Concert Programs 2007

"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.”

back to top

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.

back to top

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.”

back to top

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.”

back to top

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.”

back to top