Suggestions & Possibilities

I'm curious by nature, and easily fascinated. One of my keener interests in contemporay folk arts- creative work by people who don't define themselves as artists and who don't frequent galleries. 

In this category, I would include activities like gardening, Christmas lights, cottage signs, bird houses and whirligigs, Hallowe'en installations, custom trucks and cars and handicrafts of all kinds.

I'm also very interested in history, and there is more of it about here than there was on the west coast. The fact that there was a prisoner of war camp in what's now a park at the end of our street is interesting to me- especially when one hears that a number of the inmates returned to the area after the war. 

My mother volunteers at Bethune House, and I find it fascinating that thousands of people come all the way from China to see it.
 

My favourite part of the Santa Claus parade here last weekend were the amazing old buses and the taxi from a local transporation company- I could spend days taking pictures of them, and there have to be some interesting stories in vehicles that have been on the road that long.

I enjoy writing about music and other cultural forms and events, but I find the standard format of most reviews is pretty boring. 

I have a lot of time and respect for my elders, and I think it's sad that people with so many stories rarely get to tell them.

I'm also reasonably informed about current events, although friends say I have something of an "attitude" and they may be right. I prefer, as did my grandfather, to think of it as plain speaking. Some people say that the one of the roles of media in society is stimulate discussion and I've enjoyed doing in print and at conferences over the years.

 

Before I came back to Ontario this fall, I was working on an idea for a local publication on southern Vancouver Island publication called "New to the Area". Having moved there from downtown Vancouver, I was struck by aspects of island life that it seemed to me people who had lived there longer didn't notice anymore.

 

I find the same thing happening here. For example, I like to walk. I've been enjoying walking around town and getting to know it a little. It's conjured the question of why, in a town with the demographics of Gravenhurst, are no benches anywhere? 

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Flowers (p)

I started gardening some years ago,
and when I became interested in photography
again a few years later, inevitably I started really
looking at flowers more closely...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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out on the west coast (p)

... before I came to Gravenhurst in late September,
I lived in Vancouver and on the southern peninsula
of Vancouver Island, which is where these pictures
(and several thousand others) were taken...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Looking North (p)

some alternative perspectives...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Death of Music

an opinion...

Music is amazing. It's power to soothe, pleasure, define, inspire, communicate and motivate us can rival that of food, sex and creation stories. It may be the most beautiful thing we created as a species.

Coming at a time when some of our other habits and choices are killing off entire species of plants and animals, the Industry's assertion that Downloading is Killing Music is a chilling thought. Who among us would want to be responsible in any way for the death of this priceless gift of the ancestors?

Fortunately, it's not true.

Music is not dying.

Music is thriving.

- There are more people playing more kinds of music now than there have ever been in the history of the planet.

- More new musical instruments have been created in the last 50 years than in the last 5 centuries.

-  More money is being spent on music - on concert tickets, ring tones, music lessons, instruments, performing rights, MP3 players, soundtracks, recordings, band merchandise, etc - than ever before.

- More people are listening to more music more often than ever before- in their cars, on their MP3 players, on their computers, in the supermarket, restaurants, gyms, on elevators and in hotel lobbies as well as live performances, CDs and yes, even vinyl. 

- There are more ways to make money from music now than ever before, and more possibilities for unprecedented access to existing and potential audiences.

Conclusion?

Reports of the Death of Music have been highly exaggerated.

Music is not dying. Music is fine. Music is actually doing quite well, thanks very much.

 






When the Industry formerly known as Music claims that downloading is killing music, what they are really saying is that CD sales are declining and they want you to think it is because of evil downloaders who hate musicians but love their music so they steal it.

They are acknowledging, if only indirectly, that their sons and their daughters are beyond their command. They are not only criticizing something that they can't understand, they are lobbying governments around the world to make their lack of understanding law. Perhaps they believe that if they do, then the times will stop a'changing.

I have a different hypothesis. I am suggesting that if anything is dying here, it's a business model so far past its' stale date that it's now a bio-hazard. I suggest that attempting to impose an industrial way of doing things on a virtual environment is doomed as doomed can be.




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Louis Armstrong

an appreciation...

My Dad is a very big fan of Louis Armstrong' s music, so I grew up hearing it a lot. I think the best present I ever found for him was the soundtrack to "Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans", which brought Louis together with Billie Holiday. It was also the recording where I really started to be able to "hear" just how what he could do with a horn and vocals.

Some say that was a key part of his art- that he would sing like he was playing his horn and play his horn like it was singing.

I've rarely hear young musicians ever even mention his name, but it seems that people who knew a few things about jazz, and about living, held him in very high regard...

"If it weren't for him,
there wouldn't be any of us."

Dizzy Gillespie

"If you don't like Louis Armstrong,
you don't know how to love"

Mahalia Jackson

"I think that anybody from the 20th century, up to now, has to be aware that if it wasn't
for Louis Armstrong, we'd all be wearing
powdered wigs.
I think that Louis Armstrong loosened the world, helped people to be able to say "Yeah,"
and to walk with a little dip in their hip.
Before Louis Armstrong, the world was
definitely square, just like
Christopher Columbus thought."

Hugh Masekela

"If anybody was Mr. Jazz it was Louis Armstrong. He was the epitome of jazz and always will be. He is what I call an American standard,
an American original."

Duke Ellington

"You can't play anything
on a horn that Louis Armstrong
hasn't played"

Miles Davis

This was where he and his wife lived for many years. It's now a museum and archive.

The first thing I thought when I saw it was how very modest it seems for an artist whose work has had such an enormous impact. It's a thought that struck me when I went to Graceland, and saw that the house of the man who sold more records than anyone else ever lived in what my mother would call "a nice house" but in relation to the amount of influence and $$$ generated by the resident, modest in the extreme.

Maybe they both remembered where they grew up, and their homes reflected their early dreams of "one day"...they seemed to have been satisfied with less than even entry-level rock stars today. Maybe that's why it cost so much less to go see them perform...

For the most part, Mr. Armstrong seems to have
let his music do his talking, but his perspectives
on music and on being a professional musician
seem very, very wise to me and worth sharing...

“Never play a thing the same way twice”

“If I don’t practice for a day, I know it.
If I don’t practice for two days, the critics
know it. And if I don’t practice for three
days,the public knows it.”

"I never tried to prove nothing,
just wanted to give a good show.

My life has always been my music,
it's always come first, but the music
ain't worth nothing if you can't lay it
on the public.

The main thing is to live
for that audience, 'cause
what you're there for is
to please the people."

...that's Old School....

learn more about this amazing artist here:

http://www.redhotjazz.com/louie.html

http://www.pbs.org/jazz/biography/artist_id_armstrong_louis.htm

Wedding Dance of the Widow Bride

...a CD review

The Wedding Dance

of the Widow Bride

words & music
by Geoff Berner

The Wedding Dance is not pretty - it’s beautiful… beautiful, angry, sweaty, sexy and all the way up in your face. Mr. Berner aka “the lucky goddamn jew”set out several years ago with Diona Davies and Wayne Adams for the hills and villages of Hungary and beyond, searching for klezmer artists who survived The Holocaust .

What they found during these encounters was more than tough old men and melodies – and you can hear it on The Wedding Song.

Klezmer, like blues, rembetika and other great traditional styles, came from hard lives in tough times. Out of those years of love, lust, liquor, knives… and the occasional pogrom… came a music burning with passion, pain and a yearning that can strip paint. The Wedding Dance honours that tradition by taking klezmer out of the Volvo and back to the street.

Mr. Berner sings his ass off, whispers to screams and everywhere between . Diona’s fiddle wails with mad joy, scratches like a boney finger at the window and leaps into the darkness with Wayne’s tribal primal percussion.

From zen subtle and tasty to manic thunder, this is the work of a committed ensemble playing for their lives. It kicks ass - a sharp reminder that kicking ass was an acoustic tradition. On a good day, it still does no matter how many Folk moderns might get the vapors just thinking about the very questionable lifestyle choices that forged these sounds.

Fair enough - decaf lattes do go better with the gelded incarnations of traditional music so often heard these days.

Geoff Berner doesn’t just play klezmer, he is klezmer incarnate - what John Zorn was to jazz or Billy Bragg to punk in the 80s – making great music that’s true to its’ roots.

'nuff said,
d

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Remembering Mike Seeger

There was already a cloud on the day with the news of the passing of Les Paul. Then word came from a friend that Mike Seeger had died today too.

"That" I wrote my friend "is a real gut shot."

I worked with Mike a couple of times when I was booking the folk festival in Vancouver. The first year, I brought him out solo and I made damn sure there was time each day to sit and have a cup of tea with him... one of the few smart things I've done in the last 5 or 10 years.

It was one of those times when being a presenter feels like the best gig on earth. To be able to sit and speak with a man who's love of music had changed the sound of my world, and many other people's too... to know that the audience that year, and the other performers were having the chance to hear a man who knew more about music than the rest of us put together, and who could play and sing and give you chapter and verse on each verse and chorus in every song he was singing.



In the course of our conversation, I asked him if he thought it might be possible he could come back the next, and bring John Cohen and Tracy Schwarz with him, because we would be honoured to present the New Lost City Ramblers if they wanted to come. He said he'd speak to them about it, and he did and we did and a year later, they were a part of the festival.

Over the course of the weekend, John Cohen told me that they hadn't had a gig since they'd been given a Lifetime Achievement Award several years ago. He laughed, but it wasn't a good laugh, and his story has stayed with me to this day, especially this day, because I'm sad and I'm too pissed off to even count my blessings that I was able to meet and to work with Mike Seeger and with the Ramblers

Is it ageism or ignorance or illiteracy or what? Why is it that Mike Seeger and the New Lost City Ramblers couldn't get the time of day, let alone a gig at folk festivals anymore? And it's not just them... there are a lot more senior artists out there in exactly the same situation. In many cases, they are artists who were there when festivals were young and they were too. Now if they want to get close to any of those stages they helped to build, they better be prepared to buy a ticket.

It's not chops. Instrumentally, vocally and all the way to I've seen elders take youngers more known and acclaimed to the woodshed. Ever hear of Faith Petric? Google her sometime. I watched her clean Billy Bragg's clock in front of a thousand people. She had no malicious intent- she's just that good.

I know it's not the do-re-mi. What it cost me to bring Mike in, and the Ramblers as run-outs - a music biz term that means they didn't have a tour or any other gigs, so they flew in to Vancouver and then went home - wouldn't get you any of the young and the groovy flavours of the month.

I think it's a shame. I think it's a damn shame. In a cultural zone where there's a lot of palaver about "community" and lots of hugs and blah, blah, blah, I think there are people who ought to know better that have a bad case of Folk Shame.

I think there are people who are ashamed of the old Folk. It's not cool enough for them. They think it's boring. They think somehow that some baby band who's never been closer to Maybelle Carter than a YouTube clip is cooler than the New Lost City Ramblers because some dumb-ass music rags say so... and let me be clear here, I don't have a bone to pick these young bands.

I think their love for traditional music is both serious and sincere, and their desire to get into it and bring all the juice they can to it is a blessing, well worthy of admiration and support. I love to listen to them, and I presented a lot of them. I also think that the literate among them would be the first to say they'd be honoured to sit on a stage with elders like Mike and the Ramblers, and would take the memory to their grave.





One of the young bands I like a lot is Po'Girl, and it's been my pleasure to work with them a few times. One year I was chilling out at the Calgary festival, and Alison from Po'Girl came up to me there and told me a story. It seems the week before, in Vancouver, I'd programmed them on a stage with Odetta and during that session, she'd been sitting beside her when Odetta told the audience she was going to sing an old folk song called Kumbaya. That's right. Kumbaya.

And Alison, bless her, told me straight up that her eyes rolled back in her head and she was thinking to herself "Oh no... not THAT song". But Odetta was in earnest, and she proceeded to sing that song. Then Alison said to me "and I realized, I had never really heard that song, not like Odetta sang it and I want to thank you for putting me on that stage with her."

This story means a lot to me. Certainly, all the good feelings I had about Po'Girl were justified beyond measure, and they are a band I'll always have faith in... but beyond my stuff here, I think it shows what can happen when an artistic director or any oher presenter brings young artists into contact with senior artists. At the same time, it speaks to what is lost when that doesn't happen. It's not a problem with the bands. The problem is elsewhere.

I'm pissed off tonight because this is one of those lose-lose propositions. When our elders, masters of their craft like Mike Seeger and the Ramblers don't get hired anymore, everybody loses. The audience doesn't get to hear artists who have devoted decades to getting deeper and deeper into their art and their craft. Young artists don't get to sit beside these masters and hear how good they are, and how they have learned to bring an audience together.

Our elders, these senior artists, don't get to perform in front of large audiences. They are not welcome at festivals that they help get off the ground and they don't get paid the kinds of fees that festivals could offer them... money that would mean a lot more to them than it would to the young and the hip, who could get it anywhere.




And perhaps the saddest, stupidest part of it all is the cool points. There are any number of festivals where it seems like Mike Seeger and others of his generation aren't cool enough any more.... but there are others who disagree. Ry Cooder, Ralph Stanley and Bob Dylan played on his records. John Hartman and David Grisman made a reecord with him. Alison Kraus and Robert Plant sought him to to help with their album Raising Sand. Dock Boggs owed him a solid or two, and Maybelle Carter welcomed him into her home.



I belive that Mike Seeger had a rich full life, and his passionate curiousity ensured he would never want for things to do. I don't know that he felt slighted or felt the loss because he didn't get booked at one festival or another. It's too bad more people didn't get to hear him and the Ramblers and it's too bad more young bands didn't get to play with them, or have a cup of tea backstage.

I'm thankful there were elders around me who taught me well. I'm thankful I got to shake Mike Seeger's hand and show him respect for his work, and I'm proud that I presented him, and Faith Petric and Utah Phillips and others like them. There's other elders out there, though, who've more than paid their dues, who've spent years developing skills and repertoires and who could use a good paying gig or two. It breaks my heart to think the odds are so long against them.

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