Musical Christmas Gifts

Okay, with the Christmas shopping season upon us, you may be wondering what to get your favorite musician or music fan for a gift. Look up “Music Gifts” online and you’ll probably come across the website for Austin, Texas store Wild About Music, which has a wide range of stuff relating to specific classic musical acts from the Beatles and Bob Marley to the Ramones and Sex Pistols. They also have things related to music or musical instruments in general. Here’s my favorite so far:
Acoustic Guitar Toilet Seat

Happy shopping, the economy is counting on you!

I Beg Your Pardon? Rapper John Forte to be released from Prison

So the big news in hip-hop circles this week was the presidential pardon of Fugees rapper John Forte by outgoing President Bush. Being puzzled by the pardon, after a little poking around the different stories online about it I found the following from Billboard:

President Reduces Sentence Of Fugees Producer Forte
November 25, 2008 – RB Hip-Hop

By Hillary Crosley, N.Y.

Rapper/producer John Forte, who worked closely with the Fugees before being sent to prison on drug charges, had his sentence commuted yesterday (Nov. 24) by President George W. Bush.

The artist was arrested for possession with intent to distribute cocaine and conspiracy to distribute at Newark International Airport in 2000. Police discovered Forte with with two briefcases filled with liquid cocaine, which they estimated were worth $1.4 million.

He was sentenced to the mandatory minimum of 14 years and was serving time in Fort Dix, N.J., but will be released Dec. 22 after serving just over seven years. He must serve five years of supervised probation.

Forte, 33, co-wrote two songs on the Fugees’ 1996 breakthrough, “The Score.” He also released two solo albums, “Poly Sci” (produced by the Fugees’ Wyclef Jean) and “I, John.”

Singer Carly Simon and her son Ben, who attended Exeter Academy with Forte, were vocal advocates for the artist’s release.

Note that last line–I think that may be the explanation. Bush likely has never heard a note of Forte’s music, but he’s most definitely heard Carly Simon’s…

Here’s my favorite John Forte moment, from a tune on his first solo album where he steals my favorite 80’s tune:

Jason Mraz Wants To Be Yours

As much music as I listen to on a daily and weekly basis, I don’t usually get music recommendations from my wife. Not that she doesn’t have good taste in music ( I married her, after all) but just that there’s little she hears that I haven’t already heard.

Last week she came to me with a question about a song she had heard, of all places, on the radio. “Not another cheesy Top 40 tune,” I’m thinking as she tries to describe it. I end up going to the local station’s website to narrow it down, since it had only been about an hour since she’d heard it on the way home, and the song turned out to be “I’m Yours,” a Jason Mraz song that has become something of a career moment for him.

I wasn’t wholly unaware of Mraz, but it was an awareness built on the shakiest of associations, the passing glance of, “heard it once, didn’t much notice it in the commercial it was in.” I was also aware that he’d been putting out albums that were mostly ignored in the mainstream for a few years now, so to hear that he was getting airplay on an actual Top 40 playlist, however insignificant that fact is nowadays, was enough to get me investigating.
Turns out, Mraz just released some new product–a CD/DVD combo called We Sing, We Dance, We Steal Things. it’s a collection of three “intimate sessions” EPs he has put out in the past year or so, with the DVD including videos and other footage. “I’m Yours” is on it, of course.
As stated above, I’m not that familiar with Mraz’s earlier work, but these three batches of songs are personable enough to make me want to hear more. He’s fond of clever lyrical turns of phrase, and his guitar playing incorporates reggae rhythms and other pop flourishes to keep him from sounding like yet another Jack Johnson wannabe.

Here’s the official video for “I’m Yours”, if you are not one of the 36 million people who have already seen it:

A Year Without Chris Conner

An email today from Chris Conner’s Caring Bridge website reminded me that this Friday it will be a year since we lost him to lung cancer. Follow the link in that last sentence to read a message from his family. Here’s what I wrote about Chris last year for the Columbia Free Times:

Remembering the Music
Chris Conner 1970-2007

Last week’s passing of local musician Chris Conner after a ten month battle with lung cancer was marked not only by a standing-room only funeral service but with a “Celebration Service,” the night before where many of his friends and fellow musicians paid their respects in a most appropriate way, through playing music.
I first heard Chris Conner at the Rosewood Drive club Annie’s in the early 1990s, where he and Ryan Goforth debuted an acoustic duo they called Sourwood Honey. Young and inexperienced, Chris’ voice already possessed much of the tone and timbre that would render it instantly recognizable later on. Greg Outlaw of Annie’s nurtured them with frequent bookings, though it didn’t hurt that it seemed like most of Lexington emptied out into the club on the nights Sourwood played. After an early acoustic cassette release, the lineup grew into a full band for 1995’s self-titled CD. Having Les Hall on keyboards and Jessie Jeffcoat on lead guitar really filled out the band’s sound, which was evolving into what would get them unfairly pegged as yet another jam-rock band. Chris’ songs like, “All My Relations,” however, had a radio-friendly, 70’s country-rock vibe to them that no amount of improvisatory jamming could disguise.
By the time 1998’s **(oxydendrum arboretum)** was recorded the band was doing well on stages all over the southeast. The album reflected the confident musicianship of the entire band, and it includes several of their best songs, like, “Follow Me Down,” and, “Blues For You.”
It was Chris’ growth as a songwriter that probably contributed the most to the end of Sourwood Honey’s successful run, at least from a musical standpoint. His material was eclipsing the band’s status as collegiate jam-rock favorites, and it begged for a more focused showcase. The right answer came along in the form of The South, and the 2005 release of **Monsters In the Kudzu**. Taking the best of Chris’ country-rock tendencies and framing the songs on top of a solid rock ‘n’ roll foundation, the band finally gave Chris a chance to put his own stamp on something without filters or alterations. Like the South’s “Let it Sing,” says, “This little bird inside, I’m gonna let it sing.”
Last summer, during one of his good weeks, Chris attended a South Carolina Musicians and Songwriter’s Guild open-mike night at the Red Tub. The respect that the other musicians in the room had for him was obvious, yet Chris took the time to compliment those who played before his brief turn. Introducing his own, “…And the Weaving of Fate,” he reminisced about the song being singled out by me the first time I had given Sourwood Honey a good review in **Free Times**, and how much that had meant to him as a young songwriter. The song itself is about the writing process, opening with the line, “The writer is willing to spill everything, if you’d only dare to listen.”
Though there were plenty listening to his music by the time his lung cancer diagnosis came last January, the medical crisis brought home to Chris the importance of his family and his faith, the two things he held closest in the months to follow. Both of those elements were apparent last December in my own favorite musical memory of Chris. When I began to put together the Christmas at Red Bank program, Chris was one of the first who agreed to perform. One of the songs he chose to play that night was the classic, “I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day,” and as he sang his voice rang out clear as the bells in the song, with no indication of the sickness that would make it hard for him to breathe only weeks later. During the closing sing-along of, “Silent Night,” his baby son Ace was brought up to him as we sang, inaugurating the next generation of the Conner family into a life on stage.

This year’s Christmas at Red Bank concert is coming up on Sunday, Dec. 7th, and Chris’ memory will linger over it just as it did last year when it was so fresh in our minds. Then, we remembered him by playing a recording of his performance from the previous year; this time around we’ll have Chris’ younger brother Brian Conner of Villanova on stage as one of the participants, as well as Nicole Hagenmeyer from The South, singing a couple songs with Leslie Branham. Come out and join us, as we kick off the Christmas season the way Chris Conner would have wanted us to–with great music.

Tony Trischka: Not Just Another Banjo Player

Tony Trischka

“Bela Fleck was sixteen when he called me,” Tony Trischka says when asked about his connection to the more well known banjo picker. “My first album Bluegrass Light had just come out and it was a fairly progressive album. He was already playing some bluegrass and wanted to get into the more progressive stuff so his teacher at the time suggested he call me.” Even a talented picker like Trischka recognized Fleck’s abilities quickly, he says.
“It was clear pretty soon that he didn’t need lessons, so we just sat around and picked,” Trischka says, “Neither of us can remember now how long it lasted, but it wasn’t much more than a few months.”
Trischka takes the inevitable questions about Fleck in stride, though his own career has been just as widely varied, if not more so. He does acknowledge one difference between them, however.
“I’m not a jazz player—I listen to it a lot, but I never made it a part of my style; he can play jazz, obviously,” Trischka says. “I took the freedom of jazz and applied it to what I do.”
What he’s done is some pretty amazing work as both a band leader and a sideman over the years, redefining the banjo in musical terms that everyone can relate to.
“I have focused on making the banjo a truly musical instrument,” Trischka says. “People think of it as ‘Dueling Banjos’ or ‘Beverly Hillbillies’, that’s the mass consciousness of it, but the very first thing I played on a banjo was Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’, because I knew the notes and wanted to hear what it sounded like. I play Bach on it, too.” To Trischka, it’s all just music, no matter what you’re playing it with.
“It is a musical instrument, so you play with the technique and the sound you can get out of the instrument—I just did a recording session with these jazz players just so they could have that flavor of the banjo on what they were doing; I play with country artists too, but sometimes they don’t want the banjo because it makes it too bluegrass.”
Trischka began playing banjo in the 1960s after seeing the popular folk group the Kingston Trio, and the instrument wasn’t that unusual to find on the radio at the time, he says.
“It was that time where folk music included bluegrass and they were doing folk music albums, hootenanny albums, to cash in on it for good reason,” Trischka says. “I heard the Kingston Trio and searched for more stuff like it and found Flat and Scruggs, Bill Monroe, and the Stanley Brothers.”
From there, he played in a number of bluegrass bands with names like the Down City Ramblers, Country Cooking, Country Granola, and Breakfast Special. A trio of solo albums were issued in the 1970s, after which Trischka spent a year as the musical leader of a Broadway show, The Robber Bridegroom. A good chunk of the 1980s saw him playing with the progressive bluegrass act Skyline and working on movie soundtracks for Foxfire and Driving Miss Daisy. Since the 1990s Trischka has released a string of solo albums and appeared countless times on public radio programs such as Prairie Home Companion and Mountain Stage. To Trischka, it’s all in a day’s work.
“I’m just really eclectic in my musical taste,” He says, “The heart of what I play is bluegrass, though I’ve played more progressive things. I was listening to the Beatles, Hendrix, the Beach Boys, but also to jazz—Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and classical composers like Aaron Copland. I’ve been playing now for forty-five years—if it was just bluegrass I couldn’t have done it that long. I need a little variation. I’m not like Earl Scruggs, who has been playing Scruggs style since 1930, he’s still coming up with new stuff.”
Trischka’s last two projects, 2007’s Double Banjo Spectacular(Rounder) and 2008’s Territory(Smithsonian/Folkways) are typical of the genre-bending appeal his performances bring, jumping from old-time to classical and through bluegrass, country, and more.
“I had done a couple of electric albums for Rounder and wanted to do a more traditional album,” Trischka says, “They suggested the double banjo concept as a marketing thing, to sell more albums, but it was a great excuse for me to assemble a dream team of people like Earl Scruggs and Steve Martin—everybody I asked to do it was into it.”
And yes, before you ask, it is the same Steve Martin as the actor and comedian. In addition to his more well-known comedy work, Martin has been a serious banjo player for forty years. He and Trischka play a couple of songs together on the double banjo disc, including a Martin composition, “The Crow.”
“Steve is very serious about it,” Trischka says when asked about his famous friend’s musical abilities. “He writes his own tunes, and they’re beautiful—intelligent, fresh, and different.”
A comical moment of sorts occurred last year when Martin played with Trischka’s band on the television show Ellen. After their performance, the hostess came out to do the traditional post-song questions, and with her back to Trischka proceeded to pose her first queries to Martin, who politely and graciously turned the conversation toward his friend, who after all was the guy on stage with an album to promote.
“Hey, it’s Steve Martin,” Trischka says when reminded of the moment, “I’m just a banjo player.”

For ticket information on this week’s show, see the online feature at http://www.free-times.com, in the music section.

Here’s Trischka in action, with Steve Martin AND Bela Fleck–the guy on guitar is Michael Daves, who is playing the duo show here in town:

A Song for Veteran’s Day

Veterans Day is Nov. 11th in the United States, but honoring soldiers is an international sentiment. Here’s my favorite song about soldiers/war/veterans, “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda,” a folk song from Eric Bogle. This version is a live take from Shane McGowan and the Pogues.

Bye Bye Baumer

Mere hours from now, the great Columbia SC band Baumer will become the “Late, Great Baumer,” after their final show tonight. I’ve already posted at length about their decision to call it quits, so I won’t reiterate those thoughts here–rather, I’ll leave a parting shot from their Headliners gig back in March of this year. Hard to believe so much has changed since that night…

Ten Election Day Songs

It’s finally over, almost…the longest campaign in American history, I think I heard it called today. Just for fun, here’s a list of songs for election day, most of them with the same title. I remembered the Arcadia song first, then had to remind myself of some of the others:

“Election Day”, Arcadia: a top ten hit for the Duran Duran spinoff group Arcadia in 1985

Election Day – Anti-Heroes, a two minute start-to-finish punk blast from their 1999 album Underneath the Underground.

Election Day, Blaze Foley: From the roots-country rocker’s 2006 album Cold, Cold World; Lyle Lovett also covered it nicely on My Baby Don’t Tolerate.

Election Day, Boxer Rebellion: Another punk tune, this one with the classic understatement “It’s up to you and me now, what the fuck shall we do?”

Election Day, Cindy Kallet: An obscure tune from a New England folk artist who’s averaging about one album a decade. This song is from her 1989 album Dreaming Down a Quiet Line.

Election Day, The Replacements: This bloozy, woozy tune can be found on the expanded reissue of Pleased To Meet Me.

Election Day, Sun Ra/Henry Dumas: more a conversation with found sounds in the background, an interesting artifact of the 1960s from the album The Ark and the Ankh, originally issued in 1966 and reissued in 2002.

Election Day, Jerry Joseph: This one’s from the first album by future Widespread Panic collaborator Jerry Joseph, before he formed his longtime backing band, the Jackmormons.

Election Night, John Wesley Harding: From the early studio recordings collection Dynablob, draw your own Dylan comparisons here.

Election Night, Bic Runga: A moody, jazzy soundscape that sets an optimistically tranquil mood for what’s sure to be a stressful night for a lot of people—two in particular, of course.