[Dixielandjazz] A New Wave Of Musicians Updates That Old-Time Sound

[Steve Barbone]

CAVEAT: NOT OKOM - VERY LONG - (Delete if not interested) HOWEVER

THERE ARE SOME PARALLELS TO OKOM AND THE FUTURE OF THE MUSIC. I suggest that
every serious band leader on the list who wants more prominence, or who
wants to really move the music forward read this completely. Then simply
adapt your presentation in similar fashion.

Just imagine what would happen if some YOUNG, and/or young thinking OKOM
bands adopted the philosophical messages in this article. Like:

"They (the young musicians) don¹t want to play their parents¹ music, but
they do long for a tradition older than themselves, one with memorable
melodies, deep stories and a boisterous beat." or

³There have always been the preservationists and the experimentalists in
old-time music, the only difference now is that the experimentalists are
more dominant. Most musicians in our generation aren¹t such sticklers for
tradition. They aren¹t saying: ŒIf you change the music, you ruined it.
You¹ve shown a lack of respect.¹ When you feel less compulsion to duplicate
an old recording, you can be freer and have more fun."

Obviously the audience, both those in live venues and for records, agrees.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


A New Wave of Musicians Updates That Old-Time Sound

NY TIMES - By GEOFFREY HIMES - November 5, 2006

WHEN the Mammals took the stage at the legendary Ryman Auditorium in
Nashville in September, it was easy to mistake them for a bluegrass band.
After all, the young quintet played fiddle, banjo, acoustic guitar and
upright bass, and the set began with ³Hangman¹s Reel.² It did have a drum
set, but even so. 

The Mammals didn¹t sound like a bluegrass outfit, however; they didn¹t
emphasize hot solos, clean arrangements or three-part high, lonesome
singing. Instead all five musicians attacked the old fiddle tune at once,
hooting and hollering, pushing the beat and improvising simultaneously. They
sounded like an inspired garage-rock band using hillbilly instruments.

Which might be a shorthand definition for old-time, string-band music,
whether you¹re talking about the original explosion in the 1920s or today¹s
aftershock. In this decade more and more musicians under the age of 30 have
picked up banjos and fiddles and hit a burgeoning circuit of festivals,
small-town theaters and big-city nightclubs. They don¹t want to play their
parents¹ music, but they do long for a tradition older than themselves, one
with memorable melodies, deep stories and a boisterous beat.

Over the past five years this new wave of old-time string bands has moved
from tiny record companies to major folk labels like Signature Sounds (the
Mammals and Crooked Still) and Red House (the Bills and the Wailin Jennys);
major bluegrass labels like Rounder (Uncle Earl) and Sugar Hill (the Duhks);
and even the pop label Nettwerk (Old Crow Medicine Show, the Be Good Tanyas
and the Foghorn Stringband).

The role models for these new groups are bands that flourished in the rural
South in the decades before Pearl Harbor. Acts like Gid Tanner & the Skillet
Lickers and Charlie Poole & the North Carolina Ramblers became stars in the
southern Appalachian Mountains in the ¹20s and ¹30s with their
rough-and-ready, wild-and-wooly 78s. When the Skillet Lickers sang ³Hell
Broke Loose in Georgia,² they played as if it really had.

³Old-time and rock ¹n¹ roll are not that different,² said the Mammals
guitarist, Tao Rodriguez-Seeger. ³They¹re separated by time, not by
character. When you play these old instruments with a hell-bent-for-leather
attitude, its like a driving punk band.²

Ketch Secor, the fiddler for the Old Crow Medicine Show, said, ³Listen to
Earl Johnson and the Clod Hoppers back in the 1920s. They¹re crazy, wily and
fierce, closer to punk rock than anything. It¹s two minutes until the red
light comes on in the furniture warehouse where they¹re recording and until
then everyone¹s playing at once as hard as they can. That¹s how we try to
play.² 

When Earl Scruggs joined Bill Monroe & His Blue Grass Boys at the Ryman
Auditorium in 1945, he completed Monroe¹s transformation of old-time into
bluegrass. The music picked up speed, more focus and higher standards, both
vocally and instrumentally, and some true virtuosos emerged. But something
was lost too: the reckless let¹s-all-go-for-it-at-once abandon that made
those early records so exciting.

The young bands aren¹t making much noise on the Billboard charts, but they
are a growing presence at folk festivals, jam-band festivals, even bluegrass
festivals, all over North America. Some big names from an older generation
have flocked to their cause, producing their albums and inviting them on
tours. 

³A lot of venues that would never book a string band five years ago are open
to us now,² said Ruth Ungar, the fiddler for the Mammals. ³That¹s because
old-time and rock ¹n¹ roll are approaching each other. There are old-time
bands that play rock tunes, and there are rock bands that use a banjo or a
fiddle. The difference between Sufjan Stevens and the Old Crow Medicine Show
isn¹t all that great. Now you can play a banjo in front of teenagers and not
have them make fun of you like this.² She slaps her knee in a sarcastic,
exaggerated manner. ³Now they¹re more likely to ask you for banjo lessons.²

The curving wooden pews at the Ryman were filled with under-30 fans in
September. They had come to see the headliner, the new-grass band Nickel
Creek, but were captivated by the Mammals, who are based in Woodstock, N.Y.
The Mammals introduced ³Way Down the Old Plank Road,² originally recorded by
Uncle Dave Macon in 1926, with hymnlike a cappella harmonies, declaring that
they ³won¹t get drunk no more.²

But then the shaggy, bearded Chris Merenda, brother of the banjoist Mike
Merenda, crashed his cymbals and the song leapt eight decades forward. Ms.
Ungar, wearing a ruffled blue-denim skirt with straight brown hair halfway
down her back, dug her bow deep into her strings, and Mr. Rodriguez-Seeger,
wearing a black cowboy shirt and, with his long legs, towering over his
bandmates, took a scissor-leg leap across the stage as he banged out a
ringing chord on his acoustic 12-string.

With that surge of energy, the youthful listeners edged forward in their
pews. When Mr. Rodriguez-Seeger sang lustily about ³watching the pretty
girls as they go riding by,² he made a visceral connection between the
youngsters and a time outside their own, a time when teenagers rode on
horses rather than inside SUVs.

The Mammals, who perform at Mother¹s Wine Emporium in Troy next Saturday,
released their fourth full-length album, ³Departure,² in the spring. Though
the string-band instrumentation and the old-time approach are intact, all
but one of the songs were written in the past 20 years. The band¹s three
lead singers ‹ Ms. Ungar, Mr. Rodriguez-Seeger and Mike Merenda ‹ came from
folk circles, where creating new material within the tradition was expected.
Not only have the three written most of the album, they¹ve also given songs
from Nirvana and Morphine, two rock bands of their youth, an old-time feel.

³We¹ve been called a band that takes old music and makes it sound new,² Mike
Merenda said. ³On this album we take new music and make it sound old. We
play these instruments because they¹re the instruments we know how to play,
but what¹s exciting is to take them out of the realm of expectation.²

Mr. Merenda does that by making a banjo sound like a rock guitar. Rushad
Eggleston does it by making a cello sound like an old-time fiddle. When Mr.
Eggleston, a classically trained cellist, fell in love with string-band
music, he created a place in it for his instrument where none had existed.
Playing the short, percussive phrases of a fiddle rather than the long,
legato lines of the violin, he made the cello a cornerstone of the
Boston-based string band Crooked Still, which performs at Joe¹s Pub on
Monday. 

The quartet¹s latest album is ³Shaken by a Low Sound,² and the combination
of Mr. Eggleston¹s cello and Corey DiMario¹s double bass skews the sound to
the low end. Occupying the middle range is Greg Liszt¹s banjo, and flying
overhead is the soprano vocals of Aoife (pronounced EE-fa) O¹Donovan. Except
for two tracks there are no chording instruments like guitars on the disc,
forcing Crooked Still and guest fiddler Casey Driessen to build harmonies
from single-note lines like a chamber group. Songs like ³Little Sadie,²
³Railroad Bill² and ³Wind and Rain² have been in the old-time repertoire for
decades, but they¹ve never sounded like this.

³Rushad locked himself up in a practice room to develop a new way of playing
the instrument,² Ms. ODonovan said, explaining that he can make the cello
sound like a rhythm instrument: a snare drum, a rhythm guitar or a bass.
³Rushad¹s a wild man, and that comes through in his playing. That didn¹t fit
easily with bluegrass, but it fit perfectly with old-time music.²

The Duhks, who come to Joe¹s Pub on Tuesday, also add a wild card to their
instrumentation. When they performed at a Baltimore street festival in
August, the lineup was fairly traditional: a banjoist, Leonard Podolak; a
fiddler, Tania Elizabeth; and an acoustic guitarist, Jordan McConnell. But
out front was a lead singer without an instrument, Jessee Havey, with a
dyed-platinum crew cut, a loud green-and-purple dress over black bicycle
pants, and a left arm covered in tattoos. To stage left was Scott Senior, a
bald man with heavy-framed glasses and a whistle around his neck, sitting
atop a hollow wooden box called the Peruvian cajon, which he slapped to
create a rippling beat.

³You can be more melodic with hand percussion than with a drum kit,² Mr.
Senior argued. ³Because the sounds are very dry and because they decay very
quickly, they work with acoustic string instruments much better than a trap
drum kit where the cymbals ring forever.²

Ms. Elizabeth said the band draws from fiddle traditions in its native
Canada. ³But we like to emphasize African-American music too,² she added.
³Early bluegrass and early rock ¹n¹ roll took a lot from black music without
giving credit, so we want to be sure to acknowledge that source and
celebrate it. No music in North America is free of that black influence.²

In Baltimore, Mr. Senior played the cajon on the traditional Quebecois story
song ³Du Temps que J¹étais Jeune² as well as the African-American hymn
³Death Came a Knockin¹.² His pulse reinforced the old-time rhythm of the
fiddle and banjo and pulled the younger listeners off the curbs and into the
middle of the closed-off intersection before the stage where they wriggled
to songs written long before they were born. Those two tunes come from the
2005 disc ³The Duhks,² and the band¹s new album, ³Migrations,² contains
several more songs from Canada, two more hymns from the black church and an
old-time arrangement of a Tracy Chapman song.

³There have always been the preservationists and the experimentalists in
old-time music,² Ms. Ungar said. ³The only difference now is that the
experimentalists are more dominant. Most musicians in our generation aren¹t
such sticklers for tradition. They aren¹t saying: ŒIf you change the music,
you ruined it. You¹ve shown a lack of respect.¹ When you feel less
compulsion to duplicate an old recording, you can be freer and have more
fun.

On the other hand, counters Mr. Rodriguez-Seeger, her bandmate, ³I thank God
every day for people like my Uncle Mike and places like the Library of
Congress. Without them, we¹d be toast. If they hadn¹t preserved our cultural
past, those of us who like to steal old things and make something new of
them wouldn¹t have anything to steal from.²

Mr. Rodriguez-Seeger is referring to his Great-Uncle Mike Seeger, a founder
of the New Lost City Ramblers.

Sitting in the sunlit lobby of the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville,
beneath a giant piano-keyboard sculpture, the great-nephew tells a story
about the time the Mammals shared a workshop stage with the Ramblers at the
Vancouver Folk Festival. ³Uncle Mike said, ŒCan you ask your drummer to not
play so loud?¹ ² Mr. Rodriguez-Seeger recalled, ³and I said sure, but what
could I do? I couldn¹t ask Chris to not play the way he plays. So during
ŒCluck Old Hen,¹ Mike put down his mandolin and started to walk away. I
thought, ŒOh, no, he can¹t hear, and now he¹s mad.¹ But instead of walking
offstage, he came over to me and started doing this monkey dance. Instead of
fighting our way of doing things, he got into it. It was such a great
moment, it almost made me cry.² Ms. Unger added: ³That¹s the cool thing
about old-time music. You can¹t take yourself too seriously when you¹re
singing about a chicken.²