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Concert Report 5/2/03

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The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers:
NPR carries a Sunday morning show called Stained Glass Bluegrass, basically gospel/bluegrass fusion. I'll recommend that. Also, Béla Fleck has a good bluegrass album. It's clean, but not that innovative, but as I said, it's a solid listen. He's better doing jazz with the Flecktones, also worth checking out.

As for folk, well, Bob Dylan did that for us. He had an interesting vocal approach, and I really enjoy listening to HIM, but his immitators and disciples usually just annoy me. To get better stuff, you have to go older: Woody Guthrie (and his measurably less talented but still interesting son Arlo), Pete er... crud, forgot his name, want to say Segar but that conjures up images of BOB Segar, and that's not who I'm thinking of-- i'll remember it later--, even the Kingston Trio. Those are good names to start with for non-bluegrass American Folk. Also Richie Havens and another really well known but forgettable name. Crud. I'll have to look those up and get back to you.

stacer:
I've heard the Bela Fleck stuff, I think--at least, I know my roommate in Chicago had the CD. Personally, the reason I'm turned off by Bob Dylan is because he tries to sound like an 80 year old man, even when he was in his 30s. And maybe that's the problem I have with much of contemporary American folk.

I've never actually heard Woody Guthrie sing, but I had to read 3 books about him this semester for my nonfiction class--seems like everyone was stuck on Woody in 2002 in children's publishing! If you ever want a well-reading, thorough but straightforward biography of him, I suggest This Land Was Made for You and Me: The Life and Songs of Woody Guthrie, by Elizabeth Partridge. Written for a high-school readership and above, it does a great job of including the truth about Woody's life, including his mother's struggle with the disease that also killed Woody himself, Huntingdon's disease, without sugar-coating. But it also concentrates on the impact his songs had for so many decades. Good book.

I don't know--maybe it's because folk is trying so hard not to be country-fied that it bothers me. I mean, if modern folk music grew out of folk music from the past, that would mean songs about everyday life, yes, and granted, we're not an agrarian society for the most part anymore. But it should also have lively music, interesting scoring, use of interesting rhythms, that sort of thing. You'd think. I can't describe it by typing it, but if you've ever heard any of the local bands in Utah except for Ryan Shupe and the Rubber Band (and they're guilty of that kind of songwriting at times, too), you'd probably get a good idea of what I mean--every phrase is ended with a long, low held note, usually with awkward emphasis on the wrong syllable.

Great example of this was the guy who opened for Kate Rusby last year (whose name I forgot promptly after sitting through that excruciating concert): he has this song about wistaria, the flower that grows in vines on the sides of houses. Now, whenever I hear that word, all I can think of is the chorus of his song: "Wis-ta-riiiiiiiiiyyyyyyaaaaaaaaaa, wis-ta-riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiyyyyyaaaaaa," with the "iiiiiiii"s going up and the "aaaaa"s going down. Yeah, hard to describe, typewritten.

Maybe it's just that I don't mind country music and I like older Celtic music and the music that grew out of it (including country, which grew out of folk music of Scots-Irish immigrants in the Appalachians). So I'm drawn to music like Kate Rusby's, which is decidedly different than American folk, even though her label is sold as folk, too. Then there's groups like The Mamas and the Papas, and other groups I've always thought of as rock, but who were actually part of the folk movement of the 60s (as I found out from reading the jacket on my John Denver cd, because they sang his Leaving on a Jet Plane first).

But I just thought maybe there were American groups like that today that I might have been missing. I'll have to check out Bela Fleck again.

By the way, I HIGHLY recommend getting Kate Rusby's newest cd, Little Lights. Too bad she has a fear of flying. She somehow got past it last year to do a tour of the U.S., which is how I got to see her in Chicago, but I went to the website recently and found out that she's going to stick with places she can travel via the surface of the earth for a while, so she won't be coming back here anytime soon.  :( Hard to promote here if you can't get here, so I'll do what I can to recommend it to friends...  :D

Sorry to pull you guys off the original topic. Maybe I should have started a new thread.

The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers:
I want to add Kris Kirstofferson and Ron Wood to my list of good folk singers

Most of the people I listened were performing at least into the 90s. They're not new, but they're still contemporary.

And I understand what you say about Utah bands. Utah must have the lamest local music scene anywhere. i grew up with bands like the Pietasters, the Pilfers, Phish, and Local H (admittedly the worst of the four) as local bands. The Provo scene just didn't cut it.

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