of something bigger—a
geographical place with a rich cultural history.
That’s as important to me as the music.”
back to top
October
21, 2006
Santiago Jimenez, Jr. with
Rhythm in Shoes
Santiago Jimenez Jr.
was born to play the accordion. His father, Santiago
Sr., practically invented the accordion-driven
dance music known as conjunto, or more commonly,
Tex-Mex music. His older brother, Leonardo “Flaco”
Jimenez, has taken the sounds of that border music
into the American mainstream through recordings
with Ry Cooder, Doug Sahm, Bob Dylan, Dwight Yoakam
and other prominent musicians. Santiago Jr. probably
had no choice in the matter—it was in his
DNA to play the button accordion.
Santiago Jimenez Jr. was born
in 1944 in San Antonio, Texas, and grew up surrounded
by virtuoso accordion playing. Santiago Jimenez
Sr. (1913-1984) had been a successful recording
artist since the mid-1930s and had scored numerous
regional hits by the early 1940s. Santiago Jr.
took up the accordion at a young age and was an
active recording artist by his teenage years,
producing a number of 45s for such local San Antonio
labels as Discos Grande, Magda, Lira and Corona.
He recorded his first full-length album in 1960,
with Flaco, El Príncipe y el Rey del
Acordeón (The Prince and the King of the
Accordion).
For the most part, Santiago
Jr. has avoided the cross-cultural path of his
celebrated sibling, choosing instead to devote
himself to the preservation and expansion of the
traditional music of his father’s generation.
Like his father, he plays the old-fashioned two-row
button diatonic accordion. Unlike most of his
contemporaries, Santiago Jr. does not generally
use drums or electric bass guitar on recordings
or performances. He jokes that he leaves “the
flash” for big brother Flaco.
Conjunto music
is a regional style developed in southern Texas
that combines the musical traditions of two disparate
cultures. The first is that of the German, Polish
and Czech immigrants who settled such towns as
New Braunfels, Bergheim, Elmendorf and Kosciusko
in the middle and late 1800s. These pioneers brought
the accordion with them, which they used to accompany
their polkas, waltzes, mazurkas, schottisches
and other dances.
Surrounding these newly arrived
farmers and merchants were the thousands of Mexicans
who suddenly became Texans when the border was
redrawn in 1836. The Tejanos (Texans
of Mexican ancestry) welcomed their new neighbors
from Europe, and the evolutionary process that
resulted in conjunto music began at shared
community events. Santiago Sr. received his first
exposure to the accordion at polka dances in New
Braunfels, to which he was frequently taken by
his father, Patricio Jimenez, a noted accordionist
in his own right.
The Tejanos took the
European dance tunes and the accordion accompaniment
and added Spanish-language lyrics to them, turning
the old tunes into new songs that told of real-life
struggles, poverty, romance, work and other daily
concerns. Much like blues or country music, this
music was rooted in the working-class and was
something more than mere entertainment, serving
political, cultural and social needs as well.
To accompany the accordion,
the Tejanos added the bajo sexto,
a 12-string bass guitar that quickly became an
essential part of the conjunto style.
Santiago Jimenez Sr. added the tololoche
(acoustic bass) to the mix in the 1930s, completing
the basic instrumental format for the sound. Later
groups added the electric bass guitar and drums,
but traditionalists like Santiago Jimenez Jr.
continue to perform in the older trio configuration.
Since starting as a teenager,
Santiago Jr. has been a prolific recording artist
throughout his career. He’s recorded scores
of singles for local distribution, and more than
20 albums for such respected roots music labels
as Arhoolie, Rounder and Watermelon, as well as
his own label, Chief. He has toured extensively
throughout the U.S., Mexico, Europe, Asia and
Russia. He’s also performed at most of the
major folk festivals and on the popular PBS program
Austin City Limits.
The musical and cultural contributions
of Santiago Jimenez Jr. were formally recognized
in 2000, when the National Endowment for the Arts
honored him with its National Heritage Fellowship
award. In its citation, the NEA noted, “In
the contemporary world of Tejano music,
Santiago Jimenez Jr. is seen as a standard bearer
of deep conjunto tradition, a lively
performer, and a man of great humor and wit.”
Santiago Jimenez Jr. is
also a man who gives back to the community. He
is in Dayton to participate in “Culture
Builds Community,” a new three-year educational
partnership between Cityfolk and East End Community
Services Corporation. Jimenez will collaborate
with Rhythm In Shoes in a series of outreach activities
that will include a residency program, workshops
and a public dance/concert.
Time
really does fly when you’re having fun.
It seems hard to believe that Rhythm In Shoes,
the Dayton-based and internationally lauded ensemble,
has been touring concert dance and music for 20
years. But it’s true—it was 1987 when
dancer and choreographer Sharon Leahy joined forces
with musician, singer and songwriter Rick Good
to create Rhythm In Shoes, a
dance and music company that has been hailed as
“really smart stuff” by The Village
Voice.
Rhythm In Shoes is a many-faceted
ensemble. Part dance concert, part hoedown and
part vaudeville extravaganza, RIS is deeply rooted
in traditional dance and music. Leahy’s
choreography is fresh and creative, incorporating
elements of tap, clogging, modern dance and traditional
dances from the British Isles into a cohesive
ensemble style that has earned the troupe widespread
acclaim. The band that accompanies the dancers
is an accomplished and eclectic outfit that ranges
effortlessly from timeless swing tunes to old-time
country stringband music, with many stops in between.
Rhythm In Shoes has earned rave
reviews from audiences and critics over the past
two decades. The Boston Globe calls Rhythm
In Shoes “a company of first-rate dancers
and superb musicians” and notes approvingly
that “Leahy has created a whole new language
by combining straightforward step-dance moves
with intriguing shifts, turns, jumps and ensemble
pattern…the musical and spoken interludes
combined with the dance to weave a colorful, tightly
knit tapestry.”
The RIS dance troupe includes
Sharon Leahy, Gina Burgei, Tina de Alderete, Emma
Leahy-Good and Janet Schroeder. The freewheeling
band is composed of Rick Good (artistic director,
guitar, banjo), Kevin G. Anderson (percussion),
Matt Brown (fiddle) and Ben Cooper (bass, guitar,
fiddle).
Sharon Leahy began creating
dances when she was 13, in her hometown of Woodbridge,
New Jersey. Before moving to the Greene County
metropolis of Spring Valley in the 1980s to concentrate
on Rhythm In Shoes, Leahy studied and worked in
New York and North Carolina. She has taught at
several colleges, festivals and dance camps and
is currently Artist-in-Residence at the University
of Dayton. Her choreography has earned numerous
fellowships from the National Endowment for the
Arts and the Ohio Arts Council, as well as support
from Jacob’s Pillow, the Dayton Foundation
and the National Dance Project of the New England
Foundation for the Arts.
Dayton native Rick Good has
been a major presence on the Miami Valley music
scene since the late 1960s. He was a founding
member of the Hotmud Family, an acclaimed and
very popular old-time country and bluegrass band
that recorded four albums for Vetco and two for
Flying Fish in the 1970s and 1980s. He later played
with the zany swing-billy trio known as the Rugcutters
and, in a foreshadowing of his theatrics in RIS,
acted in "The Last Song of John Proffitt",
a one-man play which had an extended run at Yellow
Springs Center Stage. Nova Town, an album
of Good’s original songs, was released in
1997.
Rhythm In Shoes has toured widely,
performing in 47 states and in Ireland, Japan
and Canada. The company tours a number of different
presentations—concert performances, smaller-scale
ensemble performances, school matinees, master
classes and workshops. RIS also maintains an active
local profile, presenting several programs each
year, including a standing-room-only Christmas
show. The company has been presented from its
earliest days by Cityfolk in both concerts and
at Cityfolk Festivals.
RIS was prominently featured
during Dayton’s Centennial of Flight Celebration
in 2003. Twice each day RIS took the stage at
Carillon Park as “Doctor Goodfellow’s
Traveling Vaudeville Entertainment” for
the hit production Vaudeville, 1903. That same
year, the ensemble premiered "Rambleshoe",
a no-holds-barred collaboration with the Red Clay
Ramblers, the iconoclastic old-time band from
North Carolina.
A critic for Dance Magazine
wrote that the ensemble’s “use of
tap, clogging, and percussive rhythm in general
was not just lively and accomplished; it was intelligent,
tasteful, and provocative.” It’s also
a lot of fun for the audience, thanks to the madcap
antics of Doctor Goodfellow and his crew of anything-for-a-laugh
cut-ups. From the broadest of physical comedy
to subtle and sophisticated verbal humor, Rhythm
In Shoes is the funniest act to come out of Dayton
in many a decade.
Rhythm In Shoes is way
more fun than a dance performance or stringband
concert either one. This bunch is a unique cultural
phenomenon that more than deserves its international
reputation. Congratulations to Sharon, Rick and
all past and present members of the company on
this historic milestone season. Here’s to
20 more.
back to top
November
25, 2006
NEA JazzMaster Ahmad Jamal
The piano trio has
been an important part of modern jazz for more
than half a century and astonishingly, Ahmad
Jamal has been at the forefront of that
movement from the beginning. Unconstrained by
complex orchestration, the trio is relatively
free to spontaneously produce arrangements, dazzling
improvisations, and interesting textures and interactions.
Jamal has influenced every jazz pianist of the
past 50 years, either directly or indirectly,
and thanks to him, the piano-bass-drums trio is
one of the iconic, bedrock ensembles in jazz.
He made the trio swing.
Ahmad Jamal was
born in Pittsburgh in 1930. He began his keyboard
odyssey at the tender age of three, when a piano-playing
uncle jokingly challenged the toddler to duplicate
what the uncle had just played. To everyone’s
astonishment, the young boy did just that. Flawlessly.
The precocious youngster started formal piano
lessons at age seven and later, during his teenage
years, took what were essentially college-level
master classes from esteemed local teachers Mary
Cardwell Dawson and James Miller.
Jamal made his professional
debut while still in high school and was quickly
immersed in the thriving Pittsburgh scene. He
got his first touring experience with the George
Hudson Orchestra, but Jamal was not destined to
be a sideman. Influenced in his early days by
the playing of pianists Art Tatum, Errol Garner
and Teddy Wilson, Jamal joined a group called
the Four Strings in 1949 and logged time the following
year backing a song and dance team, the Caldwells.
In another display
of his maturity and precocity, Jamal took control
of his musical direction and career by starting
his own trio in 1951 at the age of 21. Originally
known as the Three Strings, the trio played in
Chicago and New York clubs. They were heard by
legendary record man John Hammond, who signed
the group to Okeh Records, a subsidiary of the
Columbia label. Jamal was joined on these early
Okeh recordings by bassist Israel Crosby and guitarist
Ray Crawford.
This trio, renamed
the Ahmad Jamal Trio, was one of the great jazz
groups of the early 1950s. This drummer-less ensemble
could swing as hard as a much bigger band and
the group was a huge influence on Miles Davis.
On an immediate level, Davis instructed Red Garland,
the pianist in his group, to try to play more
like Jamal, and his drummer, Philly Joe Jones,
to incorporate a beat-accenting technique used
by Ray Crawford. But what really inspired Davis
was Jamal’s repertoire and what he did with
it.
The recordings made
by Jamal, Crosby and Crawford between 1951 and
1955 for Okeh and Epic included “Ahmad’s
Blues” (later heard in the play Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf); “Billy Boy,”
Jamal’s arrangement of an old folk tune;
“Poinciana,” the song that would make
Jamal a star a few years later; and “New
Rhumba,” which would later be orchestrated
by Gil Evans for Miles Davis on their historic
first collaboration Miles Ahead.
Jamal moved in
1955 to Argo Records, the Chicago-based subsidiary
label of blues titan Chess, and recorded the album
Chamber Music of the New Jazz. Guitarist
Ray Crawford left the group after this album and
was replaced by New Orleans drummer Vernell Fournier.
This trio had several commercially successful
albums in the late 1950s and early 1960s that
captured the group’s telepathic interplay.
Jamal’s commercial
breakthrough was the 1958 album But Not For
Me, recorded by the trio at a live show at
the Pershing Hotel in Chicago. It was one of the
best-selling albums of the era, lodging in the
Top Ten list for more than two years. (Nearly
40 years later, Clint Eastwood would use two songs
from the album, “Poinciana” and “Music,
Music, Music,” on the soundtrack of his
film The Bridges of Madison County.)
The record not
only made Jamal a star, it also gave him the means
to open his own club in Chicago, the Alhambra.
This was important for two reasons: it provided
Jamal a level of financial security rare for a
musician, and it allowed the trio to minimize
its touring without sacrificing performance opportunities.
The great and enduring
legacy of Ahmad Jamal will be what he accomplished
with the acoustic trio. He established the template
for the piano-bass-drums trio and he first demonstrated
its unlimited potential for serious expression.
Numerous critics and musicians have spoken of
Jamal “using his trio as an orchestra,”
an apt phrase for Jamal’s distinctive skills
as composer and arranger.
Writing in The
Village Voice, Stanley Crouch cogently praised
this aspect of Jamal’s music, “No
musician has had a more profound effect on the
orchestral approach to small groups in the last
35 years than Ahmad Jamal. He showed people how
to italicize and magnify elements of music that
were taken for granted, how to organize the sound
of a group around the drums and how to interchange
the riff with the ostinato or the vamp…He
is a virtuoso, but his innovations are found in
his arrangements.”
Pianist Eric Reed
said of Jamal, “I’m always overwhelmed
by his brilliance. Everything he does is completely
organic and original.”
Jamal is a master
of dynamics, of being exciting without being obvious
(as Miles Davis used to say). Jamal’s music
doesn’t need volume to swing. His use of
silence and space, tension and release, texture,
contrast and dramatic surprise is virtually unmatched
in jazz, or any other music for that matter.
Ahmad Jamal is
joined tonight by two long-time musical partners,
drummer Idris Muhammad and bassist James Cammack.
This trio has been playing together for so long
and has created such an uncanny musical rapport
it can honestly be dubbed Jamal’s third
great trio, comparable to the Crosby-Crawford
and Crosby-Fournier bands.
A native of New
Orleans, Idris Muhammad has been
a professional musician for more than 50 years.
He has played soul and R&B with Sam Cooke,
Jerry Butler and James Brown; been the house drummer
at Prestige Records; toured with Roberta Flack;
and performed with jazz greats including George
Coleman, Lou Donaldson, Johnny Griffin, Pharoah
Sanders and Grover Washington, Jr. Bassist James
Cammack, who’s been with Jamal
almost 25 years, has also toured and recorded
with singers Nancy Wilson and Vanessa Rubin, trumpeter
Malachi Thompson, tubist Howard Johnson, pianist
Chris Neville and the Chicago Jazz Ensemble.
Beyond the influence
that Miles Davis acknowledged throughout his career,
other tributes to Jamal have come from musicians
ranging from Shirley Horn and Keith Jarrett to
Philly Joe Jones and Randy Weston. Jarrett has
long acknowledged that the 1958 album Portfolio
of Ahmad Jamal inspired his own keyboard explorations
and his trio conception.
The National Endowment
for the Arts bestowed its Jazz Master Fellowship
upon Jamal in 1994 to honor his myriad important
contributions to jazz. That same year, he was
named a Duke Ellington Fellow at Yale. Jamal has
also received several international music awards
honoring his composing and playing.
Ahmad Jamal knew
at 21 what he wanted to do musically and then
he went out and did it. Fifty-five years later,
he’s still doing it. Jamal changed the sound
of jazz, both through his own music and the inspiration
he provided for later generations of pianists.
And he’s not done yet.
“Music chose
me,” says Ahmad Jamal. “Music is a
constant challenge. You are not ever finished.
I am always looking forward because I am always
learning something.”
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January
20, 2007
Ralph Stanley and the Clinch
Mountain Boys with Larry Sparks and the Lonesome
Ramblers
It was a tough choice for a country
boy: a pig or a banjo. Ralph Stanley
was 11 years old and his mother had offered to
buy him either a pig or a banjo, but not both.
Young Ralph loved animals and dreamed of being
a veterinarian, so the pig was quite tempting,
but a banjo was downright magical and who knew
where magic might lead. Stanley chose the banjo,
of course, and with that instrument, he became
one of the greatest, most important traditional
American musicians of the 20th century. He’d
have made a good veterinarian, but our musical
universe is infinitely richer because he took
the other fork in the road.
Ralph Stanley was born in 1927
in rural Dickenson County in southwestern Virginia.
The area—about halfway between Pikeville,
Kentucky, and Johnson City, Tennessee—was
one of the early hotbeds of country music, and
Ralph and his older brother Carter soaked the
music up like sponges. They learned old ballads
and banjo tunes from their mother, Lucy Smith
Stanley, from local musicians, and from records
and radio programs by J.E. Mainer, Grayson &
Whitter, the Carter Family and other country music
pioneers.
The Stanley Brothers first recorded
in 1947 for Rich-R-Tone Records in Johnson City.
With Carter singing lead and playing guitar and
Ralph adding his banjo and tenor vocal harmonies,
the sound of the Stanley Brothers was similar
to the bluegrass style Bill Monroe was developing
at the time, but also held the echoes of the mountain
music of an earlier generation. That mountain
influence was the hallmark of the “Stanley
sound” and one of the elements that set
the Stanleys apart from their contemporaries.
Recording for Columbia, Mercury,
Starday and King throughout the 1950s and early
1960s, the Stanley Brothers and the Clinch Mountain
Boys was one of the most popular bluegrass bands
of the era. Both Carter and Ralph were skilled
songwriters and they produced literally dozens
of original songs and tunes that are now bluegrass
standards. On a national basis, the bands of Flatt
& Scruggs and Bill Monroe were probably more
influential, but in southwestern Ohio, it’s
doubtful that any band topped the Stanley Brothers
when it came to inspiring and shaping other musicians.
Carter Stanley died in 1966,
leaving Ralph Stanley in an awkward position.
Carter had always been the band’s frontman,
leader, main singer and spokesman, a situation
that suited the more reticent younger brother.
After a month or two, Ralph picked up the reins
and headed back out onto the road at the head
of his own band, also called the Clinch
Mountain Boys. The fans embraced and
supported Stanley’s band, which had an even
more old-time, archaic sound than that of the
Stanley Brothers, and it quickly became a major
attraction on the fledgling bluegrass festival
circuit.
In the 40 years since Carter
Stanley’s death, Ralph Stanley has been
a champion of the traditional bluegrass sound.
He’s now recorded more than 200 albums—exactly
how many is anyone’s guess—and nurtured
the talents of such younger musicians as Larry
Sparks, Ricky Skaggs, Keith Whitley, Charlie Sizemore
and Ron Thomason of Dry Branch Fire Squad.
Ralph Stanley has seen a lot of highs and a lot
of lows in his sixty-plus years on the bluegrass
highway, but not even Stanley could have predicted
the wacky events of 2000-2001. It started with
the unexpected success of the film O Brother,
Where Art Thou, which prominently featured
the music of both Ralph Stanley and the Stanley
Brothers. The film’s soundtrack album sold
more than six million copies (with virtually no
airplay on commercial country radio stations),
topped the pop and country album charts and won
three Grammy Awards.
Against a field of singers half
his age, Ralph Stanley won the Grammy for “Best
Male Country Vocal Performance.” It was
the first time a bluegrass singer had ever won
that award, and Ralph Stanley won it for his haunting
a cappella rendition of “O Death,”
a song that was already old when Stanley was a
boy. Bluegrass fans everywhere thought they had
died and gone to heaven. His second Grammy the
following year was icing on the cake.
Approaching his 80th birthday
this year, Ralph Stanley does so as an elder statesman
of country and bluegrass music and one of the
most revered traditional musicians of our time.
Stanley was honored in November with the National
Medal of Arts, the highest award given to artists
by the United States government, and he is universally
respected by fans and musicians. Life is good
these days for Ralph Stanley. As much as he wanted
that pig, he knows he made the right choice.
Bill
Monroe had the “high lonesome” sound,
but Larry Sparks is the undisputed
king of “low lonesome.” Sparks has
long been recognized as one of the most soulful
singers in bluegrass, a “second generation”
pioneer who has created his own instantly recognizable
sound. Sparks is one of the premier stylists in
bluegrass history, as both a singer and guitarist.
He is also, 40-plus years into his career, on
a hot streak, with a handful of recent IBMA awards
to his credit, including back-to-back “Male
Vocalist of the Year” honors in 2004-2005.
Larry Sparks was born in 1947
in the Warren County town of Lebanon and grew
up there and in southern Indiana. Spark’s
parents were among the legion of Kentuckians who
migrated north seeking jobs, and Larry was raised
deeply immersed in the old-time mountain sounds.
He was an avid listener to Wayne Raney’s
radio show on WCKY and developed early interests
in the blues and honky-tonk country as well as
bluegrass.
Sparks played a bluesy lead
guitar style that landed him a job with the Stanley
Brothers at age 16. He worked off-and-on with
the Stanleys for three years, during which time
he made his recording debut with a single on the
Dayton-based Jalyn label. When Carter Stanley
died in 1966, Sparks was Ralph Stanley’s
choice to be the lead singer in his new band.
Playing with Ralph Stanley exposed
Sparks to a large and appreciative audience and
by 1969, he had the confidence to strike out on
his own, forming his band the Lonesome
Ramblers. With Mike Lilly on banjo, Wendy
Miller on mandolin and Art Wynder on bass, Sparks
recorded one of the all-time great bluegrass albums,
Ramblin’ Bluegrass. The album served
notice of the arrival of a major new talent on
the bluegrass scene.
Sparks has been a prolific recording
artist throughout his career, recording for King
Bluegrass, Old Homestead, County, and, for the
last several years, Rebel. He has recorded more
than 50 albums, including such acclaimed classics
as John Deere Tractor, Larry Sparks Sings
Hank Williams and You Could Have Called.
His most recent album is 40, which won
both “Album of the Year” and “Recorded
Event of the Year” awards in 2005 from the
IBMA.
“I guess I’m
the youngest old-timer around,” Sparks is
fond of saying. Sparks has followed his own muse
from the start, swimming upstream against the
tide of modernism in bluegrass for four decades
now. While other bands experimented and stretched
the boundaries of bluegrass, Sparks dug ever deeper
into both tradition and minimalism, refining his
music by stripping away all excess and fanciness.
All that’s left is the soul.
Sparks might have become a bigger
star if he’d changed his ways, but that
wasn’t his way. He never moved to Nashville,
for example; he and his family were happy in Indiana.
He never added drums or steel guitars to his records.
He never really cared about the current trend
or what other bands were doing. He’s never
“gone country.” Sparks has carved
out a unique niche for himself. There’s
not another guitar player or singer like him in
bluegrass—not even close.
Widely admired by other musicians,
Larry Sparks is one of the greats of modern bluegrass.
Known for such timeless records as “John
Deere Tractor,” “A Face in the Crowd,”
“Love of the Mountains,” “Going
Up Home (To Live in Green Pastures),” “Tennessee
1949” and the awesome guitar instrumental
“Carter’s Blues,” Sparks will
definitely be joining his former bosses, the Stanley
Brothers, in the Bluegrass Hall of Honor one day.
The current edition of the Lonesome
Ramblers includes Randy Pollard (fiddle), Jackie
Kincaid (mandolin), Josh McMurray (banjo) and
Sparks’ son Larry D. Sparks (bass). The
band’s distinguished alumni include banjo
players Dave Evans and Scott Vestal; mandolinist
David Harvey; fiddlers Glen Duncan, Stuart Duncan
and Kirk Brandenberger; and dobro player Tommy
Boyd.
Larry Sparks says there
will always be room in bluegrass for a stylist.
Of course, he’s just getting started. He’s
only 60—younger than J.D. Crowe, Del McCoury,
Doyle Lawson, or Peter Rowan—and the man
is definitely on a roll. Sparks has played countless
times in Dayton throughout his career, so he’s
no secret in these parts. Seems the rest of the
world is finally beginning to catch on.
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February
1 , 2007
Jean Paul Samputu and Ingeli
If all you know of the Republic
of Rwanda comes from the film Hotel Rwanda, you
have only part of the story. The horrific 1994
genocide at the core of that movie has defined
this African country for a generation, and it
is impossible to ignore that national nightmare
in any discussion of Rwanda, its people and its
culture. But Jean Paul Samputu,
one of Rwanda’s most renowned musicians,
is out to show the world the other side of his
homeland—the rich legacy of traditional
music, drumming and dance of one of the oldest
cultures in Africa.
Rwanda is a small land-locked
country about the size of Maryland; it’s
surrounded by Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda, and the
Democratic Republic of the Congo. With a population
of eight million people, Rwanda is the most densely
populated country in Africa and also one of the
poorest. Almost 90% of Rwanda’s people work
in subsistence agriculture and most live in abject
poverty. Average life expectancy is only about
47 years.
It is thought that Rwanda was
first settled by the Twa, pygmy hunter-gatherers
who are the earliest recorded inhabitants of central
Africa’s Great Lakes region. The Twa were
dominated by the Hutu when they moved into the
area, and then in the 15th century, both Twa and
Hutu were conquered and subjugated by the Tutsi,
whose power derived from their ownership of cattle.
The population of modern Rwanda is a mix of Hutu
(84%), Tutsi (15%) and Twa (1%). A former colony
of Germany (1895-1918) and later Belgium, Rwanda
gained its independence in 1962.
The escalating violence that
engulfed the country in the early 1990s culminated
in the 1994 genocide that claimed nearly a million
lives. Most of the victims were Tutsis, killed
by Hutu militias and mobs, though the toll also
included thousands of moderate Hutus and an estimated
30% of the country’s Twa population. Thirteen
years later, Rwanda is only gradually recovering
from the tragedy.
Jean Paul Samputu, who performs
with the dance and percussion ensemble Ingeli,
is among his country’s premier agents of
change. Samputu has earned the right to speak
of forgiveness and reconciliation—he lost
both parents and four siblings to the genocide
in 1994. “Rwanda is a country that is healing,”
Samputu insists. “The people are forgiving
and in a few years Rwanda will be a united country.
People need to discover and know about the unique
culture of Rwanda.”
Jean Paul Samputu was born in
Rwanda in 1962, in the small town of Butari. Raised
as a Roman Catholic, he began singing as a teenager
in his church choir. He started playing guitar
at age 15. Later, as a seminary student, Samputu
first heard the American-influenced gospel music
of the Pentecostal church. His music was shaped
by the traditional tribal music he heard growing
up, as well as records by Stevie Wonder, Lionel
Richie, and a pair of iconic Jamaican singers,
Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley.
Hailed by Afropop Worldwide
as “the first Rwandan musician to establish
true international visibility,” Jean Paul
Samputu has been praised by critics in Africa,
Europe and the U.S. for the “remarkable
passion” in his voice and his uncanny ability
to bring beauty and understanding out of a horrible
time and place, “an amazing musical feat
borne of tragedy” (Songlines).
Samputu speaks six languages—Kinyarwanda,
Swahili, Lingala, Luganda, French and English.
His music is equally cosmopolitan, a masterful
synthesis of Rwandan regional styles including
soukous, rhumbato, Rwandan 5/8, pygmy
hunting music, Afrobeat, older pre-colonial traditional
forms such as Ikinimba, as well as zouk
and reggae music from the Caribbean and musical
traditions from neighboring Burundi, Uganda and
the Congo.
After recording a pair of albums
in the early 1980s with the popular band Nyampinga,
Samputu made his solo recording debut in 1985
with Tegeka Isi. He’s since recorded nearly
a dozen CDs, the most recent of which Voices from
Rwanda. The new album pays tribute to the history
of Rwandan music and is a sterling demonstration
of Samputu’s versatility. Singing mostly
in a sweet tenor voice, Samputu moves easily from
a whisper to a roar, summoning forth low baritone
growls and an ethereal falsetto to enhance his
delivery and range.
Samputu formed the dance and
percussion ensemble Ingeli in the mid-1980s and
has toured and recorded with the group steadily
since then. The word “ingeli” means
“the most beautiful of the cows,”
and while the idea loses something in translation,
it refers to cattle being the traditional symbol
of wealth and power in Rwanda and that the “most
beautiful” cattle would be highly prized.
The members of Ingeli accompany Samputu’s
singing and guitar playing on such traditional
Rwanda instruments as the 12-string inanga,
the single-string umuduli, drums known
as ingoma and the amakondera
bamboo horn.
Samputu was imprisoned for six
months in 1990, for the “crime” of
being a well-known Tutsi. He fled to Uganda after
being released and was living there when his family
was killed. When Samputu returned to Rwanda in
July 1994, the news of his family’s fate
sent him into a downward spiral of alcoholism,
drug abuse and homelessness.
“I
couldn’t sing anymore,” he told a
Boston Globe reporter recently. “I
became a drunk. I drank too much because I couldn’t
understand. The people who killed my father, they
are friends. They are neighbors. They are people
we grew up with. It destroyed me. It made me angry.
From 1994 to 2000, for six years, it wasn’t
me. I was not me.”
Samputu began his recovery while
he was living with a brother in Kenya. “I
had a vision from God,” he says, “that
I have to forgive the people who killed my family.
And I have to heal my country.” That mission
is Samputu’s new muse.
Jean Paul Samputu has won several
highly prestigious honors for his music: the Kora
Award for Best African Traditional Artist in 2003,
the 2006 Pearl of Africa Award for “Best
Male Artist, Rwanda” and the Calabash Award
for Peace. These awards elevated Samputu’s
status and profile both in Africa and abroad,
allowing him to assume the role of cultural ambassador
for his embattled country.
Samputu and the members of Ingeli
now do double duty when they tour—they are
entertainers, first and foremost, but they are
also educators. Wherever he performs, Samputu
also lectures to classes and groups (and talks
with anyone who will listen) about genocide, human
rights, peace, and reconciliation in Rwanda, as
well as the pan-African crises of AIDS and poverty.
“Through
performance I can bring the message of peace,”
says Samputu of his musical activities. “The
world needs peace. Not just music and joy, but
also the message of peace and hope. My mission
is to bring hope to the children because when
there is no hope there is no vision.”
Samputu has performed for the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees;
at the World Culture Open at Lincoln Center in
New York (he was one of only two African performers
selected for the occasion); the Freedom Awards
at the National Museum of Civil Rights; the National
Geographic Society; and at numerous universities,
festivals and conferences around the world. The
acclaimed musician has also established the Samputu
Foundation, an educational outreach organization
to teach children about peace and forgiveness.
While in Dayton for this Cityfolk
performance, Samputu and Ingeli will be participating
in a number of educational and cultural activities
in the community. Many of these will be at the
University of Dayton (co-sponsor of tonight’s
concert), where Samputu will speak to classes
in the departments of history, English, religion,
philosophy, music, anthropology and political
science. Samputu will also work with music department
students and the Ebony Heritage Singers, U.D.’s
student gospel ensemble.
Other outreach events take place
at the East End Community Center as part of “Culture
Builds Community,” a three-year educational
partnership between Cityfolk and East End Community
Services Corporation. These activities include
classes, drum and dance workshops, talks and performances
at both the Community Center and East End neighborhood
schools, as well as a social event and meal at
the Community Center.
The true horror of the 1994
genocide in Rwanda reduces down to one fact: it
was Rwandans killing Rwandans—neighbors
killing neighbors. Before any kind of reconciliation
is possible, a massive amount of forgiveness must
first take place. But ancient hatreds run deep
and die hard. That some Rwandans are not yet ready
to forgive doesn’t diminish Samputu’s
work on behalf of human rights, it shows how absolutely
essential this kind of work is going to be if
Rwanda is to heal. Jean Paul Samputu is trying
to change the world for the better, one concert
at a time. All he asks is that we listen.
back to top
February
3, 2007
Andy Bey
Andy Bey
is a virtuoso singer. He’s usually called
a jazz singer, though he sings a lot more than
jazz. He’s one of the best in the game and
has been for almost 50 years, blessed with a four-octave
range, a rare gift for phrasing and intonation
and a hip musical sensibility. Bey has worked
with some of the greatest jazz musicians of our
time and he accompanies himself at the piano with
an elegant, distinctive Monk-inflected approach.
He’s a legend—and he’s finally
becoming a star.
Andy Bey was born
in Newark, New Jersey, in 1939. He was a precocious
child, showing considerable talent for singing
and piano playing at a very young age. Bey performed
at the landmark Apollo Theater in Harlem when
he was 12 and had appeared on such New York TV
programs as Spotlight on Harlem and The Star Time
Kids before he turned 18.
With his sisters
Salome and Geraldine, he performed and recorded
as Andy Bey and the Bey Sisters for several years,
just three voices and Andy’s piano. The
trio lived and toured in Europe for a year and
a half in the late 1950s, appearing regularly
to great acclaim at The Blue Note in Paris and
other prestigious venues. The group recorded a
couple of times during that period, working with
such jazz players as Kenny Clarke and Kenny Dorham.
The Beys moved back to the U.S. in 1960 and recorded
two albums for Prestige, Now! Hear! and
’Round Midnight, before breaking
up in 1966.
Admired by such
noted musicians as Aretha Franklin, John Coltrane,
Nina Simone, Lena Horne and Sarah Vaughan, the
Bey siblings had an innovative and unique sound
of their own. “Had we stayed together, there’s
no telling what might have happened,” he
told writer Bob Blumenthal. “We were doing
some different things with three-part harmony…We
were able to blend and we had a family sound.”
The late 1960s
was an interesting time for an intelligent and
open-minded musician. Bey’s recordings from
this period reflect the politically charged atmosphere,
especially the work he did with Horace Silver
(The United States of Mind trilogy of
albums) and Max Roach (“Members Don’t
Get Weary”). Bey also worked, perhaps most
notably, with saxophonist Gary Bartz in the Bartz
Nu Troop, an underappreciated but influential
band.
Bey recorded his
first solo album, Experience and Judgment,
in 1974. The record was a good showcase for Bey’s
mighty voice and while it didn’t sell in
huge numbers at the time, it was a critics’
favorite and it has since attained the status
of a cult classic. Those who loved the album waited
eagerly for its follow-up. It was a long wait.
After Experience
and Judgment, Andy Bey went more than 20
years without recording, a circumstance Newsday
described as “like having Ella Fitzgerald
take a vow of silence.” Bey worked when
and where he could during those years. He played
in jazz clubs as a solo act, did a few tours with
Horace Silver and got involved in jazz education,
spending three years in Austria in the early 1990s
as a vocal instructor.
Bey mostly worked
on his music during his years away from the studio.
By his own admission, Bey “has always been
a serious musician,” and he worked long
and hard on perfecting a sound that was already
majestic. Though his approach was spare to begin
with, just voice and piano, Bey labored to pare
away all excess.
As he trimmed here
and there, what was left was the essence of the
song, which is all a master singer like Bey needs.
During these years of extensive woodshedding,
a transformation took place within Bey’s
music as “methods and habits fuse[d] into
a single, thick style that simultaneously enhances
ideas and celebrates its own peculiarities”
(New Yorker).
Bey’s comeback,
which has finally, belatedly earned him some stardom,
began in the mid-1990s, when he teamed with astute
producer Herb Jordan to record some ballads, jazz
standards, and classics from what is often called
the Great American Songbook. The first album was
Ballads, Blues & Bey, released in
1996. Listeners were stunned by what they heard,
what Bey calls his “‘soft pallet’
voice.”
That new sound was
evidence of Bey’s hard work. “I still
did some things with power,” Bey explained,
“but now I was also interested in controlling
my sound…I wanted to show my other side,
my intimate side.”
The follow-up, Shades
of Bey, was another stunner that had critics
straining to describe Bey’s extraordinary
singing. Tuesdays in Chinatown, and the
fourth album in the series, American Song,
were released to widespread acclaim and increasing
sales. Graced by stellar arrangements by pianist
Geri Allen, American Song received a Grammy nomination
for “Best Jazz Vocal of the Year”
in 2004.
Joining Andy Bey
on the last three albums, and on stage tonight,
is guitarist Paul Meyers. Meyers
is described by The New York Times as
“one of the most eloquent jazz guitarists
since Kenny Burrell.” Meyers has toured
with Bey since 1997, and is quite active on the
Brazilian music scene in New York, performing
and recording with the groups Terra Brasil and
Brasil and Company, among others. In addition
to performing with numerous jazz and Brazilian
artists, Meyers has recorded a pair of solo guitar
albums, Blues for the Millennium and
Dusk to Dawn.
What helps make
Bey’s recent albums is the compelling choice
of material. Not only does he put a personal stamp
on familiar timeless material from Duke Ellington,
Billy Strayhorn, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers
and Lorenz Hart, Jerome Kern and Harold Arlen
but he’s made more contemporary songs such
as the Nick Drake tune “River Man”
his own. All four CDs have been produced by Herb
Jordan, who deserves a lot of credit for Bey’s
resurgence.
These albums have
been met with tremendous acclaim from fans, critics
and other musicians. In a New Yorker
article, Sasha Frere-Jones wrote that “Bey’s
rich, wide bass-baritone is plainly and proudly
seductive, but there is a radical sensibility
hidden inside his huge natural gift. Bey can be
velvety as the occasion requires—only to
leap into ecstatic commentary, lifting a chestnut
like ‘Caravan’ far above its customary
iterations.”
A review in People
put it simply: “Equal parts benediction
and seduction…these American songs have
met an American Master.” The New York
Times called Bey “the least known of
the great jazz singers” and the master of
“a film noir voice: languid, mysterious
and surpassingly beautiful.”
The irony of his
sudden success this far into his career is not
lost on Bey. “People are telling me,”
he says, “‘It’s good your career
is on the rise and you’re finally making
it,’ but I often wonder what being ‘discovered’
means. I never went anywhere. It’s not like
I was ever driven to be rich or a star. There
are still times when I have no work.”
It is difficult
to accurately assess the career of a black musician
in the U.S. without at least considering the issue
of racism, particularly as it pertains to the
opportunities, choices, limitations and obstacles
that musician faced because of race. Listening
to Bey’s albums, one can’t help but
wonder: Why isn’t Andy Bey a superstar?
And more: Why the
22-year hiatus from the recording studio? Why
the lack of renown for a singer who “swings
as hard as Sinatra did” (New Yorker)?
Why was Bey always received better in Europe and
Japan than in the U.S.? Why have so many singers
of lesser ability enjoyed so much more success?
Bey admits to years
of anger and bitterness because of such unanswerable
questions, but in recent years, he seems to have
accepted, more or less, what he can’t change.
“There are still issues in this business
in America,” Bey told a reporter for the
International Herald Tribune. “But
I don’t want to harp on that because I’ve
come to realize that the important thing is to
keep moving on. The older I get the calmer I get.
I’ve begun to understand my aggression.
I think I’m getting smarter, and I know
I’m singing better.”
The Jazz Journalists
Association has named Andy Bey its “Best
Male Jazz Vocalist” for three consecutive
years, proof that the spotlight may finally be
catching up to Bey. While Bey never courted stardom,
every musician wants to be heard, so the attention,
however late in coming, must feel like a vindication.
Sinatra burnished his legend by singing about
doing it “his way,” but Bey actually
did it. “I stuck with what I loved,”
he says, “and I learned a lot about myself
through the music. I want to keep growing as an
artist until the end of my life as long as I can
sit at a piano and sing.”
back to top
March
2 , 2007
Hungarian
State Folk Ensemble
The “folk revival”
of the 1950s and early 1960s was not just an American
phenomenon. What happened in the U.S. was part
of a worldwide movement to preserve and celebrate
folk and traditional cultures in the years after
World War II. This increased appreciation of traditional
arts, music and dance was born of several impulses—nostalgia
for an earlier time, increasing nationalism in
a war-fragmented political landscape and newly
created (or re-created) countries trying to establish
a national identity for rallying purposes.
The Hungarian
State Folk Ensemble was established in
1951 to collect, preserve and perform the traditional
music, dances, and costumes of Hungary, and then
use those folk materials to create a Hungarian
“national” style of dance. The ensemble
was founded by choreographer Miklós Rábai,
who served as the company’s artistic director
until his death in 1974. Rábai was followed
by Dezso Létai (1975-1981) and Sándor
Timár (1981-1996). Ferenc Sebô has
been the ensemble’s artistic director since
1996.
Working with the
traditional folk songs and tunes that inspired
such classical composers as Bartók, Liszt
and Kodály, the ensemble performs dances
from throughout Hungary, choreographed for theatrical
presentation. The dances—some of them hundreds
of years old and many showing a strong Gypsy influence—include
czardas; herdsmen’s stick dancing; solo,
couple, and group jumping dances; clapping dances;
circle dances; and more.
Anna Kisselgoff,
dance critic for The New York Times, has written
of the troupe, “The Hungarian State Folk
Ensemble is marvelous—crackling with dancing
that snaps like a whip in a program framed successfully
by a sophisticated context...this unreservedly
brilliant company...feeds the eye and the mind.”
When this globe-trotting
ensemble was formed in 1951, Hungary was not the
independent country it is today. It was part of
the “Eastern Bloc” of European nations
ruled by the Soviet Union. In that repressive
environment, forming an ensemble like this one,
or performing in one, was a courageous political
act as much as it was an artistic choice. This
group helped keep the national dream alive in
Hungary.
For its Dayton
debut, the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble will
present Hungarian Concerto: Hommage à Béla
Bartók, a tribute to the great Hungarian
composer who did so much to elevate traditional
folk culture to the level of fine art.
—Jon
Hartley Fox
Part One
— From Father to Son
Prologue:
Hommage à Béla Bartók, excerpt
from Forty-four Duos for Two Violins
Memory
of the “Journey”: A journey
in space, in time, in fantasy; a memory of the
journey we shared.
Scenes along
the River: The Danube River—the
largest river of Europe, thus also of Hungary—connects
different cultures, rather than separating them.
The dances of the Hungarians living by the Danube
were influenced by the cultures of other people
living in the same region. This scene from the
Sárköz region of Western Hungary evokes
this colorful world; archaic jumping dances, skill-demanding
bottle dance going back to the Middle Ages, as
well as unique and original couple dances.
Verbunk
and Czardas: From the Szatmár
region of Eastern Hungary comes the quick and
exciting men’s recruiting dance and couple’s
czardas.
Gypsies:
Gypsies are the most exciting and the most “mysterious”
minority living in Europe. Their archaic culture,
their virtuoso men’s dances, and the lyrical
and frolicking nature of full-blooded love displayed
in their couple dances make this scene unique,
original and unrepeatable.
Clapping
Dance: Two couples dancing, accompanied
by a violin and a bagpipe. Exciting asymmetric
rhythms, fine technique and the individuality
of each dancer evolve from the couple dance.
Turning
Dance and Czardas: Due to its political
and geographic separation, Transylvania—a
region once belonging to the pre-World War I Hungary—preserved
an archaic culture of dances and music. This scene
evokes the men’s dances and couple dances
of the Transylvanian “Mezoség”
region.
Men’s
Dances: Men’s dances denote a category
of dances; the most virtuoso Hungarian men’s
dances represent the last phase of development
of individual folk dances. Flexibility and power,
varied dynamics and rhythm, devastating and suggestive
interpretation are the main features of these
dances. Only the top dancers can dance the men’s
dances.
Together
on the “Journey”: We are
part of an ever-changing “global culture.”
However, we have our particular and original culture
recreating a community...a community that is the
source of our identity.
Intermission
Part
Two — Our Treasures
“There was
a shepherd...”: Community is a power, the
source of persistence. This power protects all
members of the community and shows the way to
existence of all men and women.
Jumping
Dances and Czardas: This scene presents
a men’s dance made up of elements of ancient
war dances traced back to the Middle Ages, which
feature skills and rivalry. The appearance of
girls turns the scene into a celebration. The
whirling dance and the couple dance interlaced
with short steps and playful changes draw a picture
of the imaginative world of the Hungarian culture
of dance.
Dance for
Voice and Tarogatno: The tarogato
is an ancient medieval wind instrument resembling
the clarinet. In the early 18th century, this
instrument was forbidden, and became a symbol
of the struggle for freedom.
“My
pearl...”: Circle and lace dances
developed in Antiquity, at the dawn of human civilization,
and are represented on an abundance of Greek and
other Mediterranean vases and mosaics. Hungarian
girls’ circle dances are late descendants
of this archaic style. This dance accompanied
by voices is about love, just like a following
poetic, dreamlike duet.
Shepherds:
Dances of medieval Europe were dominated by war
dances. Books by famous travelers report that
the heyducks’ (herdsmen’s)
dances were extremely virtuoso and war-like. Shepherds
have kept this ancient type of dance alive almost
up to the present day. Virtuosity survived but
fighting and swords have softened to dance with
sticks.
Couple’s
Dance from Csíkszék, Transylvania:
This dance is accompanied by a unique
instrument called the “hit-gardon.”
It is carved from a tree trunk and shaped like
a peasant envisioned a cello. It is a stringed
instrument which is played percussively, with
its strings all tuned to the same note. The clapping
and stomping of the dancer and the sound of the
gardon are interdependent, and they ultimately
drive the off-beat rhythm of the dance.
Circle
Verbunk and Czardas: The slow and gallant
verbunk, a dance used on the occasions
of recruitment (“verbung”)
begun in the 18th century. The related czardas,
a couple’s dance, became the most authentic
expression of Hungarian character. It is present,
in various forms and types, in the full territory
of the Hungarian linguistic area. In this scene,
the most outstanding dances are adapted to the
stage, in a form most similar to the original,
authentic dance.
Epilogue:
Hommage à Béla Bartók
back to top
March
9, 2007
Karan Casey Band
Karan Casey
made her reputation singing with Solas, the great
Irish-American band, but there’s more to
her music than the traditional ballads and songs
of Ireland. She’s a jazz singer, a folk
singer, a pop singer, a protest singer, even a
children’s music singer, but above all—as
her countrywoman Maura O’Connell so memorably
put it—she’s “just a singer.”
Casey is not limited to any single style of music;
she’s a versatile vocalist with a gift for
bringing great songs to life, in both English
and Gaelic.
Karan Casey was born in 1969
in the tiny village of Ballyduff Lower, County
Waterford, in southeastern Ireland. She started
singing at a young age and sang in school and
church choirs as well as traditional singing competitions.
She also studied piano. Casey moved to Dublin
in 1988 to study music at University College Dublin
[UCD] and the Royal Irish Academy of Music. It
was in Dublin that she began her professional
music career.
“At the end of my first
year at UCD,” Casey recalls ruefully, “there
was a concert at which I sang a jazz song. I was
told afterward by the head of the music department
that that wasn’t music. It was one of the
reasons I left the music department; they were
too narrow-minded.”
Casey is a big fan of legendary
jazz vocalist Ella Fitzgerald, especially her
scat singing, and she sang many of Ella’s
standards working in the jazz band Bourbon Street
and in a two-year residency in a duo at George’s
Bistro. Casey also formed the band Dorothy to
perform her original material. At the same time,
she was learning traditional Irish ballads from
renowned singer and song collector Frank Harte,
who served as a mentor to Casey and many other
singers.
Casey moved to New York in 1993
and began working on a jazz degree at Long Island
University and performing jazz in her free time.
“I used to sing jazz at a friend’s
house every Friday night,” she says. Living
in Queens and feeling more than a little homesick,
Casey rediscovered her love of the old Irish music.
“I started to go to traditional seisiuns
[jam sessions] around the city because I was really
lonely. That’s how I got back into traditional
singing again.” She soon joined the band
Atlantic Bridge.
It wasn’t long before Casey
hooked up with Seamus Egan, Winifred Horan, John
Doyle and John Williams in forming the band Solas,
acclaimed by many as the first great Irish-American
band to play traditional Irish music. Egan and
Horan were playing a job one night when they were
told Casey was in the audience. They had heard
Casey before, so they invited her to join them
on stage.
On the Solas reunion DVD, Casey
talks about her first meeting with Egan and Horan,
musicians from the U.S. who had won numerous All-Ireland
instrumental championships between them. “I
remember them coming into the gig and I thought,
‘Oh, they look like rock stars, the pair
of them,’” she says. “I got
up and sang a few songs with them. Then we realized
we were neighbors, living on the same street,
so it kind of went from there.”
Casey was a member of Solas for
four and a half years and can be heard on the
band’s first three albums Solas, Sunny
Spells and Scattered Showers and The
Words that Remain. Casey also participated
in the band’s 2006 reunion, documented on
the CD/DVD release Reunion: A Decade of Solas,
singing such favorites as “Newry Highwayman,”
“Wind That Shakes the Barley,” “Pastures
of Plenty,” “Nil Na La” and
“Unquiet Grave.”
Solas toured extensively during
Casey’s time in the band, playing in Japan,
throughout Europe and the U.S. Casey’s vocals
were a big part of the Solas sound, and she earned
rave reviews for her singing. The Boston Globe
said that “Casey’s voice is among
the loveliest in folk music, and she is a wonderful
interpreter of both contemporary and traditional
material.” The Herald of Glasgow,
Scotland, praised her as “the most soulful
singer to emerge in Irish traditional music in
the past decade.”
Casey left Solas in 1999 to pursue
a solo career and start a family; she was replaced
in the band by Deirdre Scanlan. In 1997, while
she was still a member of Solas, Casey did some
solo touring in Ireland and recorded her first
solo album, Songlines. Though the album
contained a fair share of traditional material,
including the a cappella solos “An Buachaillin
Ban” and “Laboring Man’s Daughter,”
it also showed a singer who was not constrained
by her traditional influences.
That’s not too surprising
for a musician born in our age of mass media.
“In Ireland,” Casey points out, “there’s
no kind of closed area where it’s pure traditional
music. Not if you’re living in a household
with a radio and a TV, and most people are.”
Outside influences enter the mix “just by
osmosis,” she says, and she’s long
been a fan of Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Ella
Fitzgerald and other jazz singers.
“Traditional Irish music
is a challenge,” Casey says. “I grew
up singing on my own. I learned a lot of songs
on my own and did solo singing competitions. And
a lot of the tradition is about solo singing and
drawing people into you and into the song. It’s
quite a challenge, therefore, to add anything
to that, because on many levels, you lose something
when you add something else. It’s a huge
challenge to know where to draw the line.”
Casey’s three subsequent
albums indicate that she’s got a pretty
good handle on drawing the line in a place that
honors the traditional songs by presenting them
together with complementary new material. The
Winds Begin To Sing, Distant Shore and Chasing
The Sun have all received rave reviews, with
critics routinely praising Casey for her sensitivity
and astute judgment in choosing songs and her
skill at connecting with the listener on a fundamental
level.
Casey is especially proud of
her most recent album, Chasing The Sun,
not only because she wrote six of the album’s
songs, but also because it’s the closest
she’s come as a solo artist to capturing
in the recording studio the magic that transpires
at one of her concerts. “People have been
asking me for the last few years for an album
that reflects the gigs, so here it is,”
she says. “This has just the lads and myself
on it with no frills other than a few harmonies
and a bit of percussion.” She also sings
another couple of a cappella traditional songs,
“The Brown and the Yellow Ale” and
“Jimmy Whelan.”
The least known of Casey’s
albums is Seal Maiden: A Celtic Musical,
ostensibly a children’s album, but a work
that Casey’s adult fans will also enjoy.
Featuring Martin Hayes, Dennis Cahill, Niall Vallely
and Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh (of Altan) in addition
to Casey (who narrates the story and sings several
songs), the award-winning CD recounts an Irish
legend of a seal that becomes human; the same
story was told cinematically by John Sayles in
the film The Secret of Roan Inish.
Karan Casey has also made numerous
guest appearances on recordings by a diverse group
of artists, including Tim O’Brien, on The
Crossing album and tours; Paul Winter, on his
Grammy-winning Celtic Solstice; and Bernice Johnson
Reagon of Sweet Honey in the Rock, on the album
and PBS documentary Africans In America.
The Karan Casey Band includes
Casey on vocals, pianist Caoimhín
Vallely, guitarist Robbie Overson,
and the newest addition to the group, cellist
Kate Ellis. Caoimhín Vallely,
a member of the noted Vallely family of County
Armagh, is the younger brother of accordion virtuoso
Niall Vallely, Casey’s husband and frequent
touring partner, who is (along with brother Caoimhín)
now playing with a new band called Buille. Just
so you know.
Though Casey began writing songs
just a few years ago, she is now recognized as
one of Ireland’s finest singer-songwriters.
Her original songs are politically charged, passionate
and progressive, tackling such difficult topics
as Irish self-determination, immigrants’
rights and discrimination. Political awareness
has also long shaped her choice of songs to cover,
from Woody Guthrie’s “Pastures of
Plenty” and “Strange Fruit,”
Billie Holiday’s searing indictment of a
lynching in the deep south (which Casey makes
sound disturbingly Irish), to such contemporary
fare as “Distant Shore” by Billy Bragg
and songs by John Spillane, Barry Kerr and Ewan
MacColl.
“Songwriting is something
I’ve been longing to do for a long while,”
says Casey. “It doesn’t come easy
to me. I have to work hard at it. I moved out
to the countryside 10 miles north of Cork City
and that helped a lot to set up more of an environment
for writing. But getting into writing more is
also just me looking back on my life and wondering
where things are going, and starting the process
of reflecting on all that. There’s a long,
long way to go, I think.”
back to top
March
10, 2007
Bill Mays Trio
Bill Mays is
a consummate piano player. Name the gig, and he’s
played it. Name the format or musical configuration,
and he’s done it. Name the singer, and he’s
backed him, her or them up. From solo piano to
big bands, from jazz to funk to pop, from time-tested
standards to his own brand-new compositions, from
Los Angeles to New York, Bill Mays has done it
all. He’s flown under the critical radar
for far too long, but Mays is finally starting
to get the acclaim that is due him as a modern
keyboard master.
Born in 1944 in northern California,
Bill Mays was part of a musical family. His father
played several instruments, and Bill started on
piano at a young age but also played trumpet and
baritone horn in his teenage years. Mays was inspired
to play jazz after hearing the great pianist Earl
“Fatha” Hines at age 16.
“A friend took me to a
jazz brunch and ‘Fatha’ was playing
solo piano,” Bill says. “It was so
new to my ears, and it was burning! His rhythmic
drive, unusual melodic twists, two-handed independence
and use of the whole keyboard thrilled and inspired
me.”
He was soon deeply into jazz.
“Shortly thereafter,” he says, “I
heard Miles Davis’ band at San Francisco’s
Black Hawk, and that was further inspiration.
Later I discovered Tommy Flanagan, Hank Jones,
Wynton Kelly, Jimmy Rowles, Horace Silver and
Art Tatum—I was hooked.”
Mays began his career as a professional
musician in the U.S. Navy. After four years of
that experience, which included a year of instruction
at the Naval School of Music, he mustered out
and became an active part of the music scene in
San Diego. Mays played in the Bill Green Ensemble,
which was seen on a daily local television show,
and also co-led a quartet called Road Work Ahead,
which worked extensively in San Diego and throughout
southern California.
Mays moved to Los Angeles in
1969, where he worked jazz gigs with Art Pepper,
Shelly Manne, Buddy Collette, Harold Land and
Bud Shank, and was a long-time member of the quintet
led by trumpeter Bobby Shew. Mays led a couple
of bands during this time and played on records
by an array of artists that ranged from Tom Scott’s
L.A. Express to Frank Zappa.
With his versatility, creativity
and wide-ranging talent, Mays was a “natural”
for Hollywood. “I’d worked hard on
my sight-reading,” he explains, “and
on gaining familiarity with other keyboard instruments
like harpsichord, organ, celeste and synthesizers.
I started as a rehearsal pianist for TV shows.
That’s how I met the music contractors and
started working in that end of the business.”
Vocal accompaniment is a big
part of the pianist’s art, and Bill Mays
is among the best in the business. He was a first-call
recording session pianist in L.A. and has, accordingly,
worked with some of the greatest and most popular
singers of our time: Sarah Vaughan, Frank Sinatra,
Anita O’Day, Al Jarreau, Dionne Warwick,
Shirley Horn, Aretha Franklin, Sheila Jordan,
Mel Torme and the Manhattan Transfer.
Mays made his solo recording
debut in 1976 with A Musical Cocktail.
That was followed by albums with saxophonist Bud
Shank and Road Work Ahead, but Mays really began
to hit his stride in the early 1980s, with a duet
album with bassist Red Mitchell and the 1983 debut
of the Bill Mays Quintet (with drummer Shelly
Manne) on Tha’s Delights.
Despite having a full calendar
and a very successful career working in Los Angeles,
Mays moved to New York in 1984. “I wanted
to broaden my scope,” he says of the move,
“and work with some of the people I’d
always admired. And, continue to grow as a writer
and player.
“I mostly did wall-to-wall
studio work in L.A. for 15 years, and played jazz
only occasionally,” Mays explains. “Since
the move to New York, it’s exactly the other
way around. I travel six months of the year playing
jazz, doing jazz clinics and only occasionally
play studio dates, most recently for TV with Luciano
Pavarotti.”
After relocating to New York,
Mays made up for lost time, jazz-wise, leading
his own bands and playing and recording with such
top musicians as Benny Golson, Mel Lewis, Ron
Carter, Clark Terry, Al Cohn, Phil Woods, Gerry
Mulligan, Rufus Reid and the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra.
Mays recorded several albums in his first few
years in New York, including a live solo performance,
a pair of duet albums with bassist Ray Drummond,
a duet with Canadian jazz guitarist Ed Bickert
and the second outing by the Bill Mays Quintet.
The Bill Mays Trio made its bow
in 1994 with An Ellington Affair. The
current trio of Mays, drummer Matt Wilson and
bassist Martin Wind came together in the late
1990s and was first heard on Out In PA,
released in 1999. This threesome has subsequently
recorded the critically acclaimed albums Summer
Sketches, Going Home and Live at the
Jazz Standard.
“I’ve found
a connection with my current trio like no other,”
says Mays. “They bring so much to the table
from their vast playing experiences—the
technical concerns are out of the way and the
interplay with them is uncanny. The music seems
to be coming from one head. And I greatly value
their contributions as composers.” All
About Jazz agrees with Mays’ assessment
of his group, noting that “only a few trios
in the world today can rival this band.”
German bassist Martin
Wind moved to New York in 1996 and quickly
established himself as a major player on the city’s
jazz and avant-garde scenes. Like Bill Mays and
Matt Wilson, Wind can expertly play any style
or sub-style of jazz, from mainstream to way,
way outside.
Wind has recorded or performed
with dozens of artists in addition to Mays, including
Pat Metheny, Johnny Griffin, Clark Terry, Bucky
Pizzarelli, Mike Stern, Michael and Randy Brecker,
the Village Vanguard Orchestra, Arts & Crafts,
Radio Big Band Berlin and Bill Goodwin’s
Orntette. A member of the jazz faculty at New
York University, Wind has recorded eight albums
as a leader or co-leader.
A native of western Illinois
who now lives in New York, Matt Wilson
is one of the finest and most versatile drummers
in jazz. He received his musical training at Wichita
State University and then spent the next few years
in Boston, where he played with a variety of ensembles
including the Either/Orchestra and the Charlie
Kohlhase Quartet.
Since moving to New York, Wilson
has worked in groups led by Lee Konitz, Dewey
Redman, Jane Ira Bloom, Denny Zeitlin, Buster
Williams and more. Wilson has recorded seven albums
as a leader, including three by Arts & Crafts,
a highly esteemed quartet that plays everything
from standards to free improvisation.
The Bill Mays Trio has attracted
considerable attention from critics and fans in
the last six or seven years. Entertainment
Weekly echoed a common theme as it helped
spread the word. “A musician’s musician
for far too long, Mays deserves wider recognition
for the outstanding work he’s done with
his latest trio. Flanked by two exceptionally
alert and responsive players, Mays exhibits his
fluid, speak-softly-but-spare-no-intensity style…standards
and group originals blossom under the ensemble’s
telepathic interplay.”
With three highly creative writers
in the group, the Bill Mays Trio plays a lot of
original material. Mays is a widely respected
composer who blends jazz, classical, gospel and
pop influences into music that is much like his
playing—expansive, sophisticated, challenging
and rewarding. He’s written works for solo
piano, saxophone quartets, suites for bass and
piano, suites for flute and piano and—especially
in the last few years—all manner of tunes
for his piano-bass-drums trio.
“I’ve been composing
for as long as I can remember,” says Mays.
“Half the time I write just for pleasure;
the other half is for specific, commissioned projects.
I don’t have much formal, scholastic training.
I studied briefly in the 1960s in San Diego. My
major inspirations have been Gil Evans, Maurice
Ravel, Thad Jones, Horace Silver. It’s most
rewarding to hear something in your head, or voice
it on the piano, and then hear it take shape and
come to life with a band or orchestra.”
Something about the trio format
seems to suit Mays. Each player has room enough
to stretch out and really say something. And this
particular trio of Mays, Wind and Wilson operates
at such a high level of musicality and has such
a strong rapport that its playing defies the conventions
of the trio, recasting the music as a true three-way
conversation.
“The evolution of my music
has been a direct result of working with this
trio,” Mays says. “Since each of us
is a composer, we are in sync in thinking through
a tune and letting it take us somewhere we hadn’t
planned to go. This creates great musical surprises.
It only happens, though, because of the respect,
the trust and the humor we share.”
back to top
March
17, 2007
Los Lobos
Los Lobos is
more than just the greatest rock band in the U.S.
The band has become a cultural institution, not
only at home in East Los Angeles, but around the
world. Together now for almost 35 years, Los Lobos
has shown unparalleled creativity, stability and
versatility in becoming the foremost standard
bearers for American roots rock.
The band has won three Grammy
Awards, had several hit records and earned an
enviable reputation as one of this era’s
premiere performing bands. But Los Lobos has something
even more special going for it, something that
sets “the wolves” apart from every
other band on the album charts.
Imagine U2 taking a break from
their arena rock and playing some letter-perfect
traditional Irish music. Or maybe Tom Petty and
the Heartbreakers swapping their electric instruments
for acoustic ones and recording some hard-driving
bluegrass, high lonesome harmonies and all.
The very idea seems laughable,
but that is essentially what Los Lobos does, and
has done, in every concert and for at least a
couple of songs on every album. On some tours,
like this one, and on some albums (La Pistola
y El Corazon; Acoustic En Vivo), Los Lobos
sets the rock aside and concentrates exclusively
on traditional Mexican folk music.
The Los Lobos story begins in
East Los Angeles, a predominantly Hispanic section
of the city. The group was founded in 1973, when
Garfield High School students Cesar Rosas, David
Hidalgo, Louie Peréz and Conrad Lozano
began playing music together. All four had played
in local rock, R&B, blues and soul/funk bands,
but the music they played in this new group was
different—it was the traditional Mexican
music of their parents’ and grandparents’
generations. The youthful quartet was inspired
philosophically and artistically by the political
and consciousness-raising activities percolating
through the barrio, such as the Brown Berets,
Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, La Raza
and the Chicano Power movement.
Accompanying themselves on such instruments
as bajo sexto, guitarron, jarana, requinto,
and button accordion, Los Lobos worked up a repertoire
of traditional songs and tunes from Mexico and
started playing throughout the neighborhood at
parties, weddings, restaurants and civic gatherings.
The band took its name—originally, Los Lobos
del Este de Los Angeles—from a play on the
name of a popular norteno band in Texas. The title
of the first Los Lobos album, Just Another
Band from East L.A. (1977), is another inside
joke, referencing the live 1972 album by the Mothers
of Invention. “We were just a bunch of sarcastic
kids,” explains Louie Peréz of the
jokes. “We were being goofy.”
But there was nothing joke-y
(or hokey) about the band’s music. It was
authentic and powerful and performed with the
utmost respect, and the Latinos in East LA claimed
the band as their own. The band’s initial
foray into the pop music world—an opening
show for the post-Sex Pistols band of singer Johnny
Rotten—was an unmitigated disaster, with
the punks in the audience booing lustily and throwing
anything handy towards the stage.
That initial reception aside,
Los Lobos caught on with the punk and roots music
audiences in L.A., championed by the Blasters
and others who saw promise in the longhaired Latinos.
From this initial base in the L.A. punk clubs,
Los Lobos began building a national presence and
a unique band sound that incorporated the acoustic
traditional material alongside electric and hard-rocking
blues, rock and soul songs, many written by the
band members.
Saxophonist Steve Berlin, an
erstwhile Blaster, joined Los Lobos in the early
1980s and the band’s line-up has been the
same ever since—Cesar Rosas
(vocals, guitar, mandolin), David Hidalgo
(vocals, guitars, accordion, percussion, bass,
keyboards, violin, banjo), Louie Peréz
(drums, guitar, percussion, vocals), Conrad
Lozano (bass, guitar, vocals), and Steve
Berlin (saxophones, percussion, flute,
midisax, harmonica, melodica).
In 1983, Los Lobos released an
EP, And A Time To Dance, on the punk
label Slash. A Grammy Award the following year
for “Best Mexican/American Performance”
for the song “Anselma” gave the band
a truly national following, and it was off to
the races for Los Lobos. Subsequent albums like
How Will the Wolf Survive and By
The Light of the Moon earned lavish critical
praise and established Los Lobos as one of the
top roots rock bands in the country. The band
was especially admired for its dazzling original
material, songs like “Will the Wolf Survive,”
Don’t Worry Baby,” “A Matter
of Time,” “River of Fools,”
“Tears of God” and “One Time
One Night,” the best song ever written about
the human cost of Reaganomics.
The band tasted massive—and
completely unexpected—mainstream success
in the late 1980s, when it provided the music
for La Bamba, a feature film about the
life and death of Latino rocker Ritchie Valens.
The film’s soundtrack sold more than two
million copies and the title song spent three
weeks atop the Billboard hit singles chart.
While La Bamba made
stars out of Los Lobos, it also had the very real
potential to lock the band into a sound and image
that didn’t really fit. “We were the
guys who played ‘La Bamba’ and nothing
more,” says Peréz, “and it
concerned us. We didn’t really know what
to do at that point. So we ran home.” By
“home,” Peréz meant the traditional
music the band had played in the 1970s.
To avoid the trap of typecasting,
Los Lobos shifted gears for its next album and
recorded La Pistola y El Corazon, a stunning
album of mostly acoustic Mexican folk music. The
Grammy-winning album “was a way to get back,”
says Hidalgo, “go all the way back to the
beginning, and for us to refocus and go on.”
The 1990s was a decade of experimentation
and growth for Los Lobos, launched by The
Neighborhood and crowned by the band’s
finest album, Kiko. The dreamy, psychedelic,
Beatles-esque Kiko floored even longtime fans
of Los Lobos. The album was a quantum leap forward
for the band—in terms of imagination, songwriting,
playing, studio savvy and David Hidalgo’s
angelic singing—a kind of musical equivalent
to the “magic realism” of Gabriel
García Márquez and other Latin American
writers. Colossal Head and This Time
followed, along with such musical side-projects
as the Latin Playboys, Los Super Seven, and Houndog
and the Cesar Rosas solo album, Soul Disguise.
Los Lobos has been active in
the studio over the past several years, recording
Good Morning, Aztlán; The Ride
(with such guests as Elvis Costello, Dave Alvin
and Mavis Staples); Ride This: The Covers
EP and Live at the Fillmore, a CD/DVD
celebrating the band’s 30th anniversary.
This decade began with El Cancionero: Mas
y Mas, a deluxe four-CD set collecting hits,
rarities, unreleased material and live recordings.
The band is increasingly involved
in movie soundtrack work; Los Lobos has contributed
music to The Mambo Kings, Desperado, Feeling
Minnesota, Alamo Bay, The End of Violence, Untamed
Heart and From Dusk Til Dawn, in
addition to La Bamba. In their spare
time, the band members have also appeared on tribute
albums to Buddy Holly, Richard Thompson, Doc Pomus,
the Beatles and the Grateful Dead.
This Los Lobos acoustic tour
is neither marketing gimmick nor Latino nostalgia.
“It’ll be pretty much what we were
doing back at the beginning,” says Hidalgo.
“It’s mostly regional folk music of
Mexico, music from Veracruz, and some more popular
stuff, the boleros and some music from the Caribbean
and South America. It’s fun and it’s
real demanding. If we haven’t played it
in a while, we really have to rehearse and get
back into it. Acoustic instruments…you can’t
hide.”
Foreshadowed by the 2005 limited
edition album Acoustic En Vivo, this
16-city tour offers a wide variety of “unplugged”
Los Lobos music, including some of the band’s
classic hits, some selections from the most recent
album, The Town and the City, and traditional
music from Mexico, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Cuba
and elsewhere in Latin America.
“There’s a whole
world,” says David Hidalgo of the traditional
music Los Lobos is playing on this tour, “a
parallel universe of all this music that’s
beautiful and it feels connected to our history
and culture. It really had a profound influence
on us and was something we didn’t want to
give up. I still get that same feeling that I
got the first time I heard it.”
Thirty-some years into the ride,
Los Lobos remains committed to the music and its
power to bring people together. “We knew
[Los Lobos] was an opportunity to express our
viewpoint,” explains Hidalgo. “And
we’ve always felt that responsibility to
our community, playing that folk music. So we
just carried that on. We tried to write something
that had some meat to it, that meant something,
at least to us.
“Most folks are
more alike than they are different. There are
common things that we all share, just the common
day-to-day grind, the stuff that we all go through.
We all have problems, love, all that stuff. So
that’s what we went on.”
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March
21 , 2007
Kiran Ahluwalia
Like many children of immigrants,
award-winning singer Kiran Ahluwalia
found her artistic inspiration and muse in the
land and culture her parents had left behind.
Born in India and now a resident of Canada, Ahluwalia
has earned an international reputation for her
magnificent singing, in both Urdu and Punjabi,
of not only the traditional music of India and
Pakistan, but also her own new creations within
the traditions. The Village Voice has
called her “a rising international star,”
but Global Rhythms, in a cover story
on south Asian music, is more emphatic: “Kiran
Ahluwalia has arrived.”
Kiran Ahluwalia masterfully performs
two distinctly different types of vocal music
native to what used to be called the Indian subcontinent:
the ghazal, a form of sung poetry that
arrived in India around 1400, four centuries after
it had developed in Persia (modern-day Iran);
and traditional folk songs of the Punjab, a large
region in northern India that was “partitioned”
in 1947, one part staying with India, the other
becoming part of the newly created country of
Pakistan.
Ahluwalia was born in the northern
Indian state of Bihar to Punjabi parents. Kiran’s
first years were spent in India and New Zealand;
her family immigrated to Canada when Kiran was
nine. Living in Toronto, she went with her parents
to occasional Indian concerts or musical recitals,
which were usually held in someone’s home.
These weren’t really kid-friendly shows,
but Kiran had been interested in music since a
very young age and she loved the experiences.
“When I was growing up
in India,” Kiran says, “very few people
had recordings of any kind. There were state-sponsored
concerts that people from all over would walk
to and crowd into. While some children would get
bored, I was perfectly content taking it in, even
if I had to stand up the whole time.
“We had a reel-to-reel
tape recorder and we would listen to tapes of
Indian music. We would also listen to Bollywood
[the nickname given to the massive Indian film
industry, which also generates a large percentage
of the country’s popular music] on the radio,
and when a song came on that I wanted to learn,
my mother would quickly write down the lyrics
for me.”
Though Kiran had studied Indian
music while in high school, and would continue
to study it throughout her college years, she
had no intention of becoming a musician when she
entered the University of Toronto. She graduated
with a degree in industrial relations and started
climbing the corporate ladder. But…she found
that she couldn’t keep the music out of
her mind. She says that she was haunted by a recurring
dream in which she was an old woman wracked by
regret over not having pursued her musical dreams
more seriously.
In 1990, much to her parents’
chagrin, Kiran quit her job and moved to India
to become a full-time music student. She began
by studying Indian classical music in Bombay for
several years. She next journeyed to Hyderabad,
to study with Vithal Rao, one of the last living
masters of ghazal and one of the last
living court musicians of the Nizam of Hyderabad.
Rao is a legendary and highly revered singer and
he agreed to teach the ancient art form to Ahluwalia.
Her final stop was Punjab, where
she studied traditional folk singing by visiting
small villages for extended stays and learning
from older singers while also participating in
the daily life and culture of the region. Young
South Asian musicians, especially in England,
have modernized one form of Punjabi folk music
as bhangra, electronic dance music popular in
clubs, but that wasn’t what Ahluwalia was
seeking. “I was familiar with Punjabi music
from the club scene,” she says, “bhangra
and all of that. But I was more interested in
the acoustic roots Punjabi music.”
Throughout the 1990s, Kiran lived
in two worlds. On the one hand, she spent years
studying in India and doing occasional concerts
in Canada and the U.S. On the other, she returned
to Canada, earned an M.B.A., and climbed back
on the corporate ladder. Kiran worked as a bond
trader, an executive in television and radio,
and, for two years, as assistant general manager
for Putumayo, a leading world music record company.
Singing finally won the battle.
Ahluwalia made the momentous decision in 2000,
quit her job, returned to Toronto and properly
launched her career as a musician. She recorded
her first album, Kashish Attraction,
in 2001. A mix of ghazals and Punjabi
folk songs, the album received glowing reviews
and allowed Ahluwalia to tour more widely. Her
second album, Beyond Borders, was even
stronger. The album won the 2004 Juno Award for
“Best World Music Recording” and helped
Ahluwalia win the Canadian Arts Presenters “Touring
Artist of the Year” award.
Where Ahluwalia’s first
two albums featured her interpretations of traditional
music from India and Pakistan, Kiran Ahluwalia,
released in 2005, showcases her as an artist willing
and able to tastefully stretch the tradition.
This album has a more far-ranging instrumental
sound than its predecessors—including two
songs with Cape Breton fiddler Natalie MacMaster—but
Ahluwalia makes an even more significant contribution
as a modern-day creator of ghazals.
“Ghazals are love
songs,” she says. “In this genre,
the poet and the composer have always been two
different people. It’s not like the singer/songwriter
tradition where it’s all in one person,
because the poetry is very literary. Poets spend
their lifetime studying the poetry and someone
else who spent their lifetime studying Indian
music comes along, picks up a poem, composes it
and sings it.”
For a composer in this traditional
style, especially today, the problem is finding
suitable poetry to set to music. Kiran got lucky
in this regard, when she attended a gathering
in Toronto of a literary organization called Punjabi
Kalma da Kafla (Caravan of Punjabi Pens), whose
members are émigré poets from India
and Pakistan.
“This turned into an immensely
important night,” says Kiran. “Imagine
how ecstatic I felt. I was composing music in
this genre and I found poets writing beautiful
lyrics in this poetic form of ghazals
right here in Canada. A huge door opened up for
me.”
Working with three transplanted
Pakistani poets living in Toronto—Rasheed
Nadeem, Rafi Raza and Tahira Masood—Kiran
is creating Canadian ghazals for the modern age.
This is trickier than it might seem, as updating
a venerable tradition is fraught with peril—go
too far and it’s no longer traditional;
play it safe and you might not connect with a
contemporary audience. Ahluwalia faced that paradox
head-on in 2002 when she performed her new ghazals
at a world music festival in Lahore, Pakistan.
The audience’s enthusiastic embrace of her
songs and her radiant singing convinced Kiran
that she was on the right path.
“The challenges
of ghazals are that you have a melody
and you improvise in it,” Ahluwalia explains.
“You also have to stay true to it while
bringing out something new in it. The words can
be hard to understand if you’ve chosen very
classic, literary ghazals. You have to
study them and figure out what was happening in
the writer’s life when he wrote it and how
you can interpret the ghazal. And in
terms of composing, it’s not a pop song
and it’s not classical, so it’s in
a genre of its own and that can be challenging,
too.”
Ahluwalia is accompanied in concert
by a rather uncharacteristic line-up of tabla,
guitar and harmonium. The tabla is a percussion
instrument consisting of two hand drums of differing
size and timbre. The skin-covered drums are widespread
throughout India and are used in classical, pop
and religious music. The acoustic guitar is not
a traditional part of Indian music. While Ahluwalia
is not the first singer to use it to accompany
ghazals, she is among the first to use the guitar
in a melodic rather than rhythmic function.
The harmonium is another alien
to the Indian tradition. A free-reed keyboard
instrument that combines elements of the pump
organ and the accordion, the harmonium was invented
in France in the 1840s and introduced to India
by British missionaries a decade or so later.
A versatile, portable and popular instrument,
the harmonium is most often used to accompany
vocalists, as well as Sikh and Hindu religious
ceremonies. Ahluwalia plays the tanpura
(also called the tambura in some parts
of India), a long-necked, round-bodied, fretless
Indian lute that produces a buzzing drone sound.
Kiran Ahluwalia has performed
in Pakistan, Spain, and Finland and toured throughout
Canada and the U.S. The worldwide release of her
newest album (her first two were self-released
with limited distribution) has put Ahluwalia in
the position to introduce a much larger international
audience to two of the world’s oldest and
most beautiful vocal traditions. She’s ready
for the challenge. And as a critic for the Toronto
Globe & Mail put it: “For those
uninitiated into the charms of non-classical Indian
music, this is an ideal place to start.”
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April
7 , 2007
Lunasa
In October 1997, a quintet of
talented Irish musicians calling themselves Lúnasa
released an all-instrumental album of the same
name. A mix of studio and live concert recordings
drawn from the band’s first few months together,
Lúnasa attracted immediate attention on
both sides of the Atlantic. Dubbed an “Irish
music dream team” by the magazine Folk
Roots, Lúnasa was the hot new band,
“taking Irish trad where few bands have
gone before” (Hot Press). The
Boston Herald was on the money when it noted
that “not since the debut of Solas has an
Irish traditional band been as lavishly praised
as Lúnasa.”
Named for an ancient Celtic
harvest festival honoring the Irish god Lugh,
the patron of the arts, Lúnasa is Trevor
Hutchinson (acoustic bass), Sean Smyth (fiddle
and whistles), Kevin Crawford (flutes, whistles
and bodhrán), Cillian Vallely (Uilleann
pipes and whistle) and Paul Meehan (guitar and
banjo), who replaced founding member Donogh Hennessy
at the end of 2004.
The first steps toward the current
band came in 1996, when Sean Smyth, Trevor Hutchinson
and Donogh Hennessy joined forces for a Scandinavian
tour. Liking the music they made together, the
three decided after the tour to form a band. Piper
John McSherry and flutist Michael McGoldrick were
recruited to fill out the band; this was the band
that made the 1997 debut CD. The new group had
a definite Bothy Band feel to it.
“I had a vision
of the type of music I wanted to create,”
says Sean Smyth. “In my book, the most influential
band was the Bothy Band, who were flute, pipes
and fiddle based.” But Lúnasa also
included guitar and bass, which gave the band
an unusual texture and distinctive sound.
“There are lots
of great melodies in Irish music but often people
don’t hear the rhythms underneath,”
explains Smyth. “We try to relate the swing
or energy out of the music, using new rhythms,
letting each instrument add its own unique layer.
We’ll play the same tune over and over searching
for the groove, exploring it. We let the music
find its pulse.”
“There is nothing
that occupies the sonic territory that the bass
has, other than the bodhrán,” adds
Trevor Hutchinson. “Most of the instruments
are in a high range, and you need to balance the
sound by giving it a low range. The hardest
thing is integrating with the guitarist—what
room does the guitar leave to figure out what
the tune needs? Does it need to swing? What
will be the rhythm motion?”
The buzz generated by the new
band and album earned Lúnasa a three-album
deal with U.S. label Green Linnet. Cillian Vallely
and Kevin Crawford had replaced McSherry and McGoldrick
by the time of the band’s 1999 Green Linnet
debut, Otherworld. The album was a commercial
and critical smash; Otherworld received
“Traditional Album of the Year” honors
from the publications Irish Echo and
Irish Voice.
After first establishing a rabid
fan base at home in Ireland, the men of Lúnasa
have racked up the frequent-flyer miles through
extensive touring. The band has performed throughout
the U.S., Canada and the U.K., and toured in Australia,
Israel, France, Austria, Spain, the Netherlands,
Japan and other countries near and far. Quite
possibly the hardest-touring band in traditional
Irish music, Lúnasa played nearly 150 shows
in 2006.
Though Lúnasa is a relatively
young band, the members of the band have extensive
individual credits. Trevor Hutchinson, one of
the few bassists in traditional Celtic music,
is a native of County Tyrone, Northern Ireland.
From 1986-1991, Hutchinson played bass with the
Waterboys, an Irish roots rock band with which
he recorded two albums. He next played in the
band of accordionist Sharon Shannon and can be
heard on three of her CDs. Hutchinson is also
an active session musician, having recorded with
Eileen Ivers, Moving Cloud and Dermot Byrne.
A County Mayo man, Sean Smyth
is an All-Ireland Champion on both fiddle and
whistle. Smith has recorded with Dónal
Lunny’s Coolfin, Matt Molloy, Alan Kelly
and Brendan O’Regan. Smith made his solo
recording debut in 1993 with the critically acclaimed
The Blue Fiddle, named one of the ten
best albums of the year by Irish Echo.
Kevin Crawford was born in Birmingham,
England, and now lives in County Clare. He also
works with the all-star band Moving Cloud and
has recorded with Raise the Rafters, Grianin and
Joe Derrane. Crawford has recorded a pair of solo
recordings for Green Linnet, ‘D’
Flute Album (1994) and In Good Company
(2001).
Cillian Vallely is yet another
member of the first family of Celtic music, the
Vallely clan of County Armagh, Northern Ireland.
A brother of Niall and Caoimhín Vallely
(both of whom have appeared in Dayton with Karan
Casey), Cillian Vallely has been the Uilleann
pipes soloist in the Broadway production of Riverdance,
toured with Tim O’Brien in “The Crossing,”
and performed with fiddler Seamus Connolly and
the bands Whirligig and Chulrua. He has also recorded
an album with brother Niall, Callan Bridge.
The newest member of Lúnasa,
guitarist Paul Meehan was born in Manchester,
England, and grew up in County Armagh, Northern
Ireland. Before joining Lúnasa, Meehan
had performed and recorded with the bands Na Dorsa,
North Cregg, Buille and the Karan Casey Band.
He’s also done session work with Tommy Peoples,
Altan, Paddy Keenan and many others.
Lúnasa had a memorable
year in 2001, touring with both Mary-Chapin Carpenter
and Ladysmith Black Mambazo. The band had two
CDs released that year to significant acclaim:
Green Linnet released the group’s third
album, The Merry Sisters of Fate, while
Compass reissued an expanded and remastered version
of Lúnasa, the band’s self-released
1997 debut.
Lúnasa recorded its masterpiece
(so far), The Kinnitty Sessions, in 2004.
Recorded live-in-the-studio before an invited
audience in an Irish castle that’s supposedly
haunted, The Kinnitty Sessions is an intense,
compelling collection of tunes by a band at its
peak. The album did a superb job of capturing
the excitement, power and spontaneity of a Lúnasa
concert and it won numerous accolades and honors,
including the Irish Music Magazine Readers
Poll for “Best Traditional Album”
in 2005.
The band’s most recent
album is Sé, Gaelic for “six.”
It’s the first Lúnasa album without
guitarist Donogh Hennessy, but the band’s
red-hot virtuoso playing on this grouping of tunes
has been met with the by-now usual critical acclaim.
Irish Echo lauded the band for its “altogether
rare blend of intelligence, innovation, virtuosity
and passion.” Hot Press went even
further, hearing in Lúnasa “a range
of sounds and moods not available to more mortal
players.”
Lúnasa’s bass and
guitar rhythm section sets it apart from most
modern Celtic bands, but Lúnasa also defies
current fashion with its all-instrumental format.
“I always felt that a singer would water
down what we have to offer,” says Kevin
Crawford. “What we try to do and what
we do really well is to create the highs and lows
that other bands often create by the use of a
song here and there. We do it through the
music and I think it works. Once you capture
the audience’s imagination and psyche, it
really works well. If they’re following
what you’re doing, you can bring them along
this road and it’s great.”
Despite the band’s innovations,
the members of Lúnasa insist the band is
still highly traditional. “We’re always
trying to blend the new and the old,” asserts
Sean Smyth, “and though it makes some people
uncomfortable, we’re very, very true to
the way the old melodies are when we play them.
We don’t do any jazz/blues revampings or
anything like that, though we do blend in some
new melodies and harmonies, and of course added
the rhythm section.”
“There’s no
point in doing tunes just because we know them
and are comfortable with them,” says Crawford. “Unless
there’s the whole sound of fiddle, pipes,
flute, guitar and bass…unless we can collectively
give that tune or set of tunes a new life, we
won’t do them. We have such a deep respect
for the music that I would hate it if we came
across that we were trying to mess with it.”
Kevin Crawford and his mates
in Lúnasa need not worry too much about
that last bit. After 10 year and six successful
albums, Lúnasa isn’t the hot new
band on the scene anymore. The quintet has grown
into a powerhouse ensemble, celebrated internationally
both for their innovations and their deep commitment
to traditional Irish instrumental music. Their
audience has grown far beyond “the Irish
and ex-pats only” crowd of the early days.
“We like playing
for any [audience] and for them to be enjoying
what we are bringing to them” Smyth says. “Not
that they need to understand anything about jigs
or reels or what they are, but that they can go
to a concert and be genuinely touched. Not
that ‘I’ve done my Irish thing for
the year,’ but that they enjoyed it and
that it took them somewhere spiritually.”
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