Concert Programs 2008

"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, and has been writing about music, pop culture and the arts for over thirty years.

October 30, 2007

Vieux Farka Touré

Vieux Farka Touré went against his father’s wishes to become a musician. That’s not really an uncommon story, one probably found in every culture that has musicians. What makes the story oddly poignant is not only that Touré’s father was an internationally renowned musician himself, but also the preferred occupation—his father wanted him to be a soldier instead. Fortunately, the son was as strong-willed as the father.

Twenty-six-year-old Malian guitarist, songwriter and singer Vieux Farka Touré, hailed as “the biggest buzz of the year in world music” (Toronto Star), is the son of iconic African guitarist and world music superstar Ali Farka Touré. Vieux was born in Bamako, the capital of the west African country of Mali, and grew up there and in Niafunké, his father’s hometown up north in the Sahara Desert.

Both environments were full of music and Vieux grew up surrounded by it, especially his father’s innovative guitar playing. The young boy started out on the calabash, a drum made from a dried and hollowed gourd, and other percussion instruments. As he warily observed his son’s increasing interest and obvious musical talent, Ali Farka Touré issued an ultimatum, forbidding his son to become a professional musician.

Ali had received the same ultimatum from his own father a generation earlier—and defied it—so he probably wasn’t too surprised that his son resisted the paternal guidance. “Farka” means “donkey” in the family’s native language and in its implied stubbornness, the name was a good fit for both father and son.

For his part, Vieux began playing the guitar, determined to master his father’s unique style, but took pains to keep his playing secret. In 1999, he enrolled in the National Arts Institute in Bamako, a school that has produced other outstanding guitar players, including Habib Koité. The secret was out now, and seeing that his son would not be dissuaded, Ali Farka Touré finally gave his blessing to Vieux’s musical career. It helped that Ali’s good friend Toumain Diabaté, the world’s leading kora player, was his son’s mentor.

“Though my father initially resisted my playing music,” says Vieux, “once he saw that it was truly my ambition and my calling, he was at my side…and he stayed there until the end. Here in Africa, he who teaches you in life, you will follow his path. Our lives here in Mali are like that. Much of what I sing on the album was his wisdom, teachings that he passed down to me. As he neared the end of his life, I knew that the wisdom he imparted to me was important to spread.”

It wasn’t that Ali Farka Touré had anything against music or musicians. The elder Touré, who died of cancer in 2006 shortly after recording two cuts on his son’s debut album, was one of the biggest stars in Africa and had gained a sizable audience in the rest of the world through such high profile ventures as Talking Timbuktu, a Grammy-winning duet album with American guitarist Ry Cooder.

No, Ali Farka Touré loved music. What he hated—vehemently and totally—was the music industry. Touré felt, no doubt correctly, that many of his earlier business associates had unfairly exploited and/or cheated him. While he eventually made good money from his music, he knew he had been wronged early in his career. Ali didn’t want his son to suffer the same fate. He was so embittered by his experience with the music industry that Ali initially viewed the military as a better career for Vieux.

Under the tutelage of Toumain Diabaté, and playing for the first time with the support of his father, Vieux made remarkable progress as a guitarist and composer. He was soon recognized as a guitar virtuoso, a flat-out master of his father’s hypnotic style of African desert blues. Still, Vieux had his secrets.

Vieux was approached in 2005 by American musician and producer Eric Herman, a former classmate at the National Arts Institute, about making an album. The two men went into the recording studio and cut a few tracks, which they then played for Ali and Toumain Diabaté. The older men were stunned by what they heard. Herman was in turn surprised by their reaction to Vieux’s music.

Herman quickly figured out that Vieux, out of deference for his father and mentor, had constantly monitored his playing around the older men, playing enough to earn a reputation as a virtuoso but not a bit more. He was careful not to tip his hand. In truth, Vieux had worked out an extraordinary personal sound on the guitar that began with a mastery of his father’s style but also incorporated elements from the outside world, from reggae to rock to jazz.

Impressed by Vieux’s recording, Diabaté quickly volunteered to play a pair of tunes on the album. Those kora-guitar duets, “Touré de Niafunké” and “Diabaté,” are among the highlights of the album. An even more moving sign of acceptance was Ali’s fervent desire to be a part of the recording, despite being so weakened by terminal cancer that he had to be carried into the studio.

The Ali-Vieux duets, “Tabara” and “Diallo,” were the first time father and son had recorded together and “everyone in the studio felt the gravity” of the moment, according to producer Herman. These two cuts would be Ali Farka Touré’s final recordings and were sure to be seen by his fans worldwide as a passing of the torch.

Touré’s debut, Vieux Farka Touré, was released in February 2007 to a very enthusiastic response. Rolling Stone described the CD as “a remarkable debut that mixes the traditional Mali blues of his father with more modern rock and reggae notes,” while Afropop Worldwide called it “a beautifully realized debut.” In an especially perceptive review of the album, a critic from PopMatters noted that, “Even setting aside the contributions from his father and Diabaté, this debut release from Vieux Farka Touré displays a precocious mastery of form.

“Vieux comes across as a deeply grounded individual who cares about the world around him…the spirit of his father lives on in Vieux’s guitar work. Equally compelling, the very good soul of Ali Farka seems to be within his son, as well. Happily, the family name lives on. Vieux Farka Touré is a terrific debut.”

The album has drawn the inevitable comparisons between father and son, which do both men a disservice. Ali Farka Touré was a one-of-a-kind musician, a raw and titanic force something like an African equivalent of John Lee Hooker, the great (and highly idiosyncratic) American bluesman. Both men made deep blues from the most basic elements of musical and human expression. The similarities between the music of Hooker and Touré are “Exhibit A” in the case for African roots for American blues.

That connection, between Mali and the southern U.S., has been explored on such albums as Mali to Memphis: An African-American Odyssey (Putumayo) and recordings by Taj Mahal, Corey Harris and others; in the Martin Scorsese film Feel Like Going Home, which featured Malian musicians Ali Farka Touré, Habib Koité and Salif Keita; and in countless books and articles.

Vieux Farka Touré is an African bluesman, but his blues aren’t the same as his father’s. “Music is personal expression,” says Vieux. “Everyone has their own ideas and their way of doing things. No one can replicate what someone else has done. I am working to follow my father’s path, but that path continues into new areas. I am of a new generation, so there are things that inspire me in today’s world that I put in my music, just as he did in his time.”

Rarely has the musical idea of “passing the torch” been played out in such starkly human terms—and such a short time—as it was with Ali Farka Touré and his son Vieux. It was just a few short months from their only collaboration in the studio to Ali’s death to the release of Vieux’s first album. Both Ali and Vieux knew that Vieux was already seen as the successor to his father’s legacy and that people would scrutinize the album closely, looking for signs of the father in the music of the son.

Vieux Farka Touré toured the U.S. for the first time in July and August, just after his debut album had spent several weeks atop the world music chart in CMJ. Fans have warmly accepted the young Malian musician and seem inclined to let him be his own man. He’s not Ali Farka Touré, but that’s okay.

Vieux Farka Touré has staked out his own turf and is going to play his music the way he sees fit. As John Lee Hooker once put it so perfectly, “It in him and it got to come out.” And however it comes out, his father’s legacy is in good hands. Vieux Farka Touré is a bluesman born and bred, and from the Mississippi delta to the Sahara Desert, the blues is the blues.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: www.vieuxfarkatoure.com

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November 16, 2007

Solas

The story of traditional Irish music is a tale of two countries, Ireland and the United States. The old tunes and songs from Ireland have been part of the American soundtrack since the first Scots-Irish immigrants arrived on these shores in the years before the American Revolution. Subsequent waves of immigrants brought their music as well. By the first decades of the 20th century, Irish-American musicians were the keepers of the flame, as players like Michael Coleman, Hugh Gillespie, Ed Reevy and Jimmy Morrison kept the tunes and the traditions alive here even as they were fading away in Ireland.

The first great Irish-American bands of the modern age were Mick Moloney’s Green Fields of America and Cherish the Ladies, the venerable all-women band led by flutist Joanie Madden. The next—and the band the Philadelphia Inquirer calls “maybe the world’s best”—was Solas, a quintet that has taken the Celtic music world by storm over the past dozen years.

Solas came together in the mid-1990s, when multi-instrumentalist Seamus Egan, accordion master John Williams and fiddler Winifred Horan joined forces with guitarist John Doyle and singer Karan Casey, Irish ex-pats living in New York. The band’s combination of versatility and dazzling talent caught people’s attention right from the start. Early appearances on public radio programs Prairie Home Companion and Mountain Stage and at such festivals as the Washington Irish Folk Festival and the American Roots Fourth of July Celebration (both in Washington, D.C.) established Solas as one of the most exciting bands on the circuit.

In retrospect, that first line-up of Solas is almost unbelievable—four instrumental virtuosos fronted by a compelling and charismatic singer. The band recorded its first album, Solas, in 1996, and the original quintet recorded only one more, Sunny Spells and Scattered Showers (1997). John Williams left after this album to pursue a solo career; he was replaced by Mick McAuley, who debuted on the album The Words That Remain (1998).

Karan Casey and John Doyle also left the band for solo careers over the next couple of years, but Solas barely missed a beat. Seamus Egan remains philosophical about the loss of Doyle, Casey and Williams, something that would have sunk many a band. “It allowed us to have a natural evolution,” he says. “You don’t like to have lineup changes and you’d like things to stay as steady as possible.

“But we’d always tried to expand with new ideas and sounds and when new people come into the band, we never wanted them to be clones or copies of the people who had left. Our natural inclination to evolve and the experience of having new people in the band met up on a parallel course at some point and we were able to naturally try new things.”
Currently, Solas is comprised of founding members Seamus Egan (flute, whistles, tenor banjo, mandolin, bodhrán) and Winifred Horan (fiddle, vocals) along with Mick McAuley (concertina, accordion, vocals), Deirdre Scanlan (lead vocals) and Eamon McElholm (guitar, vocals). The band has recorded five albums since the turn of the century: The Hour Before Dawn (2000), Edge of Silence (2002), Another Day (2003), Waiting for An Echo (2005) and Reunion: A Decade of Solas (2006).

Egan and Horan are Americans and live in Philadelphia, but Scanlan, McAuley and McElholm live in Ireland. “It’s just one of these things you deal with,” says Egan. “We tour so much that in some respects it doesn’t have a huge impact where anyone lives. We just build it into the schedule. It would be easier if we were all in the same general time zone but it’s something we’ve always dealt with so it’s never been a huge issue.”

Seamus Egan, a native of the Philadelphia area, is arguably the most important Irish-American musician of his generation. While living in Ireland with his family for several years in his youth, Egan began a serious study of traditional Irish music. By the time he was 14, he had accomplished the unprecedented feat of winning All-Ireland championships on four different instruments: flute, mandolin, tenor banjo and tin whistle.

Egan made his first solo album at 16; has recorded with musicians ranging from Peter, Paul & Mary to Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid; made major contributions to the soundtracks of the films The Brothers McMullen, Dead Man Walking and the acclaimed PBS special, Out of Ireland; and has appeared on several high-profile national tours, including “Masters of the Steel-String Banjo,” which Cityfolk presented several years ago. Egan has recorded three solo albums, the most recent of which is When Juniper Sleeps.

The multi-talented Winifred Horan is not only a superb classically trained fiddler, she’s also one of the best Irish step dancers to have come out of the New York City area, winning the U.S. National Dance Championships a record nine consecutive years. Educated at Mannes College of Music in New York and the New England Conservatory in Boston, Horan spent 15 years as a classical violinist before returning to the traditional Irish fiddle music of her youth. Horan danced and fiddled with Cherish the Ladies before forming Solas. She has recorded two solo albums and recently released a well-received duet album with bandmate Mick McAuley, Serenade.

Singer Deirdre Scanlan, who replaced Karan Casey in 1999, is a native of Nenagh in County Tipperary. Prior to joining Solas, Scanlan played fiddle with the Paddy O’Brien Ormond Ceili Band and recorded with the Nenagh Singers Circle. She has released one solo album, Speak Softly.

Mick McAuley was born into a musical family in Kilkenny and spent his early years touring the British Isles and Europe with the family band. Mick has toured and recorded with Ron Kavana, Karan Casey, Niamh Parsons and Paul Brennan of Clannad. He made his solo recording debut in 2003 with An Ocean’s Breadth, hailed as the “Celtic Album of the Year” by the Washington Post.

Eamon McElholm replaced Donal Clancy a couple of years ago as the guitarist in Solas, who had in turn replaced John Doyle. Born and raised in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, McElholm has toured and recorded with a number of prominent Irish musicians and is probably best known for his work with the popular band Stockton’s Wing. An accomplished singer and songwriter as well as guitarist, Eamon won the prestigious Performing Rights Society/John Lennon Songwriters Award while still a university student.

To celebrate its first decade as a band, Solas hit upon the idea of a live concert/DVD recording featuring all current and past band members. “We’d been talking about doing a live recording for a number of years and never really got around to it for one reason or another,” says Egan of Reunion. “As time went on, we found ourselves realizing ‘you know, we’re coming up on our 10th year, if we’re ever going to do one, this would be a really good time to do it.’

“The more we talked about it, we realized that it would be really great to get the former band members back together for the one night. When that looked like it could happen, we decided to expand it to not only be a live recording from the concert but also to do a bit of a movie.” Reunion: A Decade of Solas, the resulting CD and DVD, is a vivid and highly enjoyable romp through the band’s past that has been embraced by both fans and critics.

“It belongs in the library of any fan of traditional music,” according to Irish Voice, while Hot Press adds, “Solas offers a noble and exhilarating take on the Irish tradition while adding a respectful contemporary tinge in both style and choice of material. It’s not often that Irish music sounds like this much fun.”

Now well into its second decade as a band, Solas has prospered by deftly mixing red-hot playing of original and traditional instrumental tune sets with experimental outside-the-tradition touches in repertoire and arrangements. Songs from Woody Guthrie (“Pastures of Plenty”), the Youngbloods (“Darkness, Darkness”) and Bob Dylan (“Dignity”) fit comfortably alongside songs a century or two older, and that speaks to the skill and taste with which Solas has walked the tightrope of creative traditionalism.

Founding member John Williams once described Solas as “freewheeling yet respectful,” and that remains an apt summation of the band’s ethos twelve years into its journey. “I think [there is] a natural curiosity to push the boundaries a bit,” says Seamus Egan of his and his bandmates’ innovations within the traditions of Irish music. “You have to keep challenging yourself, and to a degree you want to challenge what preconceived ideas people may have of the music as well.”

Traditional music is in a constant state of evolution, as each generation adds its own ideas. Responsibility is part of the deal, but so is freedom. Solas understands—and utilizes—that duality as well as any ensemble. This Irish-American band is creating its own tradition.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: www.solasmusic.com

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January 12, 2008

Stanley Cowell

Performing solo is risky business. There’s no safety net, no one to help shoulder the load, no one to hide behind. Few musicians are up to the task, for either technical or psychological reasons, but pianist Stanley Cowell is a master of the form. From free jazz to swing to hard bop, Cowell is a brilliant player and improviser who seems to have absorbed the entirety of the jazz piano tradition. And his left hand, which unlocks the secrets to any successful solo piano performance, is as adept as any pianist in jazz.

Stanley Cowell is one of the most under-rated musicians in jazz, the rare pianist who is equally comfortable in any format or setting, from solo to big band. Cowell has performed and recorded with such stellar musicians as Sonny Rollins, Clifford Jordan, Art Pepper, Miles Davis, Donald Byrd, Oliver Nelson, Arthur Blythe, J.J. Johnson, Roy Haynes and Jimmy Heath, and has led his own bands for more than 30 years.

Born in 1941 in Toledo, Stanley Cowell learned to read music at the age of three and started playing piano at four. He studied both piano and pipe organ, and by 15, the precocious young musician had performed as a featured piano soloist with the Toledo Youth Orchestra, was the organist and choir director at a local church as well as a fledgling jazz pianist.
Cowell has had extensive formal training, earning a bachelor’s degree in music from Oberlin College Conservatory (where he played with Rahsaan Roland Kirk) and a master’s in music from the University of Michigan. He also studied as an undergraduate at the Mozarteum Akademie in Austria and as a graduate student at the University of Southern California and Wichita State University. Cowell worked with trumpeter Charles Moore and others in the Detroit Artist’s Workshop Jazz Ensemble while he was at Michigan.

With his master’s degree in hand, Cowell moved to New York City in 1966. Cowell’s abundant talent and versatility quickly placed him in the city’s top rank of pianists. He worked steadily for the next two decades—with saxophonist Marion Brown (1966-1967), drummer Max Roach (1967-1970), the Bobby Hutcherson-Harold Land Quintet (1968-1971) and the Heath Brothers between 1974 and 1984.

Cowell moved to New York at a turbulent time in our country’s history. Music and politics were thoroughly intertwined and probably no faction in jazz was more attuned to the radical politics of the time than the free jazz movement that Cowell joined. Playing alongside such politicized musicians as Archie Shepp, Marion Brown, Rashied Ali and Sunny Murray had a profound influence upon Cowell, though he eventually returned to a less overtly political musical framework.

“A note was a bullet or a bomb, as far as I was concerned,” Cowell remembers. “I was angry. But the ironic thing was that no black people ever came to our concerts, only white people. And they liked the music. So I said, ‘Wait a minute. This is stupid. What are we trying to do?’ I just felt that I was misdirecting my energies. I—and eventually all of these players—went back to dealing with the tradition, the heritage of jazz and other musics. We looked for more universal qualities. Ultimately, music is your politics anyway.”

Cowell had a musical epiphany at about the same time that changed his whole approach to the piano. “I had studied hard,” says Cowell, “gone to college and was trying to be a decent player. But I was without too many roots. Then I began to remember the Tatum encounter. I had shoved it into the back of my mind, but it was indelible. And in 1969, on my first record date, I more or less spontaneously tried to recreate that experience.”

Another native of Toledo, Art Tatum is considered by most critics to be the greatest pianist in the history of jazz. Count Basie called Tatum “the eighth wonder of the world.” It isn’t just that Tatum (1909-1956) was “better” or more technically gifted than everybody else, though he was. Tatum was on a different level and seemed at times to be playing a different instrument, and all other jazz pianists played in his shadow.

Cowell has been heavily influenced throughout his life by the peerless playing of Art Tatum, as have many jazz pianists, but Cowell had an actual connection with Tatum that others lacked. Tatum knew Cowell’s family and visited their home when Stanley was just six. Tatum obligingly played a bit on the family piano and the young boy was stunned by Tatum’s otherworldly virtuosity. Cowell decided then and there that he wanted to be a musician. Cowell later acknowledged his debt to his mentor with the composition of Piano Concerto, No. 1 (in Honor of Art Tatum), which was premiered in 1992 by the Toledo Symphony Orchestra.

Cowell made his recording debut as a leader in 1969 with Blues for the Viet Cong, a trio recording featuring music written by Cowell as well as a tribute to Tatum with a stride version of “You Took Advantage of Me.” He has since recorded steadily in a variety of settings for such labels as Strata-East, ECM, Arista-Freedom, DIW, SteepleChase, Galaxy and Concord Jazz.

Though it is available on CD only as an expensive Japanese import, Musa Ancestral Streams is vital for anyone interested in the development of Cowell’s music. The CD reissues Cowell’s 1973 Strata-East album of the same name—which contains “Equipoise,” Cowell’s best-known composition—plus two songs from Illusion Suite, his 1972 ECM album, also available on a slightly less expensive import CD.

The most accessible recorded example of Cowell at his solo best is Live at Maybeck Recital Hall, Volume 5, recorded in 1990 in Berkeley, California, and released on Concord Jazz. While technique is always at the service of the music in Cowell’s playing, this album contains numerous examples of Cowell’s jaw-dropping chops. It should be required listening for anyone interested in the art of solo jazz piano.

Among the album’s highlights are a mind-boggling display of Cowell’s skilled left hand on J.J. Johnson’s ballad “Lament,” which Cowell plays with his left hand only; “Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise,” where Cowell plays through 12 keys, three per chorus, in just over two minutes; and “Cal Massey,” an original tune Cowell first recorded on Illusion Suite.

Jazz writer Doug Ramsey describes “Cal Massey” as “improvised on the principle of mirror image symmetry that grows out of the opposition of the right and left hands to one another on the keyboard. With D as the central point, both hands are in the same symmetrical positions, but they are in different keys and doing different things. Even a brief discussion of the system is inevitably technical and forbidding, but the practice, as developed by Cowell, can be enormously stimulating.” Indeed.

Cowell developed a keen interest in jazz education while he was working in a quartet with Jimmy, Percy and Albert “Tootie” Heath in the 1970s, and education has been an important part of Cowell’s life and career since then. He started teaching privately and presenting an annual master class at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada.

Cowell is currently a professor teaching jazz piano in the department of music at Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He was a professor from 1981 until 1999 at Herbert Lehman College in New York City, where he taught music history, jazz history, piano, improvisation, electronic/computer music, arranging, and jazz band. In 1988-1989, he taught jazz piano at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.

Being a part of one of the country’s leading academic jazz programs keeps Cowell on his toes. “Teaching jazz at Rutgers is like preaching to the converted,” says Cowell. “I try to be a good craftsman and composer. I’m always trying to find new ways to express myself, always studying. That’s why I teach. I’m learning from my students.” He wrote “Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise,” for example, because he always tells his students they should be able to play in all the keys, “so I thought I’d better put my money where my mouth is.”

In addition to his work as a musician and educator, Cowell also owned and operated the label Strata-East Records with trumpeter Charles Tolliver, with whom Cowell played for several years in the group Music Inc. Their first joint recording, Music Inc. & Big Band, launched the important jazz label in 1971. By 1974, the artist-run company had released more than 50 albums, including recordings by such important musicians as Clifford Jordan, Pharoah Sanders, Gil Scott-Heron and Shirley Scott.

Stanley Cowell is as technically proficient as any pianist on the jazz scene, but it his imagination and intelligence that set him apart from the pack. He never reverts to cliché or formula in his playing. Like his first mentor, Cowell probes and pushes, exploring the keyboard as if it contains the answers to all of life’s questions. Stanley Cowell is not Art Tatum, but he comes from the same place.

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January 18, 2008

Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder with special guests Joe Mullins and the Radio Ramblers

Ricky Skaggs was born to be a bluegrass musician. And, for the most part, that’s what the award-winning singer, multi-instrumentalist and bandleader has done with his life. He took most of the 1980s off to be a country music superstar, but since the mid-1990s, he’s come full circle and now stands knee deep in the bluegrass. With six Grammy Awards to its credit since 1998, Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder has established itself as one of the most successful bluegrass bands of any era.

Skaggs was born in 1954 in Cordell, Kentucky, in the mountainous eastern part of the state. Both of his parents were singers and musicians and young Ricky started playing music long before he started school. He took up the mandolin at age four, inspired by his parents’ music, their bluegrass records and the honky-tonk country he heard on WCKY in Cincinnati. Skaggs made his performing debut at five, when Bill Monroe invited him on stage to sing “Ruby,” the Osborne Brothers hit. Skaggs did the same song two years later on Flatt and Scruggs’ syndicated television show and he was off and running.

By the late 1960s, Skaggs had mastered fiddle and guitar and partnered with his guitar-playing friend Keith Whitley in a band called the East Kentucky Mountain Boys that sounded uncannily like the Stanley Brothers. Ralph Stanley has said he thought he was hearing himself the first time he heard Ricky Skaggs.

That was at a Ralph Stanley show in 1970. Ralph and his band were running late, so the promoter asked Skaggs and Whitley (who were in the audience) to entertain the waiting crowd with a few old Stanley classics. When Stanley arrived at the club, he stopped dead in his tracks when he heard the two teen-agers performing. “These two boys,” he says, “were singing the Stanley Brothers’ music better than the Stanley Brothers.”

Stanley hired Skaggs and Whitley to work with his band for the summer festival season in 1971 and featured the duo on a 1971 album recorded in Dayton and released on the Dayton-based label Jalyn. Skaggs stayed with Stanley through 1972, playing on seven of Stanley’s albums, including Cry from the Cross, arguably the greatest bluegrass gospel album in history and the first of five iconic recordings Skaggs was part of before his thirtieth birthday. Skaggs and Whitley also recorded a pair of albums together in 1971, Tribute to the Stanley Brothers (Jalyn) and Second Generation Bluegrass (Rebel).

Though Skaggs’ musical roots were in the rock-ribbed mountain bluegrass of the Stanley Brothers, he really began to make his mark as a musician within the “progressive bluegrass” camp in the 1970s. While he was in high school, Skaggs spent two summers playing the bluegrass festival circuit with the Country Gentlemen, one of the leading bands in modern bluegrass. Skaggs also recorded on both of the Gents’ albums for Vanguard, The Country Gentlemen (1973) and Remembrances & Forecasts (1974).

Skaggs next turned up on J.D. Crowe and the New South in 1975, the second of his iconic albums and probably the most influential bluegrass album of the 1970s and 1980s. Led by veteran banjo player J.D. Crowe, the all-star New South included Skaggs, Tony Rice (guitar and lead vocals), Jerry Douglas (dobro) and Bobby Slone (fiddle). Skaggs also recorded his first solo album at this time, That’s It, released in the mid-1970s on Rebel.

The New South exploded on the scene, made a great album and blew up in a matter of months. Skaggs and Douglas left to form the band Boone Creek, which recorded a pair of albums before itself imploding when Skaggs left to replace Rodney Crowell in Emmylou Harris’ Hot Band. Even while fronting Harris’ band, Skaggs maintained a heavy recording schedule, turning out what many consider to be his first “real” solo album Sweet Temptation (1979), Skaggs & Rice (1980), a superb album of old-time “brother duets” with Tony Rice (Skaggs’ third and fourth iconic recordings) and Family & Friends (1982). Skaggs also steered Harris to and played a major role on her 1980 bluegrass-influenced masterpiece Roses in the Snow.

After leaving Harris’ band to pursue a solo career in Nashville, Skaggs emerged as a leader of the “New Traditionalist” movement that revitalized country music in the 1980s. Skaggs’ savvy blend of bluegrass and honky-tonk country from the 1940s and 1950s was the freshest sound on country radio and he became a major star during this period.

Skaggs won a pair of Best Country Instrumental Performance Grammys; six Country Music Association Awards, including the Horizon Award, Male Vocalist of the Year and the industry’s top honor, Entertainer of the Year in 1985; and had an amazing run of 10 number one singles between 1982 and 1986, including four songs that started life as bluegrass songs—“Uncle Pen,” “Don’t Cheat in Our Hometown,” “I Wouldn’t Change You if I Could” and “Crying My Heart Out Over You.”

Skaggs eventually—and predictably—chafed at the creative constraints contained within mainstream country music and followed his heart back to bluegrass. “Many of my fans thought that when I went into country music, I didn’t like bluegrass anymore,” says Skaggs. “But Ralph Stanley always said, ‘He’ll be back. He loves this music. He’s just out there making a name for himself. He’ll come back and when he does, he’ll do a lot for bluegrass.’ Ralph was right. I always wanted to come back and do this music.”

With a new band called Kentucky Thunder, Skaggs plunged back into bluegrass, winning the IBMA Album of the Year award in 1998 for the band’s first record, Bluegrass Rules. Skaggs has won six Grammy Awards with Kentucky Thunder since 1998, in three different categories: Best Bluegrass Album (Instrumentals, Brand New Strings,  Ancient Tones and Bluegrass Rules), Best Southern, Country or Bluegrass Gospel Album (Soldier of the Cross) and Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals for the song “Simple Life” (written by Dayton native Harley Allen, son of the late Red Allen).

Of his high-powered band, Skaggs says, “Each and every one of the pickers in Kentucky Thunder totally amazes me in every show…and that, to me, outweighs any award we could ever win.” Even so, Kentucky Thunder has won the IBMA Instrumental Group of the Year Award eight times, more than any other band. The band includes Jim Mills (a six-time winner of IBMA’s Banjo Player of the Year awards), Andy Leftwich (fiddle), Cody Kilby (lead guitar), Mark Fain (bass) and Paul Brewster (harmony vocals, rhythm guitar).

Wanting more control over his recording career, Skaggs launched Skaggs Family Records in 1997. The successful Nashville-based label has become a major force in bluegrass, releasing not only the Grammy-winning albums by Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder, but also albums by Kentucky Thunder members Paul Brewster and Andy Leftwich and such top bluegrass artists as the Del McCoury Band, Blue Highway, Mountain Heart and Cherryholmes. One of the company’s most recent releases is Salt of the Earth by Skaggs and the Whites (his wife, father-in-law and sister-in-law), released in 2007.

Guitarist and producer Chet Atkins, who once publicly apologized for “ruining country music” with the many “countrypolitan” records he produced at RCA, also credited Ricky Skaggs with “single-handedly saving” the music. Now in the 37th year of his career as a professional musician, Skaggs has won 12 Grammy Awards and is a member of the venerable Grand Ole Opry radio program. He’s also a familiar face on television, thanks to his hosting All-Star Bluegrass Celebration on PBS and Monday Night Concerts on The Nashville Network and numerous appearances on country music specials and awards show telecasts.

Because of his high profile, Nashville base, Opry membership and phenomenally successful track record, Ricky Skaggs has been seen by some as Bill Monroe’s “replacement” as the public face of bluegrass, the ambassador-at-large for the music. Skaggs idolized Bill Monroe and he scoffs at that idea. “There is no way in this lifetime that someone could ever take Bill Monroe’s place,” Skaggs insists. He sees another path he likes better.

“I don’t want to take his place,” Skaggs says of Monroe, “but I do want to take my place. I feel like I have a place here in this music and that’s the only part that I want to take—my part. Knowing that keeps my feet on the ground and my heart in the right direction. [Bluegrass] isn’t going away in six months. All these years people have played this music, the music has been planted and watered. This is harvest time.”

Joe Mullins & the Radio Ramblers, which opens tonight’s concert, is a popular traditional bluegrass band based in Xenia. The band is led by hard-driving banjo player Joe Mullins, a veteran of Longview and Traditional Grass, a band he co-founded with his father Paul “Moon” Mullins, a fiddler and legendary radio personality. Formed in 2006, the Radio Ramblers includes Mullins, Adam McIntosh (guitar), Evan McGregor (fiddle), Mike Terry (mandolin) and Tim Kidd (bass). Mullins has partnered with Cityfolk in presenting bluegrass events such as the Earl Scruggs: Family and Friends tribute in 2002. He also owns and operates Classic Country Radio, a network of three traditional country music radio stations (WBZI in Xenia, WEDI in Eaton and WKFI in Wilmington) and produces the Southern Ohio Indoor Music Festival twice a year.

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January 24, 2008

Natalie MacMaster

Family and music are intertwined in the life of fiddler, step-dancer and world music star Natalie MacMaster. Growing up in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, she was surrounded by both family and music. Her uncle Buddy MacMaster is a legendary Cape Breton fiddler (and the primary influence upon Natalie’s fiddling) and her musical cousins include fiddlers Ashley MacIsaac and Michael Beaton. She’s married to a fiddler, Donnell Leahy, who comes from a family of 11 fiddlers. If that’s not enough, she’s also on the cover of the November issue of Parents Canada magazine.

Now in her mid-30s, Cityfolk favorite Natalie MacMaster is one of the most important traditional musicians in Canadian history. She has won the Juno Award in Canada (their equivalent of the Grammy); been nominated for several Grammy Awards; recorded nine albums, most of which have earned gold or platinum status in Canada; performed at virtually all of the major music festivals in North America; performed with everyone from the Chieftains to Alison Krauss to Carlos Santana; and been one of the youngest recipients ever of the Order of Canada.

MacMaster has also been lavishly praised by critics in Celtic, folk, bluegrass and mainstream publications. According to the music magazine Dirty Linen, “MacMaster has reached a level of visibility and musical success that only a few of her traditional-music contemporaries have achieved…a confident bandleader, a versatile fiddler, an electrifying step-dancer, and, above all, a performer who definitely knows how to work a crowd.” The Boston Herald emphasized that last point: “To call Natalie MacMaster the most dynamic performer in Celtic music today is high praise, but it still doesn’t get at just how remarkable a concert artist this fiddler has become.”

MacMaster was raised in the small Cape Breton town of Troy. She started playing piano and dancing at age five and added the fiddle at nine. Tutored by her uncle Buddy, she made her performing debut later that year at a local square dance. She played extensively throughout her youth and teenage years, usually at dances and other community functions. The accompaniment at these gatherings was minimal, usually just a piano, maybe a guitar. Natalie loved it and was completely immersed in the music and the traditional culture that spawned it.

“I got it three ways,” she says of the Cape Breton music. “The first was in the bloodlines, both my Mum’s side and Dad’s side. Going right back through the generations, there were always musicians in the families. Then also through my community, the area where I grew up had a very strong musical tradition, and then at home. I heard music every day, not live music, but Mum would always have cassette tapes playing and records. It was Cape Breton traditional music, but I listened to other stuff, too, everything from Ozzy Osbourne to Anne Murray. I listened to pop radio but Mum would always have fiddle music on every day.”

MacMaster made her recording debut in 1989, at the age of 16, with the self-released album Four on the Floor. Two more self-released albums followed, Road to the Isle and A Compilation, which combined highlights from the first two cassette-only releases onto a CD. MacMaster then signed with Rounder and made her label debut in 1996 with No Boundaries. Rounder has released six subsequent albums by her as well as reissuing Road to the Isle and A Compilation.

It wasn’t until MacMaster signed with Rounder that she realized she’d found her life’s work. “When I was young and playing fiddle, no one in Cape Breton made a career out of it,” MacMaster says. “They all had other jobs that they relied on. So I thought, at best, I’d be doing this on the side of a day job. I never imagined it as a career. It wasn’t in the realm of possibility at the time.”

Cape Breton Island is part of the province of Nova Scotia, one of Canada’s Atlantic maritime provinces. The name “Breton” is a likely reference to Brittany, a Celtic part of northern France, while “Nova Scotia” is Latin for “New Scotland.” John Cabot is thought to have been the first modern European explorer to visit the island, 25 years before Portugal established a fishing colony there in 1522 that included about 200 people. The island was under French control from 1604 until the end of what we call the French and Indian War in 1763, when it was ceded to England.

The first new settlers after the English took control were Irish, who tended to assimilate into the French community. The next big population influx came in the first half of the 19th century, when approximately 50,000 Highland Scots arrived, shoved off their land at home by the forced displacement now known as the Highland Clearances. These Scots became the dominant cultural group on the island and have had the biggest influence upon the evolution of traditional music on Cape Breton.

This particular mixture of French, Irish, Scottish and English immigrants, and their respective forms of traditional music and dance, created a musical culture in Cape Breton that is unique in North America. “The biggest thing with Cape Breton style is the rhythm,” explains MacMaster. “There’s a very unique rhythmic style that’s very, very powerful—the strength behind all the music. I think it comes from the dancing being so connected with the music. I don’t know how to describe the rhythm other than it’s just like a train. It starts, and you have no other choice but to hang on. It takes you away.”

While she is undeniably today’s foremost standard-bearer for traditional Cape Breton fiddle music, MacMaster has never shied away from adding non-traditional sounds and ideas to her music, borrowing freely from bluegrass, Latin music, jazz and rock. Her music is especially eclectic when working with her band, which includes Brad Davidge (guitar), John Chiasson (bass), Miche Pouliot (drums) and Allan Dewar (piano).

MacMaster’s wide-ranging approach is heard to particularly good advantage on such albums as Blueprint, In My Hands and Yours Truly (her most recent album, co-produced with Donnell Leahy) and on the PBS special Live in Cape Breton. Recorded live at the 2006 Celtic Colours Festival in Cape Breton, the program showcases MacMaster performing with such special guests as banjo wizard Bela Fleck, Galician piper Carlos Nunez, Buddy MacMaster, Donnell Leahy and 90 members of the Cape Breton Fiddlers Association.

For those wanting MacMaster at her most traditional, there is Natalie and Buddy MacMaster: Traditional Music from Cape Breton Island, released in 2005. The informal album features Natalie and Buddy playing together on 11 sets of traditional tunes, with one solo set each. The fiddlers are accompanied by guitarist Dave MacIsaac and pianist Betty Lou Beaton, Buddy’s sister. “I feel very comfortable playing with Buddy,” says his famous niece. “I could play along with him forever. He’s got such great timing and tone, he just carries you along. All you have to do is just jump on and enjoy the music.”

Last May, MacMaster received the Order of Canada, the country’s highest official civilian honor for lifetime achievement. MacMaster is one of the youngest people ever to be so honored. “I was just stunned,” she says. “It’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, where did that come from?’ It’s a very high honor and I’m humbled by it all, for sure.” Here again, Natalie is following Buddy’s example: Buddy MacMaster was awarded the Order of Canada in 2000 for his contributions to Canadian culture.

In 2002, Natalie MacMaster married fiddler Donnell Leahy, the senior member of the four brother, four sister Celtic octet known as Leahy. It was a linking of two of Canada’s leading traditional music families, the MacMasters of Cape Breton and the Leahys of Ontario. “He’s a fiddler, I’m a fiddler,” says MacMaster. “It was meant to be.”

For now MacMaster takes her two children on tour with her and wouldn’t have it any other way. “I couldn’t and I wouldn’t want to, and I’d quit before I would,” she says firmly of leaving the wee ones at home. On the other hand, she acknowledges that the last time she threatened to quit touring, her husband just laughed and said, “Natalie, you couldn’t quit if you tried with every fiber of your body.”

“It’s music that’s very important to me,” says MacMaster of the traditional Cape Breton fiddle music she plays. “We have a rich heritage and I think people crave culture, they crave tradition. I feel that when I play. It’s family music, something that’s passed down so naturally. It’s not forced and people want that. They want that natural music.

“This is music I’ve known since I was born. It’s just ingrained in my fiber. When I hear traditional Cape Breton fiddling, there’s no music in the world that affects me like it does. It feels like I’m home no matter where I am.”

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January 26, 2008

Steve Kuhn Trio

It was the grand doyenne of American jazz piano, Marian McPartland, who once suggested that Steve Kuhn must have six fingers on his right hand. He doesn’t, but his otherworldly playing can be that dazzling. In a long and distinguished career, Kuhn has played it all, from bop to bossa nova to fusion to free jazz, in every conceivable format, from solo to orchestra. The Washington Post calls him “one of a kind.”

Kuhn has played in the bands of such musical heavyweights as John Coltrane, Stan Getz, Art Farmer and Kenny Dorham and has led his own groups since the 1960s. His forte—which he now works in almost exclusively—is the acoustic piano trio. He will perform in this format this evening accompanied by bassist George Mraz and drummer Billy Drummond. Over the past couple of decades, Kuhn has become an absolute master of the trio, as gifted as anyone in jazz in terms of technique and using the trio as an expressive voice.

Kuhn was born in Brooklyn in 1938 and raised there and in Boston. He started taking classical piano lessons at age five, but showed his true colors early by syncopating and improvising on Bach and Mozart. After his family moved to Boston when Kuhn was 12, Kuhn began studying with Margaret Chaloff, a world-famous and very influential teacher based at the New England Conservatory of Music. “Technique is in the brain, not in the hands” was one of her dictums. In addition to Kuhn, her students have included Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, George Shearing, Keith Jarrett, Mulgrew Miller and many more.

“She really had to undo what I’d learned, technically speaking, and sort of re-educate me,” says Kuhn. “She taught me in the classical Russian school. According to this school, one’s musicality must come from your whole body, from the toes. Your fingertips are the mouthpiece of your expression.”

Kuhn began playing jazz on gigs with Chaloff’s son, baritone saxophonist Serge Chaloff, best known for his work with Woody Herman. As a teenager Kuhn played in several Boston jazz clubs, backing such touring musicians as Coleman Hawkins and Chet Baker. He graduated from Harvard (as a music theory major) in 1959 and then won a three-week scholarship to study alongside such students and faculty members as Ornette Coleman, Bill Evans, Don Cherry, George Russell, Gunther Schuller and members of the Modern Jazz Quartet at the Lenox School of Music in Massachusetts.

Kuhn moved to New York in 1959 and quickly got a job in trumpeter Kenny Dorham’s quintet. Kuhn made his recording debut with this band in 1960, on the album Jazz Contemporary. Kuhn was happy in the band, but when he heard that the great saxophonist John Coltrane was planning to leave Miles Davis’ band to start a quartet, Kuhn couldn’t resist the opportunity to work with Coltrane.

“When I heard that Coltrane was leaving Miles,” remembers Kuhn, “I decided to take a chance and called him up. We met each other twice in a rehearsal studio and at his place to get to know each other and play. A few days later there was a phone call that took a load off my chest. Coltrane said, ‘Would $135 a week be okay?’”

It was a dream gig, but it didn’t work out and Kuhn left after only a couple of months without recording anything with the quartet. There was speculation at the time Kuhn felt uncomfortable as the only white member of the band or that Coltrane had been pressured to replace Kuhn with a black pianist, but Kuhn says it was simply a case of “our playing did not mix well…It was only when I heard Coltrane and [Kuhn’s replacement, McCoy] Tyner together that I realized how it should be done.”

Kuhn found a more congenial home in the band of saxophonist Stan Getz, then at the beginning of his bossa nova-fueled international popularity. Kuhn next played with trumpeter Art Farmer (1964-1966), but he was growing dissatisfied with what he saw happening in the New York jazz scene. Kuhn moved to Sweden as a result in 1967, living in Stockholm until he returned to the U.S. in 1971.

Kuhn now describes the 1960s, somewhat dismissively, as “one big search for my own sound.” The pianist launched a long-term relationship with ECM Records in the early 1970s that has yielded such important albums as Trance, Ecstasy, Non-Fiction and Remembering Tomorrow and a pair of collaborations with vocalist Sheila Jordan, Last Year’s Waltz and Playground. More significantly, Kuhn arrived at his distinctive sound on ECM. He is quick to give credit to producer Manfred Eicher at ECM, who stressed a minimalist approach—less is more, but it’s still too much.

Of working with Eicher, Kuhn says, “If he likes you, Manfred is a wonderful producer. If not, you might as well make a record on the moon. Personally, I admire jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong, Ahmad Jamal and Count Basie, who showed that less is more. But before meeting Manfred Eicher, I hardly practiced it myself. When you’re younger you tend to want to tell your life story in every chorus. Over the years, I’ve learned that you don’t have to say everything at once. The spaces and the silences are just as important as the sounds.”

Critics have long been aware of Kuhn’s magical touch. Jazz writer Bob Blumenthal puts Kuhn’s appeal in a nutshell: “The past two decades, with a variety of bassists and drummers and on a number of labels, he has displayed a mastery of the piano trio format that is second to none. His array of skills—an encyclopedic knowledge of standards and jazz classics, painterly sense of color, unfailing feel for tempo and swing, technical precision, imaginative use of musical allusion and subtle wit—have allowed Kuhn’s discography of the period to serve…as a modern piano trio canon.”

Kuhn didn’t start composing until 1969, when he wrote a piece for an album and then “suddenly realized that [he] had just recorded [his] complete oeuvre.” He has been composing ever since, and now has an oeuvre that Blumenthal describes as “a body of work that is rare in its lyricism and originality. Kuhn has long had a capacity for creating indelible melodic notions and developing them with a sure sense of drama and unpredictable logic. His compositions rarely unfold with symmetrical regularity; like streams seeking their own course, they twist and surge, gaining emotional power in their turns from quiet reflection to bold passion.”

Kuhn is especially proud of his ambitious 2004 ECM album Promises Kept, a showcase of original material performed with a large string ensemble, a project he describes as “a life’s dream.” The album is dedicated to Kuhn’s parents, immigrants from Hungary, and it contains some of Kuhn’s most emotional playing. “As I’ve gotten older and gone through deaths and losses,” says Kuhn, “as well as open heart surgery, and at the same time come to appreciate the love and the positive influences in my life, I find myself responding more emotionally. I think my emotions are more at the surface than they’ve ever been.”

A native of the Czech Republic, the highly celebrated bassist George Mraz has performed and recorded with such artists as Dizzy Gillespie, Bill Evans, Stan Getz, the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, Oscar Peterson, and many more. Mraz leads his own groups and also works with Jim Hall, Joe Lovano and Lewis Nash in the Grand Slam Quartet. He’s recorded seven albums as a leader, most recently Moravian Gems. Cityfolk has presented Mraz twice before, in performance with pianists Tommy Flanagan in 1988 and Larry Willis in 1992.

Powerhouse drummer Billy Drummond, born in 1959 in Newport News, Virginia, has released four albums of his own (including the critically acclaimed Dubai) and played as a sideman on more than 200 albums, backing such artists as Horace Silver, Sonny Rollins, Carla Bley, Joe Henderson, Sheila Jordan, James Moody and dozens more. Called “one of the hippest bandleaders now at work” by Downbeat, Drummond is currently an adjunct professor of jazz drums at the Juilliard School of Music and at New York University.

Steve Kuhn is a piano master in every sense of the term. Incorporating such influences as Fats Waller, Art Tatum, Bud Powell and, later, Bill Evans and Red Garland, Kuhn has made himself into one of the greatest pianists in jazz history. Indeed, more than a few critics have maintained that one must go back to classical titan Vladimir Horowitz in the 1930s to find a pianist with better technique and control of tone.

Since forming the first Steve Kuhn Trio, with bassist Steve Swallow and drummer Pete LaRoca in the late 1960s, Kuhn has made the trio format his own. The piano-bass-drums trio is the perfect vehicle for Kuhn, a virtuoso and fearless explorer of the keyboard who plays music that matters. “The music that I play comes from the heart,” says Kuhn. “It’s honest, it’s pure, and I never compromised.”

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January 29, 2008

Ladysmith Black Mambazo

The gorgeous, soaring Zulu harmonies of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, one of the world’s premier vocal ensembles, have their roots in the gritty mining camps of South Africa. The discovery of diamonds (1867) and gold (1886) in South Africa created the need for a large, and inexpensive, labor force before the mine owners could fully exploit their new-found riches. Other countries have solved similar problems through immigration, but the British and Dutch (or Boer) industrialists running South Africa didn’t have to look that far for the solution to their labor needs.

The workers for the mines, mostly young black men, were brought in on trains by the thousands from the surrounding countryside, enticed by stories of big money and easy living. The young men, who of course found neither riches nor ease, were poorly paid and lived communally in ramshackle dormitories. Because of the long days and six-day work weeks, the miners had only one time they could really call their own—from end of work on Saturday until church on Sunday morning. They made the most of it.

As the sun went down on Saturday, the lonely miners would sing together. Perhaps one of them would have managed to purchase some contraband alcoholic beverages. As the night proceeded, the miners would start dancing, in a light-footed style they choreographed themselves to avoid detection by the security guards patrolling outside. The dancers laughingly called themselves Cothoza Mfana, “tip-toe guys.”

When these miners would return to their homes after tiring of the mines, the singing tradition went with them and became established throughout South Africa. The tradition was further spread and refined by friendly but intense singing competitions on a local level. This style of call-and-response group a cappella singing is known as isicathamiya, though it’s also been called mbube since the 1940s after a hit record that helped popularize the traditional sound.

The first significant commercial manifestation of the sound came in 1939, when Solomon Linda and his group, the Original Evening Birds, recorded one of Linda’s songs “Mbube” (“The Lion”). The record was a big hit, reportedly the first African record to sell 100,000 copies. The widespread success of the record launched hundreds of similar vocal groups across the country and—though Linda never saw any money from it—the song served as the source for two chart-topping records in the U.S., “Wimoweh” by the Weavers in 1950 and “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” by the Tokens 11 years later.

In the late 1950s, a young farmboy named Joseph Shabalala heard the style while working at a factory in the city of Durban. Shabalala sang with several vocal groups in Durban before returning to his rural hometown of Ladysmith, determined to start his own group.

Joseph Shabalala organized Ladysmith Black Mambazo in the early 1960s. The group was originally known as the Blacks, a reference to the singers having the strength of oxen. Shabalala recruited three of his brothers—Headman, Jockey and Ben Shabalala—into his new group, as well as two cousins, Albert and Abednego Mazibuko, and a few friends. The a cappella group won every singing contest it entered, usually winning a goat for each victory, until finally being barred from the competitions because the other groups bitterly complained about always losing.

During this time, the group’s name evolved to its present form, black coming from the oxen and the earlier group, Ladysmith from Shabalala’s hometown and “mambazo” being the Zulu word for axe, signifying the group’s prowess at “chopping down” its competitors at the singing contests.

It was the wedding of the traditional isicathamiya style and Christian gospel music sung in Zulu that gave Ladysmith its distinctive sound. The idea came to Shabalala one night as he slept. “I felt there was something missing,” Shabalala remembers. “I tried to teach the music that I felt but I failed, until 1964, when a harmonious dream came to me. I always heard the harmony from that dream, and I said ‘This is the sound that I want and I can teach it to my guys.’”

Shabalala’s conversion to Christianity steered his music in a new direction. His is a gospel of love and the music’s message is intentionally non-denominational. “Without hearing the lyrics, this music gets into the blood, because it comes from the blood,” he says. “It evokes enthusiasm and excitement, regardless of what you follow spiritually.”

Ladysmith’s other main innovation was one of synthesis, combining old things in a new way. “In Zulu singing, there are three major sounds,” says Shabalala. “There’s a high keening ululation; a grunting, puffing sound that we make when we stomp our feet; and a certain way of singing melody. Before Black Mambazo, you didn’t hear these three sounds in the same songs. So it is new to combine them, although it is still done in a traditional way.”

After performing for three years on state-run Radio Zulu, Ladysmith began its recording career in 1973 with Amabutho (the first African LP to earn gold record status) and to date, it has recorded more than 40 albums. The group has won two Grammy Awards, in 1987 for its first U.S. release, Shaka Zulu, and again in 2005 for Raise Your Spirit Higher. The group’s most recent album is Long Walk to Freedom, which features guest appearances by such artists as Emmylou Harris, Taj Mahal, Melissa Etheridge, Natalie Merchant and Sarah McLachlan. The album was nominated for two Grammys.

Universally renowned as South Africa’s leading cultural ambassadors, Ladysmith Black Mambazo came to prominence in the U.S. through its work on Paul Simon’s seminal 1986 album Graceland, credited by many for  helping to introduce “world music” to a mainstream audience in this country. Simon had heard the singers on a trip to South Africa and featured them singing harmony on his hit record. He produced Shaka Zulu for Ladysmith the following year and did television appearances with the group to help launch the album’s release.

In addition to its work with Simon, Ladysmith has recorded with numerous prominent artists in a wide variety of styles, from Dolly Parton to George Clinton to the English Chamber Orchestra to Mavis Staples. The group has appeared on several TV programs in the U.S., including Austin City Limits and Sesame Street, and contributed music to the soundtracks of such films as A Dry White Season, Coming to America, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Cry The Beloved Country, The Lion King and Spike Lee’s Do It A Cappella.

On Tip Toe: Gentle Steps to Freedom, a documentary film telling the story of Joseph Shabalala and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Short Documentary Film in 2001 as well as an Emmy Award for Best Cultural Documentary on American television.

Prominent critic Jon Pareles has praised Ladysmith in The New York Times for retaining its traditional Zulu essence amidst such globe-trotting and genre-bending collaborations. “For all the years that Ladysmith Black Mambazo has performed alongside pop songwriters,” he wrote, “Mr. Shabalala’s own songs are still resolutely South African…the songs are built on dignified call-and-response leading into rolling, repeating three-chord vamps rather than the hooks and contrasts of Western pop. The vamps were carried by Ladysmith’s seven bass singers, whose voices blended like organ pipes for deep harmonies.

“Eventually, as the harmonies continued, the songs led into dance routines with synchronized moves as well as head-high kicks that are a Zulu tradition; the singers wore white shoes to show them off. Shabalala, singing above the basses, has a sweet, hushed tenor that whispers and swoops and quivers, gentle yet fervent.”

Ladysmith Black Mambazo has introduced the beauties of Zulu harmony singing to a wide audience over the last four decades. Formed during the time of apartheid, Ladysmith compellingly displayed the dignity, intelligence and inherent worth of Zulu culture and provided a musical institution around which black South Africans could rally with pride. The fact that Ladysmith was popular and respected around the world provided a constant rebuke to the ideas and attitudes underlying the apartheid system.

Since majority rule was won by South Africans in the mid-1990s, Ladysmith Black Mambazo has evolved into even more of a symbol of post-apartheid South Africa, cultural ambassadors of not just a Zulu tradition, but a national one. This is a role Joseph Shabalala takes seriously. Ladysmith Black Mambazo has performed at numerous state functions, including presidential inaugurations and performances for the Pope and Queen Elizabeth of England.

Joseph Shabalala sees himself primarily as a teacher these days and plans to open an academy in South Africa to teach and preserve traditional music and dance. Until that day, he serves as an associate professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Natal. “It’s just like performing,” he says. “You work all day, correcting the mistakes, encouraging the young ones to be confident. And if they do not succeed I always criticize myself. I am their teacher. They are willing to learn. But it is up to me to see they learn correctly.”

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February 14, 2008

Simon Shaheen

Palestinian musician Simon Shaheen has been crossing borders—musical, cultural and political, real and perceived—all his life. Internationally renowned as an oud and violin virtuoso, composer, music educator and music promoter, Simon Shaheen is one of the most important Arab musicians of his generation and an ardent and eloquent champion of Arabian music and culture. An Arab Christian born and raised in Israel, Shaheen is also a compelling advocate for tolerance, understanding and cross-cultural collaboration.

Simon Shaheen was born in 1955 in the village of Tarshiha in northern Israel, not far from the border with Lebanon. His family moved to the larger city of Haifa when he was two. Shaheen grew up in a musical household and he began playing the oud at age five, taught by his father Hikmat Shaheen, a music professor, oud master and founder of two regional orchestras.

“Learning to play on the oud from my father was the most powerful influence in my musical life,” Shaheen recalls. “When I held and played these instruments, they felt like an extension of my arms.” Simon added the violin at the age of six, and received eight years of formal instruction on the instrument at the Conservatory for Western Classical Music in Jerusalem.

After graduating from the Academy of Music in Jerusalem in 1978, Shaheen was an instructor at the school for two years, teaching Arabian music, performance and theory. Shaheen moved to New York City in 1980 for graduate studies in performance at the Manhattan School of Music and performance and music education at Columbia University. He is now a citizen of the U.S.

In 1982, Shaheen formed the Near Eastern Music Ensemble (NEME), a group of master musicians specializing in traditional and modern Arabian music. Now considered the foremost Arabian music ensemble in the U.S., NEME plays not only the traditional classical and folkloric music of the Arab world, but also new works by living composers of contemporary Middle Eastern music. The ensemble has performed at prestigious venues, universities and festivals in the U.S. and Europe and made its recording debut in 1992 with Turath: Masterworks of the Middle East.

One goal Shaheen had for NEME (and his later group, Qantara) was to educate American listeners about Arabian music, to show that is was more than belly-dance music—“a big hole I needed to fill,” he says. “I felt it was a mission for me. People had a hunger for world music.”

There’s a social need for this education, as well. “It’s so easy to hate and fear something you don’t know,” Shaheen says. “If it [Arabic culture] is kept as a kind of puzzle, in the dark, then definitely there will be hate and fear.”

Wanting to explore a fusion of Arabian music, Western classical, modern jazz and Latin music, Shaheen formed the group Qantara in 1995. Qantara, which means “arch” in Arabic, made its recording debut in 2000 on the critically acclaimed album Two Tenors & Qantara: Historic Live Recording of Arabic Masters, featuring the legendary vocalists Wadi El Safi and Sabah Fakhri.

“Living in New York, you can’t avoid fusion,” Shaheen says of his newer ensemble. “But it is sad in one way that you hear so much fusion music of very poor quality. It’s a lost formula in which musicians can do anything. There is no structure; there is no concept. Just mix things together. It’s what we call a Turkish salad, like putting more than fifteen different vegetables together.”

Shaheen recorded his breakthrough album Blue Flame with Qantara in 2001. The album earned rave reviews across the board—National Public Radio called it “a staggering tour-de-force of technique and passion,” CMJ hailed it as “a new benchmark in Arab-Western fusion,” The Washington Post praised it as “eminently cosmopolitan” and the Los Angeles Times simply called it “stunning.”

“I want to create world music exceptionally satisfying to the ear and for the soul,” says Shaheen. “This is why I selected members for Qantara who are all virtuosos in their own musical forms, and whose expertise and knowledge can raise the music and the group’s performance to spectacular levels.

“They all know music other than Western classical or American jazz. They’re so versatile; it’s so pleasant and beautiful when we play together. There’s a common language. They play exactly what I write and what I want to hear. They’re musicians with open minds. I want us to go all the way, because I believe in this band so much.”

Qantara has toured extensively over the past five years, performing at the Newport Jazz Festival, Montreal Jazz Festival, WOMAD Festivals in Sicily and the U.S., Chicago World Music Festival, Central Park Summer Stage in New York, and throughout Europe and the Middle East. The band, which shares some members with the Near Eastern Music Ensemble, is perhaps even more impressive in concert than on Blue Flame.

“Another obvious Qantara forté is each member’s virtuosity,” wrote a critic for Enjoy the Music.com. “It forges truly elegant exchanges or serpentine intertwined melodies that make you forget how very challenging these musical displays really are. The underlying rhythmic finesse, despite being devilish complex at times, never turns frenzied and strenuous. Like the melodic material, it always remains light on its feet…mind-bending variety and sophistication.”

“I’m not replacing the Near Eastern Music Ensemble with Qantara,” Shaheen says. “They’re different, and they’re both a part of me. [Qantara] reflects living in New York, where you have so many different people from different parts of the world with different missions and ideas, who meet in one place. Eventually they have to hear one another and work together.

“Of course, I’m known to be a traditional, classical Arabic musician. On the other hand, I have started to collaborate with American jazz musicians and musicians from Europe, Africa and South America. I’ve tried to come up with a formula that is original, interesting musically, but not harming the roots. So the qantara is a symbol of something that holds different things together, and when you go through it, you don’t know what to expect inside. It’s like a new world.”

Shaheen is uniquely suited to create this new musical fusion. “Shaheen combines technique with feeling,” says ethnomusicologist and musician Ali Jihad Racy, with whom Shaheen recorded the 1983 album Taqasim. “He is the product of two traditions. Conservatory-trained, he has one foot in Western classical music, the other at the center of the Arab musical tradition. This is very unusual.”

In addition to his own recordings—which include an improvisational duet album with Indian slide guitarist Vishwa Mohan Bhatt and a tribute to the great Egyptian composer Mohamed Abdel Wahab—Shaheen made significant contributions to Bill Laswell’s Hallucination Engine collective project as well as the soundtracks for the films The Sheltering Sky and Malcolm X.

Shaheen won the National Heritage Fellowship in 1994, the highest official honor bestowed upon traditional and folk musicians in the U.S. Shaheen’s award recognizes not only his lifetime contributions as a musician and composer, but also his work as an educator and cultural advocate. Now in his early fifties, Shaheen spends almost half of his time teaching, participating in seminars and symposia and tirelessly telling the world of the beauty and richness of Arab music.

“Think with your voice when you listen to Arab music,” Shaheen says to listeners new to the music. “It has a linear quality like the voice. Concentrate on its melodies, and listen to how they interact with the rhythm. Arab music is characterized by the use of quarter-tones, which lie between the half-steps of Western music.

“They have a quality that you may not be able to hear at first. Don’t think of them as out-of-tune notes. They are deliberate. The more you listen, the more you will begin to hear them and come to love them, for it is the quarter-tones which distinguish many beautiful maqams [a scale or modes used in improvisation] in Arabic music.”

The oud, Shaheen’s first instrument, is a plucked, unfretted short-neck lute and the central instrument in Arabian music. Shaped something like a pear cut in half, the oud has 11 strings and is considered the direct forerunner of the European lute. In addition to the Middle East, the oud is also used in Turkey, Iran, Greece and Azerbaijan, as well as the northern African countries of Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt and Sudan. The instrument is at least 5,000 years old; legend tells that the instrument was invented by Lamech, a grandson of Adam.

Simon Shaheen appreciates the legends and the history, but he clearly lives in the present, with his eyes on the future. He has the same lofty goal for every performance, no matter which of his ensembles is featured. Shaheen aims to create music “that people will view as sincere and without boundaries. Music should become the heritage, the turath, of whatever community you belong to. For music to be truly successful, it has to be within the realm of turath.”

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February 16, 2008

Bruce Barth and Terell Stafford

Pianist Bruce Barth and trumpeter Terell Stafford are two of the busiest men in jazz. Both men lead their own bands, play in additional bands, do recording sessions as leaders and sidemen, play on each other’s albums, teach at a major university, conduct workshops and clinics around the country, perform and compose. Barth and Stafford are friends, colleagues and bandmates, two musicians who have done just about everything there is to do in jazz. One thing they have done only rarely, however, is play together in a drummer-less trio, which makes tonight’s performance a rare treat for audience and performers alike.

Despite his habit of avoiding the spotlight, Bruce Barth is widely known inside the jazz world as one of the most creative, soulful and musical pianists and composers of the modern age. In an era of formulaic, by-the-numbers pianists, Barth stands out from the pack—“No one sounds quite like Barth” asserts the Newark Star-Ledger, while Jazziz calls him “a pianist of enormous ability, swathed in graceful technique and cradled in modernist harmonies.”

A native of Pasadena, California, Barth has played on almost 100 albums as a sideman, working with such stellar musicians as Wynton Marsalis, Tony Bennett, Freddie Hubbard, the Mingus Big Band, Joshua Redman, David Sanchez, Branford Marsalis, James Moody, Slide Hampton, Art Farmer, Phil Woods, Nancy Wilson, Donald Byrd and Roy Hargrove. Barth has a special affinity for working with singers and he’s worked with some of the best: Tony Bennett, Nancy Wilson, Luciana Souza and many others.

After years of private study in California—he started in 1962, when he was four years old—Barth headed east to Boston to attend the New England Conservatory of Music, where he studied with pianists Jaki Byard and Fred Hersch and trombonist George Russell. Barth made his recording debut with Russell’s Living Time Orchestra while he was still a student.

The young pianist moved to New York in 1988 and soon after toured Japan with Nat Adderly. Barth spent several months working with Stanley Turrentine and then joined trumpeter Terence Blanchard’s quintet. The four years Barth spent in Blanchard’s band was a fruitful period for the pianist. He played on six albums with Blanchard, toured extensively with the quintet and did a lot of film soundtrack work, including an on-screen cameo appearance in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X.

Barth made his recording debut as a leader while working with Blanchard, with the albums In Focus and Morning Call, both quintet efforts on Enja. He has made seven subsequent albums, the most recent of which is Live at the Village Vanguard. His albums as a leader have run the gamut of formats—solo, trio, quartet, quintet, sextet and septet. His album East and West, which features five Barth compositions, was hailed by many critics as one of the best recordings of 2001.

Barth is also a Grammy-nominated producer, with albums by Terell Stafford, Carla Cook, Laurent Coq and others to his credit. He has been heavily involved with the St. Louis-based jazz record company MaxJazz, producing a number of albums in the label’s vocal series and its highly acclaimed piano series, which includes albums by Barth, Mulgrew Miller, Denny Zeitlin, Eric Reed and others. “With my musical experience, I can bring my perspective as a musician to the date,” says Barth of producing, “having a good sense of what the musicians are doing and understanding what the artist is trying to do.”

Highly regarded as a music educator and clinician, Barth is currently on the faculty at Temple University in Philadelphia, as a lecturer in jazz piano and jazz composition. He previously taught at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, the New School University, City College of New York, Long Island University and Queens College in New York. Barth has also has given workshops, seminars and master classes in the United States, Europe, and Japan.

Trumpeter Terell Stafford has been described as “one of the great players of our time” by legendary jazz pianist McCoy Tyner. Granted, Tyner wasn’t unbiased, as he got to hear Stafford play every night from the stage, but the critics have shared Tyner’s enthusiasm, with a writer for the Chicago Tribune anointing Stafford as the latest “in a long line of trumpeters who do not allow formidable technique to stand in the way of fluid, lyric expression.”

Born in Miami and raised in Chicago and Silver Spring, Maryland, Stafford began playing trumpet at 13, studying classical music before heeding the siren call of jazz. After earning a degree in music education from the University of Maryland, Stafford continued his studies, on the advice of Wynton Marsalis, at Rutgers University. Stafford was still in graduate school at Rutgers when he made his professional breakthrough by joining saxophonist Bobby Watson’s band Horizon.

Stafford spent five productive years in Horizon, now recognized as one of the premier small groups in jazz in the 1980s and early 1990s, playing on three Watson albums during his tenure: Present Tense, Tailor Made and Midwest Shuffle. Stafford next played with McCoy Tyner’s Latin All-Star Band. Since the mid-1990s, the versatile trumpeter has played in bands led by Jon Faddis, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Heath, Benny Golson, Cedar Walton, Herbie Mann, Kenny Barron and several others, as well as in the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band and the Mingus Big Band.

Stafford has made five albums as a leader, beginning with Time to Let Go in 1995.His most recent album is Taking Chances: Live at the Dakota, recorded with his regular working quintet, which includes Barth on piano. Obviously a man who likes to keep busy, Stafford currently leads his own quintet and is a regular member of three bands: the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, drummer Matt Wilson’s band Arts and Crafts and Alvin Queen and the Organics.

Stafford has played trumpet and flugelhorn on more than 40 albums as a sideman, working with a diverse group of musicians including the Clayton Brothers, the Lincoln Center Jazz Band, Tim Warfield, Cornell Dupree, Victor Lewis, Shirley Scott and the Dizzy Gillespie Alumni All-Star Big Band.

Because Stafford came to jazz relatively late in life, after studying classical music through graduate school, he is a keen student of the music and its history. Being a student makes him a better teacher, and a more complete musician. “I learned a lot from studying Freddie Hubbard, Miles Davis, Lee Morgan,” says Stafford. “But there were still things that were missing.

“I needed to go back and study the legacy. Louis Armstrong, Bubber Miley, Cootie Williams, Rex Stewart. All the masters. So I did that. And then I had a whole new understanding about the trumpet and where the history had come from…When I went back and did the homework, I saw that there is so much happening, it’s refreshing. A lot of people don’t see it. They say that stuff is old. It’s been done. But there’s so much behind it.”

An accomplished educator as well as a musician, Stafford has taught at the Juilliard Institute for Jazz Studies, Lincoln Center’s Essentially Ellington program in New York and the prestigious Vail Foundation in Colorado. Stafford is currently a professor of music and Director of Jazz Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Bruce Barth and Terell Stafford are accompanied in this trio performance by Phil Palombi, an outstanding young bassist and former member of the Ohio All-Star College Jazz Ensemble while he was a student at Youngstown State. After a two-year stint working with Maynard Ferguson, Palombi moved to New York in 1997 and he’s since played and recorded with such musicians as Toshiko Akiyoshi, Michael Brecker, Lew Tabackin, the Village Vanguard Orchestra, Chucho Valdes and, for the last few years, vocalist Curtis Stigers. Palombi has recorded one CD as a leader, 80 East.

Barth and Stafford have been in Dayton once before for Cityfolk. During Cityfolk’s 2001-2002 season, Stafford and his band participated in a three-week educational residency project funded by the Doris Duke Jazz Network. Stafford worked with local youth jazz ensembles the first week, including the award-winning Stivers School for the Arts Jazz Orchestra and groups from 10 other high schools and colleges. Stafford was presented in concert with some of those groups during the second week. The members of Stafford’s quintet, including Barth, were in Dayton the third week, working individually with local students. The project ended with a concert performance by the Terell Stafford Quintet. And a commissioned work from the project, New Beginnings Suite, was a highlight of Stafford’s 2003 MaxJazz release, New Beginnings.

“There’s something about playing in the moment,” Barth says of live performances, “that is a challenge and a true privilege, because you really get the chance to say, ‘This is how I feel right now.’ For me, the challenge is to have a more direct and expressive way in playing the music. That’s really what I strive for. As musicians, we spend a lot of time working on our craft: the melodic ideas, the harmonic ideas. At the end of the day, it comes down to what you are expressing as a human being. That’s really what it’s about.”

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February 22, 2008

Jane Bunnett and Spirits of Havana

Tonight’s concert by Jane Bunnett and the Spirits of Havana returns this superb band to Kelly Hall on the Antioch College campus for the third time. First rate improvisers who seamlessly weave rhythms from the Caribbean and around the world with the grand tradition of jazz, Bunnett and her ensemble have carved out a place in the pantheon of Afro-Cuban music that is singularly unique.

Jane Bunnett’s love affair with Cuban music started in 1982 with her search for a cheap vacation spot. The acclaimed Canadian saxophonist and her husband, trumpeter Larry Cramer, were looking to escape the cold Toronto winter and Cuba was warm, relatively close and relatively inexpensive. Before the end of that first vacation, Bunnett had discovered that Cuba had much more to offer her than nice weather and low prices.

Bunnett and Cramer found that, despite the grinding poverty that is so pervasive on the island, Cuba is a country full of music and musicians—a place where, in Bunnett’s words, “music just seemed to be everywhere.” Bunnett and Cramer played with the local musicians and bands as much as they could, and the rich traditions of Cuban music thoroughly enchanted the couple. The island has figured prominently in their music since then.

Back in Canada, Bunnett set about immersing herself in a study of the many forms and styles of Cuban music. Bunnett’s musical training had started with classical training on the piano and clarinet as a child, and, later, she had studied piano and soprano saxophone with jazz artists Barry Harris and Steve Lacy. She’s self-taught on the flute.

Bunnett made her recording debut in 1989 with an album with pianist Don Pullen, New York Duets. She followed that with Live at Sweet Basil, a recording of her quintet performing live at a club during the Greenwich Village Jazz Festival in New York. These two albums earned Bunnett a reputation as a fast-rising talent with chops and technique to spare.

It was Bunnett’s third album, however, that first displayed her love of Cuban music and her impressive grasp of its component styles. Spirits of Havana, a blend of jazz and the folkloric Yoruban roots of Cuban music, was critically acclaimed and won Bunnett her first Juno Award (Canada’s equivalent to the Grammy). The saxophonist was forging her own unique Anglo-Afro-Cuban synthesis, and the experiments on this album led directly to such follow-ups as Jane Bunnett and The Cuban Piano Masters; Havana Flute Summit; Ritmo + Soul; Alma de Santiago and more recently Radio Guantanamo, which folded in blues and New Orleans music into this bottomless bag of influences.

Since the release of Spirits of Havana, Bunnett has led something of a double existence. She maintains an active presence in the mainstream jazz world, performing at leading festivals and playing and recording with such top-tier jazz musicians as saxophonist Dewey Redman; pianists Don Pullen, Paul Bley and Stanley Cowell; bassist Charlie Haden; drummer Billy Hart; and singers Sheila Jordan and Jeanne Lee, among others.

At the same time, Bunnett continues to dig deeper into the roots of Cuban music. For Bunnett, jazz and Cuban music are not two different things, but more like two sides of the same coin. “I see myself as a jazz musician,” she says, “but I’m working in this traditional Cuban music. I’m not working with salsa. I’m not trying to present music that is dance-oriented for pop audiences. Larry and I have always worked with traditional Cuban song-forms and styles.”

Her collaborations with Cuban musicians over the past twenty years have given Bunnett a singular perspective on the music. “I think we’ve covered a lot of musical ground in Cuba over the years,” she says. “From originally working with Merceditas Valdés and Grupo Yoruba Andabo and other folkloric groups, like Clave y Guaguancó…to working with José Maria Vitier and Frank Emilio, the Cuban piano masters…to playing the son music of Los Naranjos.”

Those various musical streams came together beautifully on Bunnett’s 2002 CD, Cuban Odyssey. It’s a stunning album—bold, ambitious and brilliantly executed. Inspired by a Cuban visit in 2000 in which Bunnett and Cramer traveled for the first time in the rural parts of the island, Cuban Odyssey is world music that honors all of its parts. The CD was named “Best World Album” at the 2003 Urban Music Awards and “Best Latin Jazz Album” at the 2003 Jazz Journalists Awards. It was nominated for a Grammy Award as the year’s “Best Latin Jazz Album”

Bunnett and Cramer have now made dozens of trips to Cuba, but the one that led to the acclaimed CD was special for two reasons. On previous visits, the couple had limited their musical activities to the cities of Havana and Santiago de Cuba. This time, they went into the countryside—to Matanzas, Cienfuegos and Camaguey—and met and played with a new group of bands and musicians.

According to Bunnett, though, the challenge was the same. “You have to integrate yourself within another musical context,” she says, “to fit in and express yourself musically and honestly within that idiom. We wanted to tie a thread through all of our experiences with the musics of Cuba. I think with this project it really happened.”

Second, this visit was documented in the award-winning film Jane Bunnett/ Spirits Of Havana: Cuban Odyssey (which Cityfolk screened at the Little Art Theatre on February 6). The two musicians were accompanied on their travels by a video crew from the National Film Board of Canada, and as Bunnett and Cramer drove around the island, the crew captured them in a series of fascinating musical collaborations with a variety of local musicians as well as such groups as Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, Los Naranjos and Desandann. The documentary, which premiered at the Montreal World Film Festival in 2000, is now available on DVD.

Bunnett’s multi-cultural music making has met with widespread critical acclaim. New Jazz Review praises her for “blending a panoramic approach to Cuban folkloric traditions and the fire of American jazz. Jane Bunnett has carved out a unique place in the pantheon of current Caribbean music.” Allaboutjazz noted her ability “to fire up the afterburners to ignite a program that’s sure to satisfy jazz lovers the world over.”

Jane Bunnett appears tonight with her six-piece touring band, the Spirits of Havana. In addition to Bunnett and Cramer, the current edition of the sextet includes Osmany Paredes on piano, Yunior Terry on bass, Arturo Stable on congas and Jorge Najarro on timbales.

Since her 1989 debut, Bunnett has recorded extensively, collaborating both with American jazz players and Cuban musicians. She has been investigating the musical linkages and cultural connections in Afro-Cuban jazz for more than 20 years. She has done the work. She has paid her dues.

She has also befriended and supported countless Cuban musicians, hosted them on North American tours and helped to arrange recording sessions for them. Official recognition of her many contributions came in 2002, when the Smithsonian Institution  honored Jane Bunnett for her “lifetime of dedication to the enrichment and diffusion of Latin music.”

Renowned Cuban saxophonist Paquito D’Rivera is a long-time supporter and fan of Bunnett’s musical efforts. In a recent interview in Jazz Times, D’Rivera spoke for many of his countrymen when he said, “Jane is brilliant and she’s been paying so much respect to our music. She uses the real ingredients.”

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March 14, 2008

Dervish

As many good stories do, this one starts in a bar, an Irish pub actually. Irish pubs often host traditional music sessions, informal affairs where neighbors visit with one another, drink a pint or two and listen to local musicians play the old songs and tunes. These sessions aren’t so much performances as jam sessions with a semi-attentive audience. It’s a convivial, low-pressure musical atmosphere that has spawned many a fine musician and band.

The roots of Dervish stretch back to 1989, when five Irish musicians who played together at weekly pub sessions—including Liam Kelly (flute, whistles), Shane Mitchell (accordion), Michael Holmes (bouzouki, mandolin) and Brian McDonagh (mandola, guitar)—recorded an album of traditional music from County Sligo as the Boys from Sligo.

Initially, there were no plans beyond making the album, but that went so well the quartet decided to become a real band—a working band—known as Dervish. Two years later, the band assumed its present format with the addition of singer Cathy Jordan from County Roscommon and All-Ireland Fiddle Champion Shane McAleer. Amazingly, this hard-working band has had only one significant personnel change in the ensuing 17 years, fiddler Tom Morrow (from County Leitrim and another All-Ireland Fiddle Champion) joining the ranks in 1998.

The band chose its name after Brian McDonagh watched a documentary about whirling dervishes and saw a weird kind of kinship. “Dervishes are usually a group of poor but spiritual people enraptured by music,” explains Jordan. “They spin around and become entranced by the music. As the spinning progresses, the dervishes reach a higher level of being. Similarly, in a traditional Irish session, people may meet for the first time through the common bond of music. As the night progresses, a euphoria builds and lifelong friendships ensue.”

For my money, Dervish is the most exciting, most complete traditional Irish band in the world. The band boasts a powerful instrumental attack with a fiddle, accordion and flute front-line that is capable of a mighty roar on a set of dance tunes but also sympathetic support for slow airs and vocals. The combination of McDonagh’s mandola and Holmes’ bouzouki gives Dervish a unique rhythmic framework.

And then there’s the band’s not-so-secret weapon, Cathy Jordan, a charismatic performer with an earthy voice and boundless stage presence. A formidable bodhrán player as well, Jordan is arguably the most compelling vocalist on the traditional circuit, heard to stunning effect on the band’s latest album, Travelling Show, singing in both English and Irish. Reviewing that album, Hot Press says of Jordan, “She shreds the rulebook and pulls the best vocal performances of her career.”

To Jordan, the appeal of Dervish to the audience is that the band covers all the bases. “In Irish music,” she says, “there are three elements: goltraí, so sad it brings tears; geantrí, so lively it makes you want to dance; and suantrá, so soothing you want to sleep. At a Dervish concert, you experience all three and it leaves you exhilarated.”

Dervish made its recording debut in 1993 with Harmony Hill and has made a total of nine albums, all released on the band’s own Whirling Disc label. Two of the albums are compilations; Decade is a collection of songs and tunes from the band’s first five albums, while A Healing Heart is a batch of slower material from earlier albums showing “the softer side of Dervish.” The band has also released a pair of concert DVDs, Session and The Midsummer’s Night.

The public reaction to Harmony Hill created much work for the band, and it had soon played most of the major folk and Celtic festivals in the U.K. After the band’s second album, Playing with Fire, was released to widespread critical acclaim, Dervish made its first tour of the U.S., playing at such high-profile venues and events as Wolf Trap, the Milwaukee Irish Festival and City Stages in Birmingham, Alabama.

The band has since become veteran world travelers, performing extensively in Europe, and in Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Colombia, Canada and the U.S., as well as at home in Ireland. Thanks to the band’s widespread touring, there are actually Dervish “tribute bands” around the world, especially in Russia and Israel for some reason. According to the band’s website, members of Dervish have appeared in concert with several of these cover bands.

Dervish has won numerous international music awards during its almost 20 years of existence. The band’s honors include IRMA Awards in Ireland; winning the Hot Press Folk Album of the Year Award for At the End of the Day; being named Best Overall Trad/Folk Band of the Year by Irish Music Magazine; and the designation by Hot Press as “Trad Band of the Year” in 2007.

The honor the band members are proudest of is being named “Free People of Sligo” by the Sligo City Council for their contributions to international music and their ongoing championing of their Sligo heritage. County Sligo, in the northwestern part of the country, has played a crucial role in the traditional music of Ireland and its preservation.

It was Sligo musicians who had immigrated to the U.S.—men like Michael Coleman and James Morrison—that kept the music alive by recording it in New York in the 1920s, a time when the music had just about vanished at home in Ireland. Dervish is honored to be part of the Sligo tradition and to carry it on. “We localize it a wee bit,” says Liam Kelly, “and do some tunes from the area.”

Live in Palma, a live double-album recorded in the Spanish resort town of Palma, is probably the best introduction for a newcomer to the many and varied charms of Dervish. Over the course of the album’s 36 selections, 10 songs and the rest tunes, Dervish powers through a captivating and energetic program of reels, jigs, slow airs, love songs and traditional ballads, all tied together with Jordan’s between-songs stories and witticisms. It’s a highly entertaining album and it made many critics’ “best of the year” lists when it was released in 1997.

At some point during tonight’s concert, Dervish will perform the title song from its most recent album, Travelling Show. It’s “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves,” the Cher hit from 1971 and quite likely the only irony-free cover of a Cher song you’ll ever hear. As Cathy Jordan says in introducing the song on stage (quite possibly with tongue in cheek), when she first heard Cher’s record on the radio, she thought it was a traditional Irish song about the Travellers, Ireland’s homegrown analogue to the gypsies.

In addition to the Cher hit, Dervish has incorporated other modern songs into its traditional sound. Jordan worked up a version of “Boots of Spanish Leather” for Bob Dylan’s 50th birthday party in Dublin and it’s now a mainstay of the band’s live shows. Dervish also does a version of Dire Straits’ “Brothers in Arms,” and one of the highlights on Travelling Show is a haunting performance of Suzanne Vega’s song “The Queen and the Soldier.”

“Irish music is one of the oldest forms of music, yet it is influenced an awful lot by other things,” explains Jordan. “It evolves and evolves. Our sound is very recognizable because of the bouzouki and mandola. And though we have a modern style within the Irish context, you might not say it’s really modern because it blends in so well. But in actual fact there are a lot of modern influences in there.

“We experiment without straying too far from the roots. We give people something familiar, yet it’s in the genre of traditional music. It’s all the instrumentation of Irish music. But it plays with people’s perception a bit.”

Like bluegrass in the U.S., traditional Irish music is home-based, social music that has only recently been transformed into an on-stage performance style. Also like bluegrass, particularly jam sessions at bluegrass festivals, pub sessions draw together musicians of many different backgrounds, ages, types and persuasions.

“I’m a farmer’s daughter,” explains Jordan, “and someone else in the band is an architect’s son. Outside of music, we may have never met, but this is how Irish people have forged unlikely friendships for years, playing music together.” That’s probably a big part of the reason why Dervish has weathered almost two decades with so little turnover.

The band’s goal has been simple and straightforward from the start: “We bring music from the session onto the stage,” states Brian McDonagh. Despite the casual beginnings of Dervish, McDonagh says, “We knew from the beginning we could make this work, and we set out deliberately to make a go of it.

“We all took the plunge and said ‘This is it, this is what we want to do.’ We were all doing other jobs and not to any spectacular success, so we thought why don’t we do something we are good at and enjoy. We really enjoy what we’re doing. I don’t see why we should stop while we’re doing that.”

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March 22, 2008

Bill Charlap and Houston Person

The “Great American Songbook” is in good hands with pianist Bill Charlap and tenor saxophonist Houston Person. They are respectful and tasteful caretakers of the canon, to be sure, but they do something far more important for the classic songs of George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern and their songwriting contemporaries.

Rather than treating these songs as quaint or delicate museum pieces to be admired from a careful distance, Charlap and Person treat them as songs—to be played, enjoyed, explored and even danced to, if Person gets his way. As they demonstrated on their acclaimed 2006 duet album, You Taught My Heart To Sing, which contains such standards as “Sweet Lorraine,” “S’Wonderful” and “Namely You,” Bill Charlap and Houston Person are the go-to guys for beautiful music played beautifully.

It’s an unlikely partnership in some regards. Person is 32 years older than Charlap, and their backgrounds could hardly be more different. Charlap has been on the fast track to stardom his whole career, while Person has labored in semi-obscurity, a masterful player “whose reputation has never caught up to his exceptional talents,” in the words of one critic.

What unites these two musicians and what makes their partnership work is that both men put the material first and make sure their talents serve the song and not the other way around. Charlap and Person respect the primacy of the song. Person is so into songs that he included a lyric sheet with his 2002 album Sentimental Journey, even though the album didn’t have any vocals. Finally, both men are cut from the same cloth: “Charlap and Person personify class.” (Audiophile Audition).

Bill Charlap was born in 1966 into a very musical family and environment. His father, who died when Bill was seven, was Moose Charlap, a Broadway composer who wrote the scores for such shows as Peter Pan, The Conquering Hero, Whoop-up, Alice Through the Looking Glass and Kelly. His mother is Sandy Stewart, a pop/cabaret singer who had a hit with “My Coloring Book” and worked both with Benny Goodman and on Perry Como’s popular television series.

Charlap started playing piano at a very young age and formally studied jazz and classical piano. He also learned from family friend (and distant relation) Dick Hyman, a respected jazz pianist who served as Charlap’s mentor. Charlap moved fully into the jazz world in the late 1980s, when he joined the band of baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan. Charlap worked with Mulligan until 1994, when he joined alto saxophonist Phil Woods’ band, with which he still works. Charlap also made his solo recording debut in 1994 with Along With Me.

Charlap formed his current working band, the Bill Charlap Trio, in 1996, with Peter Washington (bass) and Kenny Washington (drums). This trio of virtuoso players has made some of Charlap’s best albums, including All Through the Night, Written in the Stars, Stardust, Somewhere: The Songs of Leonard Bernstein and Live at the Village Vanguard, Charlap’s most recent release which was nominated for a 2007 Grammy Award.

Other highlights of his discography are Bill Charlap Plays George Gershwin: The American Soul, recorded with an all-star septet, and a duo album of ballads with his mother, Sandy Stewart, Love Is Here To Stay.

In one of his last New Yorker profiles, the esteemed critic Whitney Balliett eloquently captured the essence of the emerging Charlap as a major musical force: “Charlap is a lyrical repository. He has absorbed every pianist worth listening to in the past fifty years, starting with Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, Duke Ellington, Jimmy Rowles, Erroll Garner and Oscar Peterson…His ballads are meditations on songs, homages to their composers and lyricists.

“Charlap has a formidable technique, but he never shows off, even though he will let loose epic runs, massive staccato chords, and, once in a while, some dazzling counterpoint, his hands pitted against each other. His sound shines. Best of all, in almost every number, regardless of its speed, he leaves us a phrase, a group of irregular notes, an ardent bridge that shakes us.”

Bill Charlap has been widely acclaimed as one of the finest, most expressive pianists of his generation. Among his many honors, awards and accomplishments are two Grammy nominations, for his albums Somewhere and Live at the Village Vanguard; the Pianist of the Year Award in 2003 from the Jazz Journalists Association; and the kind of mainstream celebrity and media coverage that eludes most jazz musicians.

Born in Newberry, South Carolina, in 1934, Houston Person has been hailed by All About Jazz as “jazz’s working class hero, a true man of the people.” That reputation has been earned one gig at a time, from the 1960s to the present, with a work ethic and musical aesthetic that would today be called “old school.”

Person works hard to connect with an audience and embraces the label “entertainer.” He embodies what has often been described as “the old school” among big toned tenors. Dizzy Gillespie said it best: “He’s one of the best. He’s got bull chops.”

Person studied music at South Carolina State College and Hartt College of Music in Connecticut and during a subsequent hitch in the army, where he played with such musicians as Cedar Walton, Don Ellis and Eddie Harris. Person’s main musical influence was the early tenor sax titan Illinois Jacquet, and Person stands today as the foremost exponent of that big, fat, juicy tenor sax ballad sound introduced by Coleman Hawkins and perfected by Ben Webster, Jacquet, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis and Gene Ammons.

Person made his professional breakthrough playing in the band of organist Johnny “Hammond” Smith for a few years in the mid-1960s, and most of Person’s career has been spent leading his own sax-organ-drums trio. He made his recording debut as a leader in the late 1960s with a series of albums on Prestige, including Chocomotive, Soul Dance and Truth. These funky albums, many of which saw new life during the “acid jazz” trend of the 1990s, unfortunately led to a stereotype of Person as a “soul jazz” player instead of the complete musician his music reveals.

A critic for the San Francisco Chronicle argues against that tag: “There’s always been a greater depth to his playing than the ‘soul jazz’ label suggests. He brings an elegant, uncluttered improvisational style to a wide jazz repertoire, and a lovely, intimate touch to his ballad work. But it’s his warm, welcoming tone, the clear sense of joy in his delivery, and his empathetic melodic sense that clearly identify Person’s music.”

“I am always trying to make that melody sing because I love melodies,” says Person of his approach to music. “Even if there is no lyric, I’m still singing it. That’s the way I’ve always approached tunes—by really establishing the melody. I often don’t even improvise much on the melodies. I just play them because they are beautiful in themselves.”

After performing together at a gig in Washington, D.C. in 1968, Person formed a partnership with vocalist Etta Jones that lasted more than 30 years, until Jones’ death in 2001 (Cityfolk presented Jones and Person both in its Jazz Series and at the Cityfolk Festival). With an approach and sound that brought to mind the great collaboration between Billie Holiday and Lester Young, Person and Jones toured extensively and recorded numerous albums, including the Grammy-nominated My Buddy, a salute to Jones’ former bandleader, Buddy Johnson.

Person has recorded dozens of albums as a leader for such labels as Prestige, Westbound, Mercury and Savoy. After a long association with Joe Fields’ Muse label, he has continued the partnership with Fields on his High Note label, as both artist and producer, for more than a decade, with 15 albums on the label. He has recorded with Charles Brown, Charles Earland, Lena Horne, Dakota Staton, Lou Rawls, Cedar Walton, Ron Carter, Buddy Tate, Horace Silver, Billy Butler, and many others.

On finally receiving some long-overdue attention as a major player after decades of paying dues, Person is realistic. “Well, I’m still paying dues,” he notes, “but it’s gotten a little better. You know, that’s just life. I don’t worry about that. I’m having fun doing what I’m doing. A lot of people are giving me the opportunity to play and I’m enjoying it.”

Between the two of them, Houston Person and Bill Charlap might know more songs than any other two jazz musicians on the planet. Even better than just knowing the repertoire, these two have explored it thoroughly and come away with this truth: great songs, even those standards you’ve heard thousands of times, are great for a reason. The particular genius of this duo is in showing why these songs matter in the first place, why modern-day listeners are missing a treasure if they dismiss this material as dated or irrelevant.

An eloquent and thoughtful summary of the Houston Person and Bill Charlap partnership comes from All About Jazz: “Blessings on whoever thought of pairing Person with Bill Charlap. Along with their profound understanding of the music, these guys specialize in using only the notes they need. And not a single one more…The living here is way easy and the conversation is just grand.”

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April 11 , 2008

Rob Curto's Sanfona Project

New York accordion virtuoso Rob Curto made a big impression at the 2007 Cityfolk Festival with his red-hot dance band, Forró for All. He returns to the area tonight with his new band, Rob Curto’s Sanfona Project, a powerful musical ensemble specializing in the many styles and sounds of the dance music of northeastern Brazil. The name of the band may be new, but the primacy of the groove remains gloriously unchanged.

A founding member of the popular bands Forró for All and Forró in the Dark, Rob Curto is one of the foremost forró musicians in the U.S., with active musical careers in both New York and Brazil. Curto began his musical career as a jazz pianist, after studying with Fred Hersch and Barry Harris, but he was attracted to world music sounds and influences from the outset. His first album, Bellow the Earth, was an exploration of such forms of traditional European accordion music as French musettes, Italian tarantella, Celtic jigs and reels, and Swedish folk tunes.

Curto has since delved deeply into forró, chorinho, samba, maracatu, frevo and the other styles that make up the Brazilian accordion tradition. He has studied with some of Brazil’s greatest accordionists, including Dominguinhos, Camarão and Silveirinha, and worked with such esteemed Brazilian artists as Elza Soares, Hamilton de Holanda, Alencar 7 Cordas, Leandro Braga, Adriano Giffoni and Márcio Bahia. Curto also leads a Brasilia-based band and works with two other ensembles in the capital city, Choro de Calango and Trio Perfumado.

Traditional forró, known as forró pé de serra, is played on just three instruments: the accordion, a metal triangle (similar to but larger, louder and more central to the music than the triangle in Cajun music) and a large bass drum called the zabumba, played with a mallet in one hand and a stick called a bacalhau in the other. The melody is played by the accordion, with the drum and triangle pounding out a surprisingly complex and funky polyrhythmic beat.

Forró emerged as a distinct style of dance music in the late 1800s, about the time Brazil was in the process of becoming a republic. Forró—the name refers both to a dance and the accompanying music—is an energetic blend of Afro-Brazilian percussion and European dance music of the late 1800s, specifically the polkas, waltzes and mazurkas that constituted the primary accordion repertoire at the time.

Forró developed in the northeastern part of Brazil, the most Africanized region of the country. Forró began the evolution from regional style to national obsession as the nordestinos (northeasterners) gave up farming and moved to the coastal cities and, farther south, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.

Curto’s music includes both accordion-led instrumentals and songs. Like vernacular music the world over, the subject matter of many forró songs is love, in all of its many manifestations. Songs that aren’t about love mainly address the more serious concerns of the nordestinos—alienation, cultural dislocation, racial prejudice and a longing sense of nostalgia. Most of the songs are sung in Portuguese.

The music played by Curto’s Sanfona Project is often described as “forró novo” or “neo-forró,” a stylistic evolution in which the accordion and percussion instruments used in traditional forró are often augmented by such non-traditional additions as the electric bass guitar and a drum set, and the old-time sounds are colored by jazz and other Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Caribbean influences.

Curto first achieved his distinctive vision of musical fusion with Forró for All, which he formed after leaving Forró in the Dark. Forró for All performed at major world music and accordion festivals throughout the world and released its debut CD, Forró for All, in 2006 to widespread critical and fan acclaim.

The Los Angeles Times enthused that “Curto’s originals…combine traditional authenticity with persuasive dashes of jazz.” Up the California coast, the San Francisco Bay Guardian raved that “America’s finest purveyors of forró…combine a wildly imaginative jazz sensibility with obvious reverence for traditional Brazilian get-down sounds and the fusion is exhilarating.”

Curto has performed with his various ensembles at the Newport Folk Festival, Chicago World Music Festival, Heartheworld Music Festival in Tel Aviv, Festival International Nuits d’Afrique in Montreal, the International Accordion Festival in San Antonio, the Festival International in Louisiana, and Yiddishkayt in Los Angeles, as well as extensive international touring in Japan, Israel, Austria, Germany, Belgium, Holland, the Czech Republic and, of course, Brazil.

Curto’s most recent album is Piano de Fole, recorded in Brazil and released in 2007. The album contains several Curto originals alongside some Brazilian accordion standards and features sharp playing from several of Brazil’s best young musicians. Curto is currently working on a new album exploring some of the lesser-heard styles of indigenous music from northeastern Brazil; the CD is scheduled for release later this year.

Tonight’s concert is part a sequence of activities featuring Rob Curto’s Sanfona Project that included workshops earlier today at Yellow Springs High School and McKinney Middle School.

Rob Curto’s Sanfona Project includes:

Liliana Araújo—A singer, dancer and actress born in Fortaleza, Brazil, Araújo has guest recorded with Samba Coco de, Mazuca and Brooklyn-based Scott Kettner’s Nation Beat. She also collaborated and recorded with the percussion group Soul Nego, researchers of Brazilian and Afro-descendant rhythms founded by Marcello Santos.

Scott Kettner —This percussionist and composer is a graduate of The New School University Jazz and Contemporary Music program, Kettner has studied intensively in Brazil and in 2004 became a member of one of the oldest existing traditional maracatu groups from Recife, Brazil, Maracatu Nação Estrela Brilhante (founded in 1906). As a sideman, Kettner has worked and recorded with “Beat The Donkey” led by world famous Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista and the great Klezmer trumpeter Frank London and the Klezmer All Star Brass Band.

Mike Lavalle—Electric Bassist Mike LaValle is quickly making a name for himself on the Brazilian and improvised music scene at home in New York City and beyond. He has worked with such diverse musicians as Kenny Wheeler, Gerald Cleaver, João Braga, Márcio Bahia and Tony Moreno. Lavalle provides a funky harmonic and rhythmic foundation for Rob Curto’s Sanfona Project that, while based in tradition, is truly one of a kind.

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April 17, 2008

Juanito Pascual Quartet

Minnesota is rarely considered a hotbed of flamenco music, but everyone has to be from somewhere, right? For rising star Juanito Pascual, who’s been called “one of the bright young lights of the flamenco scene” by the Boston Phoenix and “one of the hottest flamenco guitarists to emerge in recent years” by National Public Radio, that somewhere happens to be Minneapolis. But even though the Twin Cities are some 4,000 miles from flamenco’s ancestral home in the south of Spain, the miles melt away once Pascual starts playing. He definitely sounds like he’s got a gypsy soul.

Born in 1973, Jonathan “Juanito” Pascual started playing guitar at age 11. His tastes were broad enough to encompass both Jimi Hendrix and Chet Atkins, but when a friend in Spanish class turned him on to flamenco music when Pascual was 15, he fell hard for the fiery, percussive guitar music of Spain. The following year, he went to Spain for three months to study guitar with flamenco masters in Seville, one of the music’s birthplaces.

Pascual moved to Spain as soon as he graduated from high school, intending to immerse himself in flamenco, music, life and culture for a year. “I’d saved up money working in a grocery store back home and I thought I had enough for three or four months in Spain,” he remembers. “After four weeks there, I bought this gorgeous flamenco guitar and was completely broke. I had no real choice but to hit the streets of Madrid. I started playing every day in the subway.”

So there he was, busking for tips in the Madrid subways, playing not the flamenco he had come to study, but covers of classic rock hits. “‘Stairway to Heaven’ was a popular request,” he says. “I think I made more money off that song than Jimmy Page [one of the song’s co-writers]. So thanks to Led Zeppelin, I managed to sneak by for a year…I was staying in the cheapest possible place. There was no heat. I bought a hot plate, which saved my life.”

Pascual persevered and found work accompanying dancers in local Madrid flamenco schools. As Pascual was neither Spanish nor a gypsy (the traditional keepers of the flamenco flame), he had some difficulties breaking into the local scene, but his talent, particularly his fluency in blues and jazz guitar styles, eventually won over even the most skeptical Spanish guitarists.

Flamenco guitar playing, called toque, is only one of the three main components of Spanish flamenco music.  The others are baile, the dancing, and cante, the singing, which many people consider the real heart of flamenco music. Vocalists were the stars in this music until well into the 20th century, and famous guitarists were known primarily for their affiliations with famous singers.

The guitarists began moving into the spotlight and away from a strictly supporting role in the 1920s and 1930s, thanks both to recordings and the successful innovations of Ramón Montoya (1880-1949). Montoya radically updated flamenco guitar by incorporating techniques from classical and Latin American guitar styles into his own playing.

Along with Sabicas and Niño Ricardo, Ramón Montoya established solo flamenco guitar as a viable concert form, touring throughout Europe, Asia and the U.S. as a solo act. Montoya also recorded extensively and was the first flamenco guitarist to perform and tour with symphony orchestras, as well as the first to play solo recitals.

Paco de Lucia brought further radical change to flamenco guitar in the 1960s, by adding jazz concepts and vocabulary to his playing and by working in small instrumental ensembles that did away with the singing and dancing altogether. In 1979, de Lucia took flamenco to the top of the jazz and world music charts when he formed The Guitar Trio with fellow virtuosos John McLaughlin and Larry Coryell, who was replaced after one album by Al Di Meola. Paco de Lucia is today seen as a pioneer of what is called Nuevo Flamenco or “New Flamenco.”

Juanito Pascual is a perfect example of a modern, post-de Lucia New Flamenco guitarist. Pascual returned to the U.S. after his year in Spain to attend the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. Pascual studied with classical guitarists Eliot Fisk and David Leisner and jazz guitarist Gene Bertoncini, and graduated with honors in 1997 with a degree in contemporary improvisation. Pascual has maintained his connection with NEC, serving as the director of the conservatory’s annual summer Flamenco Institute since 2005.

Pascual’s decision to pursue music professionally wasn’t a big surprise to those who knew the young guitarist. “I always knew that I wanted to be a musician, but I also wanted to do something useful, something that nourishes people,” he says. “Maybe because I grew up with parents who were in social work, but I was always plagued with issues of helping people. I finally realized that I could do that with my music.”

Living in Boston, Pascual has worked with many of the top flamenco musicians and dancers from Spain and most of the major flamenco companies in the U.S., including Isaac and Nino de los Reyes, Raquel Heredia, Omayra Amaya, Ramon de los Reyes, Jose Greco II, Carlota Santana, La Repompa de Málaga, Inés Arrubla, Susana di Palma, and Caminos Flamencos. Outside of flamenco, Pascual has collaborated with such diverse musical partners as renowned soprano Dawn Upshaw, legendary Middle Eastern musician Omar Faruk Takbilek and Israeli cantor Emil Zrihan.

Pascual made his recording debut in 2003 with Cosas en Común, an album of original flamenco guitar instrumentals. The album was well received critically and logged extensive radio airplay both in the U.S. and abroad. Pascual has been featured on The World and Hear and Now programs on National Public Radio and is currently working on his second album, Language of the Heart, scheduled for release this fall.

Pascual has performed at several major festivals, including the Tanglewood Jazz Festival, Festival Flamenco Internacional in Albuquerque, Yale’s International Festival of Arts and Ideas and New York City’s Fringe Festival, and at such prestigious venues as Lincoln Center, the 92nd Street Y and the Blue Note in New York, and Jordan Hall, the Museum of Fine Art and Regattabar in Boston. One of the highlights of Pascual’s career was collaborating on the Grammy-winning chamber opera Ainadamar (composed by Osvaldo Golijov) and performing at the work’s premiere at Tanglewood in 2003.

Juanito Pascual continues to expand his horizons. He makes his debut as an author this summer with The Total Flamenco Guitarist, a book that combines technical instruction, music history and a comprehensive introduction to the flamenco world. Pascual will make his film debut early in 2009, playing guitar in a brief on-screen flamenco scene in The Pink Panther 2, Steve Martin’s update of the Peter Sellers franchise.

The Boston Globe has hailed Juanito Pascual as a “flamenco phenom,” but as Pascual knows as well as anyone, many a “phenom” has jumped the tracks somewhere between potential and mature artistry. That fate seems unlikely to befall Pascual for a number of reasons—his talent as a virtuoso guitarist, his ambition to expand the boundaries of flamenco, his multi-cultural musical vision and skill as a collaborator and—somewhere in the back of his mind—the surprisingly potent motivational power of hundreds of subway performances of “Stairway to Heaven.”

“Flamenco is an expression of self,” says Juanito Pascual, citing another reason to bet on his long-term success as a major flamenco artist, composer and innovator. “And from the perspective of a guitarist, flamenco is like Mount Everest. It’s a challenge in every way.”

The Juanito Pascual Quartet includes:

Rohan Gregory (violin) has cultivated a wide-ranging expertise in chamber music, improvisatory, and world musics. He has played with groups as diverse as the Klezmatics, Abbie Rabinovitz’s Kaleidoscope’, Indo-West African-Jazz group Natraj, the World Beat Funk band Hypnotic Clambake, Led Zeppelin, the Arden String Quartet, and the Boccherini Ensemble. Rohan is a regular member of the Boston Lyric Opera Company, QX String Quartet, the New England String Ensemble and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.

Jerry Leake (percussion) is co-founder of the acclaimed world-music ensemble Natraj. He also performs with Moksha, BodyGrooves, and the Agbekor Drum and Dance Society. On tabla, he has accompanied such artists as Ali Akbar Khan, Steve Gorn, Kumkum Sanyal, and Purnima Sen. Jerry graduated from the Berklee College of Music where he studied jazz vibraphone and hand percussion. He has traveled the globe to study tabla, Karnatic rhythm theory, mridangam (an Indian drum); music of the Dagomba tradition of northern Ghana, Ewe music of southern Ghana and balafon/djembe in Burkina Faso. Jerry has written eight widely used texts on North Indian, West African, Latin American percussion, and rhythm theory. Jerry is on the faculty of the New England Conservatory of Music and Tufts University, and teaches a summer graduate course on world percussion at the University of Southern Maine. He presents percussion clinics and solo concerts throughout New England.

Vicente ”El Cartucho” Griego (vocals) from Embudo, New Mexico has devoted his life to the study of cante flamenco, the art of flamenco singing. In 1992, Vicente began touring the US, Canada and Latin America, with the Jose Greco II Flamenco Dance Company, where he was mentored by Caño Roto singer Alfonso ”Veneno”. Vicente currently performs weekly with Jose Valle ”Chuscales” and continues to perform with flamenco groups across the United States. To quote a review of a recent performance at the World Music Festival of Chicago, “Vicente Griego ”El Cartucho” is striking for his deep, sonorous wails that seem to come from a cavern, someplace deep within his soul...”

Laura Montes (Dancer) began studying dance in New York City at the age of six. Her studies continue here and in Spain. She has taken classes both in New York and in Spain from Andrea Del Conte, Maria Magdalena, Raquel Heredia, La Meira, Isabel Bayon and Rafaela Carrasco. Most recently she has been studying with El Farruquito and his mother, La Farruca, in Sevilla, Spain. She has danced with the Carlota Santana Spanish Dance Company, Andrea Del Conte Danza España, and the Philadelphia based Pasion Y Arte Flamenco Company. She also dances in the productions of La Traviata and Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center. Laura Montes can be seen dancing in various tablaos (flamenco clubs) in the New York City area where she resides.

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May 2, 2008

Dave Greer's Classic Jazz Stompers

It may seem hard to believe in today’s fragmented musical world, but jazz was once the most popular music in the U.S. In the 1920s and 1930s, jazz pioneers like Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington were among the most famous stars in the country. Dave Greer’s Classic Jazz Stompers, hailed as “one of the best jazz bands playing today” by The American Rag, looks to that era for its creative inspiration, playing the timeless music of such titans as Armstrong, Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Bix Beiderbecke, Sidney Bechet and their contemporaries.

Concerts by the Classic Jazz Stompers often have a central organizing theme. The thematic focus of this evening’s collaboration between Dave Greer’s Classic Jazz Stompers and its special guest, red-hot New Orleans trumpet virtuoso Duke Heitger, is the music of the legendary soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, especially the music he recorded with a pair of trumpeters, Muggsy Spanier and Louis Armstrong.

A New Orleans native, Sidney Bechet (1897-1959) was the first master of the soprano sax, one of the first soloists in jazz, the first jazz musician to earn notice within the world of “serious music” and a national hero in France, where he spent most of his later years. Duke Ellington was an admirer, once writing, “Sidney Bechet to me was the very epitome of jazz…Everything he played in his whole life was completely original. I honestly think he was the most unique man to ever be in this music.”

Bechet first recorded in 1923 with pianist Clarence Williams, with whom he worked until 1925, playing on recording sessions for several women blues singers. Bechet recorded with Louis Armstrong on a session by the Clarence Williams Blue Five. Bechet later recorded with Muggsy Spanier, a Chicago trumpeter who first recorded in 1927 as a member of the Chicago Rhythm Kings, alongside Mezz Mezzrow, Eddie Condon and Gene Krupa.

Dave Greer has described the Classic Jazz Stompers “as a territory band from Dayton, Ohio, which is magnetized by the moment in the late 1920s and early 1930s when classic jazz evolved into small band swing.” “Territory bands” were jazz ensembles that played outside the music centers of New York, Chicago and New Orleans in the years between 1920 and the beginning of World War II. Many of these bands had the talent to make a go of it in the big cities, but for one reason or another elected to stay in Omaha, or Oklahoma City or Cincinnati, touring on a regional rather than national basis.

These bands were tremendously popular with their audiences, playing the hot dance music of the day with as much energy and panache as any of the “name” bands. Each band had a home base and region, from which it worked the “territory” within a day’s drive. One of the most popular territory bands in this area was the Wolverine Orchestra, based in Hamilton and Cincinnati in the early 1920s; its members included the legendary Bix Beiderbecke on cornet. Count Basie, Lester Young, Jimmie Lunceford, Cab Calloway, Chick Webb and Illinois Jacquet are just a few of the other prominent jazz musicians who got their starts in the territory bands.

Dave Greer’s Classic Jazz Stompers consists of Dave Greer (banjo, tenor guitar, vocals), Chris Moore (cornet, vocals), Erik Greiffenhagen (clarinet, tenor and soprano saxophone), Gordon Moore (trombone), Greg Dearth (alto saxophone, clarinet, violin, banjo, guitar, mandolin, vocals), Jack Butler (tuba), John MacQueen (bass), Jim Leslie (drums, vocals) and Ted Des Plantes (piano, vocals).

The Classic Jazz Stompers fit into a historical continuum and local musical tradition that dates back to the late 1940s and 1950s when traditional jazz bands in Dayton like Gene Mayl’s Dixieland Rhythm Kings, Carl Halen’s Gin Bottle Seven and bands led by Bill Colburn and Eddie Bayard held forth at such Dayton nightspots as the Top Flite Club, the Hitching Post, the Towers, the Colony Club, Suttmillers and the Black Knight.

Formed in Dayton in 1981, the Classic Jazz Stompers started life with a weekly gig at Langtree’s, a restaurant and club under the Courthouse Square in downtown Dayton. After several years there, the band moved to the Centerville Club, where it played for four years. Subsequent residencies followed at Gilly’s, Longfellow’s Tavern (later Geez) in Washington Township and Suttmillers in Dayton. The band currently plays every Wednesday night from 7:30 to 11:30 at Stars Lounge on top of the Crowne Plaza Hotel in downtown Dayton.

In addition to regular local appearances in Dayton and Cincinnati, the Classic Jazz Stompers travel within a roughly 500-mile radius to perform at clubs, weddings, funerals, conventions and traditional jazz festivals. The band has also made three successful tours of Belgium. “The group has the sound that only comes from working together a long time. The repertoire is seemingly endless and is always delivered with the enthusiasm that comes from really believing in classic jazz” (The Mississippi Rag).

The Classic Jazz Stompers have weathered a fair amount of personnel change since 1981, but the core of the band has been together since 1990, when Chris Moore, Gordon Moore (no relation) and Erik Greiffenhagen joined the ensemble. Greiffenhagen and Chris Moore had both played in the Yellow Springs-based band, the Rambler Classics, led by saxophonist Jim Campbell, and had considerable experience with the music despite their youth.

The Stompers gained a formidable four-man front line, a relative rarity in traditional jazz bands of this size, when multi-instrumentalist Greg Dearth (a former member of the Hutchinson Brothers and the Hotmud Family, two of southern Ohio’s most notable bluegrass bands of the last 30 years) joined the group in the late 1990s. Dearth’s violin playing gives the Stompers a distinctive sound and his versatility on the reed instruments allows the band a staggering number of instrumental combinations and voices. A highly skilled visual artist, Dearth also now designs the band’s CD artwork.

The founder of the group, Dave Greer is a prominent Dayton attorney who has been playing traditional jazz since the 1940s. He was initially attracted to the music by hearing it on scratchy old 78-rpm records, but was playing the banjo by his high school years. He quit playing when he attended Yale (the banjo was not then in vogue in New Haven), but the folk revival was in bloom by the time Greer went to law school, so he resumed playing. He returned to Dayton after law school and rediscovered the thriving traditional jazz scene in Dayton and Cincinnati.

Greer played with a number of area groups for several years in a fluid and cooperative scene where the top players worked in each other’s bands. The heart of this group included Greer, drummer Hal Smith, trumpeter Carl Halen, Frank Powers on clarinet, Ted DesPlantes on piano, and Louis Anderson on tuba. They worked collectively as the Bluebird Jazz Band. With the Classic Jazz Stompers, Greer plays guitar and tenor guitar in addition to banjo and sings many of the group’s vocal selections, with a raspy voice especially well suited to such songs as “Dip Your Brush in the Sunshine,” “I’ll See You in C-U-B-A,” “Trouble in Mind” and “Waiting at the End of the Road.”

Dave Greer’s Classic Jazz Stompers will be joined for this performance by trumpeter Duke Heitger, a native of Toledo who has been dubbed “one of new swing’s rising stars” (The Mississippi Rag). Heitger began playing trumpet at a young age and was working gigs by age 12 with his father’s band, the Cakewalkin’ Jass Band. He toured the country with that band playing traditional jazz festivals, but it wasn’t until he moved to New Orleans in 1991 to join Jacques Gauthe’s Creole Rice Jazz Band that Heitger began to attract international attention.

In addition to leading his own band, the Steamboat Stompers, in New Orleans, Heitger has worked with such stellar musicians as Dick Hyman, James Dapogny, Butch Thompson, Banu Gibson, Warren Vache, Harry Allen and Bucky Pizzarelli. Heitger has appeared numerous times on A Prairie Home Companion with pianist Butch Thompson, and his work has been well received by critics who appreciate Heitger’s exciting and historically grounded playing: “Heitger has an explosive, ripping trumpet style that’s out of Armstrong by way of Roy Eldridge” (Boston Phoenix). Heitger has recorded five critically acclaimed and popular albums as a leader: Steamboat Stompers; Rhythm is our Business; Prince of Wails; Duke Heitger’s Krazy Kapers; and Duke Heitger’s New Orleans Wanderers.

Dave Greer’s Classic Jazz Stompers don’t traffic in nostalgia. The band plays the music of a bygone era, to be sure, but they play it straight and true—no hokum or jive or pizza parlor shenanigans for these guys. The Classic Jazz Stompers are believers in the ageless coolness of jazz from the 1920s and 1930s who also believe that great music transcends the decades and changes in musical fashion. Above all else, the members of Dave Greer’s Classic Jazz Stompers live by Louis Armstrong’s immortal dictum: “Hot can be hot and cool can be cool, or cool can be hot or hot can be cool, but—hot or cool—jazz is jazz!”

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