Ted, Ted, Ted

The Bazaar Cafe is a songwriter’s showcase with an open mic Thursday nights. Laura and Kai have been grinding out originals at a fair clip lately, so they signed up last week and did two of their strongest numbers. They were such a hit that they were asked to come back this week. Lilly shot some video of their set.

We spent a gratifying number of hours at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival this weekend. On Friday we saw the Jerry Douglas band, and then Allison Krauss and Robert Plant. Everything about the show was perfect, but the best part was T-Bone Burnett laying his spooky, unsettling vibe over everything. Here’s Laura’s take.

On Saturday we saw Nick Lowe, playing solo. He stopped right in the middle of one song and said “I don’t remember the words to that one.” Which is something you can only do if you’re Nick Lowe.

After him we saw Dave Alvin, which was a revelation. The Blasters, like the Jayhawks and all those other great bands, zipped right past me in their heyday, so I have some catching up to do.

On our way back from getting a new copy of the schedule at the information booth, Lilly and I stumbled on this special treat, a band of stoners who could really sing. I hope they show up on an official stage next year.

Laura’s middle school band had been playing their instruments for about 4 months when they recorded this. We voted to tax ourselves a bit extra a couple of years ago to pay for arts in the schools, and the proceeds started to flow in last year, just in time for Laura’s 6th-grade year. Suddenly her school, never one of the more lavishly equipped in town, had all these new band instruments and a smart, capable music teacher to start things up. Laura decided to learn to play all of the instruments, starting with the alto sax. This year they added a string orchestra, which Laura promptly joined.

It’s rare to see a story about Venezuela in the U.S. press that does more than summarize the chatter at the last upper-middle-class cocktail party the correspondent was invited to. Hard to get good help these days, what with the housemaids getting so uppity, that kind of thing. On a few widely-spaced occasions, however, the preoccupations of the high of brow overlap with something that actually matters to people. This surprisingly warm L.A. Times story is an example of what can happen then.

Here is a site with an online multimedia show about Woody.

TheMoMI.org — Exhibition: Bound For Glory: A Tribute to Woody Guthrie

Well that was interesting. I was just at Lilly’s kindergarten class for a song-and-snack to mark her birthday. When I walked into the classroom, an African-American boy named Durrell took one look at my gig bag and said, “That’s a five-string.” A five-string what, I asked him. “I don’t know. A five-string.”

After the songs and my little shtick about Africans inventing the banjo and bringing it this land (lifted from this site and translated into 5-year-old), this kid let on that he knows someone who plays one of these in his neighborhood, which is the housing project across the street from the school. I was doubly impressed: this is not a kid who talks a lot to strange white men, plus I had no idea I was going to run into a (potentially) Black banjo player around this ever-whitening town. I was already stoked about getting involved in this school, but this is better luck than I’d expected. I hope I get to meet this person eventually, if he exists. It’s a commonplace in the old-time music world that Black banjo players are all around, we’re just conditioned not to notice them. I know the second part of that is true; I just hope the first part is too.

When I got back from India, Mary and Laura picked me up at the airport and we hauled ass to the Playmates preschool harvest festival, where Laura and I were booked to do some pickin’ and grinnin’ with our friends Breck and Stanley. We played a few tunes and had a blast, even though I was mostly asleep and in a bit of pain from 24 hours as a sardine. Playmates is on the short list of my favorite places on earth, and it’s always great to be there doing something fun.

Laura and her backing band furnish a set of tunes in the early afternoon. More info here.

Near the elephant farm we met a tour group of women from the Sree Narayana College, which is in Kerala. They were singing and clapping to pass the time. We joined in as best we could.

I got six clips of this before my battery burned out, of which this one is the silliest. You can see the rest here.

I should say something about the concert we saw last weekend. Mary, Laura and I went over to Berkeley to see the New Lost City Ramblers, who have been collecting and performing old-time, mostly Appalachian music since well before I was born. The leader is Mike Seeger, who is brother to Peggy Seeger and half-brother to Pete. (American royalty.) This was part of an annual old-time music festival that’s been getting bigger and bigger lately; it appears that this is another of those out-of-the-way genres that’s been due for a revival.

The atmosphere was that of a homecoming. These guys could do no wrong with this audience, and they didn’t. In demeanor they remind you a bit of some of those old-time Afro-Cuban players like Guaracheros de Oriente: the material is so powerful and the performance style so calm, almost casual, that you’re surprised when your heart has suddenly been torn out and shredded by what you thought was just a three-minute folk song. They sneak up on you that way.

An autoharp, when played by someone who knows how, can be the most beautiful thing you ever heard. Mike Seeger knows how.

The next day I went back with Laura and Lilly for the outdoor concert part of the festival. There were lots of string bands playing on the grass and we got to see some smoking banjo players (clawhammer style only — I felt like a turncoat for practicing Scruggs picking the way I do), plus a real live gut-bucket. We agreed to try to make one of our own as soon as we could figure out where to get one of those big galvanized washtubs.

We’re in the youth showcase at 11:00 a.m.

And the Stairwell Sisters.

Here are some magnificent tunes recorded live in the 1920s. Lynn Point made MP3 files of them so they can be downloaded.

My only quibble: Why they were transferred to cassette tape first, and then to MP3, I don’t know. Seems like there would be a noticeable quality cost there, even with good audio equipment. It’s not hard to go straight from vinyl to MP3. (I know because that’s most of what’s on my iPod.)

I’ve always got an eye open for musical role models that Laura might like. She has pronounced likes and dislikes already, but she hasn’t heard all that much. (She digs Arlo Guthrie enormously, and she’s been liking the very impressive Abigail Washburn CD we got recently, to give you an idea of how her tastes run. Dislike: “bubblegum.” She knows it when she hears it.)

I’d been vaguely meaning to get her a copy of the Dixie Chicks‘ new CD, just to do my little part to piss off the war nuts who hate them so much. But it’s been looking like my help isn’t needed, since the CD is breaking sales records. So instead I picked up their penultimate one, Home, just because the cover art looked more inviting to me, and because it had a song by Tim O’Brien, a bluegrass guy I’ve been getting to like.

I suppose it is a measure of my yuppie snobbery that I’d always assumed the Dixie Chicks were another of those Monkee-like country-pop acts like Tim McGraw or Faith Hill. I take that back. They genuinely rock. They have a banjo player to make your hair stand up, and a fine fiddler too. One more prejudice blown away.

Oh, for my birthday I got a very nice gig bag to make it easier to carry my banjo around. Maybe one or two times a week I sneak out of the office with the banjo and a lawn chair and I sit on the grass by the little marina nearby and practice my breaks. It’s better than a double shot of firewater for settling the nerves. (Although the effect on the nerves of the people trying to relax on their boats may be different.)

The Banjo Hangout is where I mostly go to print out charts and get questions answered. Banjo players tend to be very nice folks.

To know me even slightly is to know I’m an insufferable snob about Cuban music, which is unquestionably the chief manifestation of God on Earth. Not just a snob, a bit of a purist. I frequently sit around snooty hipster parties bragging, falsely, that I never buy any recordings made after about 1955. (Truth: one, I have often bought later recordings than that; two, who has the cash for CDs when they are rebuilding their kitchen; three, I never get invited to parties like that.) There are cases, though, where I can comfortably hold two opposing opinions at once. (You are shocked.) Ry Cooder’s slide guitar work on the Buenavista Social Club album is one: I would have argued against it, on essentially religious grounds, but now that it’s done I think it’s absolutely gripping and I love listening to it.

So I just found out there’s a group called the Mammals that recorded a sort of countryish bluegrassy version of “Chan Chan,” one of the sacred Cuban standards. I was all ready to ignore it, but it turns out to be really difficult not to like. It’s sung to pieces by Tao Rodriguez, who may have benefited from having Pete Seeger for a grandpa, or not, who knows. They are giving away samples for free at their website, and I put a copy in my collection for your downloading convenience. So you have no excuse for not being completely familiar with these guys. I totally intend to go see them if they ever get off the east coast.

Everyone has some terrible thing their parents did to them that they can never forgive. Mine is Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. My dad had an old Ford LTD wagon in 1976, which came with a couple of 8-track tapes containing Herb’s greatest hits. We made liberal use of the infinite-replay feature of 8-track technology. Now that I’m pushing 40, it’s beginning to look like the sick attraction to Herb’s modest, pleasant brand of Muzak may be a lifelong disorder. Today I own a copy of every LP Herb ever recorded, plus several by the Baja Marimba band, an even less compelling spinoff group. (Laura likes For Animals Only, with the immortal “Last of the Red-Hot Llamas.” Describing this as a joke album would not help you distinguish it from the rest of the BMB’s oeuvre.) We were listening to some of this stuff over the weekend, idly listing its many deficiencies, and it occurred to me that this could be one reason I have music on all the time, at home and in the car and at work: to drown out the Herb tunes in my head.

The Children’s Music Network is building up a list of kids’ songs and books about peace on their new Peace Page. Laura and I were at the Network’s annual gathering last month up in Marin County. We went there to hear some new tunes (Laura really likes her freedom songs) and to see our friend, the absurdly capable Caroline Presnell, who coordinates the gathering. We don’t see her very often because she lives way over by Chicago. All day we wandered around this old farm turned conference center while music teachers and songwriters hung out in little groups with their tape recorders on the ground in front of them, trading material. Ella Jenkins was there to pick up a lifetime achievement award, and in lieu of an acceptance speech she had all the kids come up to the mike and sing a song. Laura had no problem singing it because the song was Malvina Reynolds’ “Magic Penny,” which has been used in the birthday celebrations at Playmates Preschool for many years: “Love is something; if you give it away, you end up having more.”Anyway, you should look at the Peace Page and let them know if they have left anything out.