February 19, 2008
Morehead Conference Center
Morehead, KY (February 18, 2008)
(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- The morning's first work, even while turning on the computer, was to page through several reference books to try to find out who Gloria Belle is. But she doesn't appear in the Encyclopedia Of Country Music, nor, even, in Mary A. Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann's standard, Finding Her Voice: Women In Country Music 1800-2000. She merits no real entry on allmusic.com, either.
Well. Thirteen years into this thing, I'd never heard of her, and it's nice still to be surprised, however painful it may also be to reveal one's ignorance.
So...for the record, Ms. Belle is a startlingly powerful East Tennessee bluegrass singer who worked in the late 1960s with Jimmy Martin. And with some other people who amounted to less. She's also a first-rate mandolin chopper. But it's that voice, strong and powerful and distinct. That voice, ah. She has almost forgotten how special that voice is, one fears.
Belle is one of the reasons this small, day-long collection of workshops and performances celebrating women in traditional music was worth attending, though I had time only for the free evening show. Co-sponsored by the three-person Kentucky Center for Traditional Music and the Women's Studies department at Morehead State University, it featured an array of styles, an assortment of traditions, and several quite different generations of performers. The hidebound worlds of traditional music were, one reads, particularly unwelcoming to female performers, or, at least, to those who wished to take charge of their work and their careers. None of that was spoken of on stage, though one suspects the stories told backstage, off-stage, throughout the day, were sad and wonderful and powerful.
Each woman offered two songs with varied accompaniment. Rory Block, arguably the most commercially successful of the ten women (and most tangentially relevant, though she now is said to live in Eastern Kentucky) took three songs, Hazel Dickens finished with three of hers, and then they gathered too quickly for a gospel finale.
Belle, singing with her husband, the guitar maker Mike Long, held the stage with the polish of someone who's been performing since she was three. Their voices twined together like old friends, riding waves of sorrow and joy.
Two others stood out. Carol Elizabeth Jones came to center stage, leaned on her guitar, and delivered an a cappella miner's ballad written by Jean Ritchie. (I went to listen, and didn't take notes; song titles, alas, escaped.) I have underestimated Ms. Jones, and will not do so again. She sang with a high, girlish quiver (in Julie Miller's range, say), and with remarkable poise and power. Later, when she sang harmonies next to Hazel Dickens, the fondness in her eyes as she followed Dickens' lead was tender and moving, even glimpsed from halfway across the audience.
Ginny Hawker, too, sang the old songs without accompaniment. Plain singing, hard songs, even the gospel. Some words held as many as three skittering notes, though none of the flourishes one associates with Reba and her successor American Idols. Just sounds torn from deep inside, shared with stoic poise.
At times the evening was a bit of a folk lecture, but mostly the music won out. Sometimes it was played carefully, as if we were in a museum, but generally (particularly when Uncle Earle fiddler Rayna Gellert, newly settled in Lexington, jumped in) the songs took wing.
One last moment. Just before a fit of coughing took him from the stage, Don Rigsby's head popped up from his mandolin and looked over at Hazel Dickens with a huge, startled grin. Dickens had talked too much all day, she said, and fought her own cough through her trio of songs. But just that one moment her voice caught hold and shot out, a striking singer once more and not the stylist age has made her. Rigsby's not normally a demonstrative fellow on stage, and if that one phrase is all we were to get of Dickens' special gifts, it was enough.
-- GRANT ALDEN
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Tractor Tavern (Seattle, WA)
February 16, 2008
(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- A friend ventured to suggest, as the Maldives began their set to a surprisingly packed house at the Tractor Tavern (and this even on a night when the Drive-By Truckers were playing across town), that the young Seattle ensemble may be the heir-apparent to the rambling backwoods aura of The Band. That's a tough call, seeing as how just a couple days earlier, this same venue had hosted the Gourds, who seem even more obviously in line to carry that particular torch.
Regardless, the Maldives proved themselves to be arguably the most promising roots act to emerge from the Northwest since the mid-'90s heyday of the Picketts, headlining a night of young and hungry up-and-comers from throughout the broader northwestern landscape. All three bands -- the other two being the Band Of Annuals (from Salt Lake City) and Or, The Whale (from San Francisco) -- included a pedal steel guitarist in their lineup, though none of the acts really used the instrument in its straightforward honky-tonk element. There was country in all three bands, but none of them were specifically country.
Or, The Whale (who might be wise to rethink the punctuation in their name, or perhaps the name altogether) kicked things off, causing slight confusion since they had been listed as the middle act. Every member of its extended lineup -- the other common ground between all three bands on the bill was that each reached well beyond typical trio or quartet size -- performed with enthusiasm throughout, and the band displayed an attractive variety of material, owing largely to the lead-vocal trade-offs between acoustic guitarist Alex Robins, singer Lindsay Garfield, and keyboardist Julie Ann Thomasson. A forgivable down side is the surface-scratching nature of the band's lyrics; rarely did anything move past the obvious or cliche, though most of the time the music, and the players' energetic delivery, made the experience enjoyable nonetheless.
Band Of Annuals raised the bar immediately with its first song, "Blood On My Shirt". Front-and-center here is the male-female vocal interplay between frontman Jay Henderson and keyboardist Jeremi Hanson. Henderson sounds rather like Gerald Collier or Rocky Votolato (who you may well not know if you're not from Seattle, but just trust me that it's a good sound); the closest touchstone for Hanson is Karen Peris of the Innocence Mission. Together they come across a bit like the best of Mojave 3's work, with first-class backing from four quite congenial lads (electric guitarist Jamie Timm, bassist Trever Hadley, drummer Jordan Badger, and pedal steel guitarist Brent Dreiling) who appear to be in a bit of a beard-growing contest. (The lead guitarist seems struggling to keep pace, while the pedal steel player is comfortably in the lead, which seems as it should be.)
The band offered up an infectiously bluesy take on Dylan's "Leopard Skin Pill Box" hat just before closing their set with the anthemic "Don't Let Me Die" from their recent debut disc Let Me Live. Members of Or, The Whale joined them onstage for the finale, the two bands apparently having bonded the night before on a bill together in Portland. Band Of Annuals members Hadley and Timm leaned with their backs against each other at one point as Henderson and Hanson lifted yet another song to a triumphant melodic high; they were soaking in the glory of the moment, as well they should. A Saturday night, hundreds of miles from home, a packed audience, in the prime of life: If you play music, this is as good as it ever gets.
-- PETER BLACKSTOCK
Copyright c. 2008 by No Depression Inc. and/or Peter Blackstock.
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February 14, 2008
CLUB CONGRESS (Tucson, AZ)
November 24, 2007
(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- This tenth-year memorial for renowned blues musician Rainer Ptacek had many wonderful moments -- warm, funny, rowdy, transcendent. But the show-stopper, the hands-down heart-warmer, was a cover of a lost Rainer song, "Blackwater Blues". It's one of ten just-released tracks on a CD made from tapes Rainer recorded with Das Combo twenty years ago, ten years before he died of brain cancer. The song was performed passionately and compellingly by Gabe Keating and Rudy Ptacek, Rainer's sons, on lead guitar and vocals and on drums, respectively. Patti Keating's smile lit up the night.
Keating, Rainer's widow, helped his best friend Howe Gelb organize the tribute jam, and musicians signed up to play throughout the night. At one point a doorman quipped that there were as many musicians in the house as fans. Musicians' affection and respect for Rainer seem almost universal, especially in Tucson, where he made his home, despite frequent offers to work in Nashville and Los Angeles. But the club was loaded with old friends and relatives as well, including many who had made the trip from Phoenix and California. And there were new fans, lured by the legend.
Gelb served as Master of Ceremonies and sideman for much of the night, loosely tying things together, letting them happen, keeping them moving, and occasionally soliciting questions from the crowd. "Put you a question on a sheet," he said, "and we'll burn it in the traditional format after the show. It's OK if the question is stupid. We'll make an ash of it later."
Rainer's Das Combo rhythm section, bassist Nick Augustine and drummer Ralph Gilmore, anchored the better part of three hours of uninterrupted music, much of which reprised songs they recorded and performed with Rainer. Local guitarists Mitzi Cowan and Kevin Pakulis took turns plying the slide.
Pakulis' own set rendered Rainer covers of Willie Nelson and Robert Johnson. Nelson's "Ain't It Funny How Time Slips Away" featured a blues-on-the-way-to-show-tune piano break by Gelb, and Pakulis' riveting interpretation of Johnson's "If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day" was one of the evening's highlights.
Phoenician Lonna Kelley contributed a uniquely fragile illumination of Rainer's "Broken Promises", imbuing it with almost gothic drama, and family friend Ned Gittings performed a captivating version of "The Mountain", highlighting Rainer's all but pervasive optimism: "I have seen the mountain/I have found momentum." John Convertino sat in with Gelb and keyboardist Nick Luca for a memorable reworking of Rainer's, "The Farm". Gelb's youngest children delighted the crowd with their emphatic delivery of the chorus of "Worried Spirits". "Whoa my worried spirits/Whoa my troubled mind" took on a new and entirely unexpected meaning.
Californian Kris McKay, formerly of the '80s Austin band Wild Seeds, performed with soulful clarity "One Man's Crusade", the song she recorded for the 1997 Rainer tribute The Inner Flame. When the band stumbled a bit on a chord change, an experienced off-stage guitarist confided, "It's a tough one. I stayed out of it."
The tribute was to end at 10 p.m., giving way to the club's traditional Saturday dance night, and as things drew to a close, Gelb noted, "The disco crowd is angry at the gates and the man is here to tune the mirror ball." There was still time, though, for another memory or two. Gelb led a stage full of musicians through an arrangement of "Wayfaring Stranger" with keyboard fills that combined psychedelic prog-rock and space music. The song, if not the arrangement, is included in the new Rainer CD The Westwood Sessions Volume I, with proceeds going to Rainer's family.
-- LINDA RAY
Copyright c. 2008 by No Depression Inc. and/or Linda Ray.
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