Pickathon Lineup Announced

Pickathon, one of the most cutting-edge roots music festivals in the US, has announced its lineup for 2012. From August 3-5, the hills and woods around Pendarvis Farm, located just outside Portland, Oregon, will be packed with music lovers of all ages. And the 2012 lineup reflects the kind of programming diversity that is a hallmark of the event. To better understand Pickathon’s programming, Hearth Music interviewed Pickathon founder Zale Schoenborn for a lively chat about where the festival's been and where it's going. Check out the interview below.

Hearth Music Interview with Pickathon Founder Zale Schoenborn

I'm talking on the phone from his home in Portland, and Zale Schoenborn, one of the key Pickathon founders, sounds remarkably relaxed for someone whose festival is about to drop a full lineup. Maybe it's because he's working for the first time with a national publicist, whereas before he'd have to call up national press outlets to get articles. Or maybe he's used to the pressure, after all, Pickathon's been around for 14 years now!

The 2012 Pickathon lineup is chock full of accepted indie bands, like Dr. Dog, Neko Case, Blitzen Trapper, Phosphorescent, Alela Diane, and plenty more, but Zale wants to talk about the smaller bands, the 50% of the festival designed only for showcasing fascinating artists, regardless of whether anyone’s heard of them or not. Talking about Los Cojolites, a Mexican son jarocho ensemble, he’s bursting with excitement about discovering their sound, a regional Mexican tradition that hasn’t been heard in the American mainstream since Richie Havens co-opted an old song called “La Bamba.” “It’s like country music from a different location,” he says. “It totally translates. It’s so infectious and so good that it doesn’t even seem foreign when you see it. It’s totally related to string band music to me but it will blow people’s minds…”

Zale was a particularly hard person to interview, not because of his personality, which is open and joyous and easily excitable, but because he’s the kind of music lover who just wants to share his excitement and it’s easy to get swept up in that. I got the feeling that he loves finding out what kind of music a particular person likes, then finding a common ground to that music. And I think he programs Pickathon that way. Gets all his friends together and just talks back and forth about all the music they’re currently most excited about, genre divisions be damned. At one point he confessed, "Your initial intention when you put together a festival is to please yourself, right?”, and as festival producer myself, I couldn't agree more! The current Pickathon lineup certainly supports this idea, with innovative encursions into “world” music groups like Mali’s Vieux Farka Toure and Quebec’s Genticorum. I wanted to get to the bottom of his booking philosophy, so I opened by asking about these world artists.


Hearth Music: Let’s talk about the line-up. It almost seems like you’re moving a bit towards world music. I noticed, aside from Genticorum, you also have Vieux Farka Touré. Is there a desire to move towards world music at all on your part?

Zale Schoenborn: No, we don’t do anything consciously. We kind of first collected everybody’s favorite 20-30 records, right, that they thought was happening in various music scenes at that moment. We ended up with 600 records that were all from the end of last Pickathon through coming out with new records in 2012, and [Vieux Farka Toure’s album] was one of them that really surprised us. I’ve always loved the relationship between the blues and Mali… That relation almost to R.L. Burnside; there’s kind of a trance-like quality to it… And that relationship, and that essence of how amazing the music is, was our criteria for deciding that that band…

We’re not necessarily trying to be world, but we definitely love to tickle the music lover inside of everybody to turn them on to something completely different. That said, we do have a couple of folks from outside the country that we don’t usually have the luxury of drawing.

HM: Like who?

ZS: We have Kitty, Daisy and Lewis, who we’ve been trying to get for years… they opened for Coldplay the last time they were in the States, but they are so Pickathon. I mean, they are huge in Europe, they are absolutely a ginormous band in England but the style of music that they play is retro-country-blues… Then you can go in the totally opposite direction like Los Cojolites which is the son jarocho music… They are just unbelievable, my friend, they are so good! They are this crazy band we discovered in the heartland of the Veracruz scene. They have been described to me as the Avett Brothers of that world. They don’t speak English, so we’re going to be handling them but it’s just such awesome string band music!

…I realized that there are so many smart people who care deeply about different music than I do, and that I should, at least, listen to those people. We should completely look at all this 'under the rug' stuff… what gets people excited in a particular world and then, a lot of the times, they’re right. They may or may not be your home base of music, but when you look at this music, and you have never heard of it, it may be the most exciting thing going on for a particular community. Bruce Molsky, Danny Paisley is another example. He’s never been to Oregon... He is the darling of all of those people in Nashville. He’s looked at as the best living singer in bluegrass music. He’s just amazing; he’s just flat-out got it… And Ted Jones is another guy. He’s 24; he looks just like Jesse McReynolds, but he believes it. When he’s playing, he’s cross-picking mandolin. He kind of sounds like the Delmore Brothers. He’s super young; he’s just tearing it up, like this old school style, completely oblivious that his music doesn’t translate really well. No machine behind him, nothing, but he’s like looked upon by the folks who love this music like myself. My dad, who only likes bluegrass, looks at those two bands as the folks he cares about to see at Pickathon. He doesn’t know who anybody else is.

HM: Didn’t Pickathon come out of Portland’s old-time scene?

ZS: I played bluegrass before I was even interested in old-time. My friends don’t give a rat’s butt about old-time. They draw this kind of imaginary line that says, ‘That’s not bluegrass.’ You probably know what I’m talking about, it goes the other way with old-time to other scenes. People draw these imaginary lines. So, we didn’t care about those imaginary lines even in the beginning which was an absolute curse for us. Those scenes, the hard-core, built-in scenes don’t want their music mixed.

HM: When you were starting off, how did you deal with trying to please the bluegrass community, the old-time community, the indie community?

ZS: We didn’t... That’s what has started off as our biggest weakness. We were destined to be 200 people including musicians, or smaller. For 7 years, 6 years, we were under 300 people, because it’s just like you’re taking a bunch of music that is not necessarily transcending popular culture in the first place, and then you’re crossing these kind of imaginary lines where all these communities love their music in pure forms or they think they do. They want to go to a Blues Festival. They don’t want to go to a Blues Festival that has Celtic music at it. The Celtic people want to go to a Celtic festival. So, we always felt passionately as musicians and as music-lovers that you can do this because most people love a lot of music and it’s not a big deal. It should work eventually… at least we’re enjoying it, the musicians enjoy it. So, let’s just continue… And then the indie thing crept in as we started moving to Pendarvis. Indie was becoming more of an infused part of what we do. And then, the last 6 years the doors are just completely broken down.

HM: At Pickathon, do you see examples of the walls being broken down like an indie crowd going crazy over a super hard-core folk performer or a folkie crowd going crazy over an Indie band?

ZS: Totally, all the time, everywhere . When we schedule, you never can be in a safe zone. We won’t allow the music to kind of be in one continuum at one stage… But the musicians, I think that is our most common feedback, is they just love that kind of cross-pollination. Musicians, it just blows their minds, they walk away completely wanting more and it feels like a big reason why they really want to come back so strongly is, the experience is just so emotionally, intensely overwhelming, to have that kind of crazy talent. And it’s crossing so many boundaries, it just kind of blows your mind… We just expect that people who are open are going to discover a lot of stuff and we love the whole mixture of it.

HM: How long has Pickathon been going and who really started the festival at the very beginning?

ZS: I started it with my wife and my brother. My wife, Wendy, my brother, my mom and friends. We just started it and I just sucked everybody in. That was 14 years ago this year… That was 1999. We did it at Horning’s Hideout and I think right around year 7, we got booted out of Horning’s Hideout in the middle of June with the festival in late August. It was brutal! We had to basically move… and we went to a place down in Woodburn, Oregon for a year. In that place, since it was a big hayfield, we learned how to run a production. We were just putting music in a campground up to that point and at year 7, when we had to move to a big, giant field, we were like, ‘Oh, crap! How do you do water? How do you do electricity? How do you do bathrooms? How do you shave? How do you do all this stuff?’ From the middle of June to August, we had to patch together all of this. That was the year we had The Be Good Tanyas and Jolie Holland and Freakwater Reunion. And then, after that, like I said, that place imploded. And then this will be our 7th year, we went to Pendarvis Farm, which was a farm that was really nothing like it is now… They kind of got into us and we slowly introduced and started growing at Pendarvis Farm. We just took off! We had 700 people the first year at Pendarvis total and now we’re up to 5500, if you include the staff, musicians and 3,000 paid.

There’s 5 partners now in the whole festival which are totally important. My brother Eric who does the website. Terry, you’ve met Terry, he’s the one that works full-time on the festival, who books the festival, who does all of the running of the festival. And my brother does all of the web, the conceptual design, and the art. I love the curation of music, I’m involved in everything too, the general person. And then Ned Failing… he’s our straight man in a lot of ways… the guy who actually keeps a bunch of wildly creative types functioning. Then we have a hospitality guru, who’s been cooking for us since day one of Pickathon, used to cook for the whole festival… His name is Michael Dorr. He’s just an absolute genius with people. He has been a huge reason why Pickathon is so comfortable at the festival.
 

HM: I remember maybe 4 or 5 years ago, there was an article about Pickathon that talked about the phrase, “indie roots.” I think it credited that phrase to you and to Pickathon. Do you feel like that you developed a genre or kind of built a middle ground between indie and between roots music that became indie roots?

ZS: I think four years ago, we were more identified with thinking that’s what we were doing for sure. Up to even 2009, that really was like a theme. It’s starting to have a lot less meaning for us, realizing that we don’t necessarily need that kind of label. It was something that helped people understand what we were doing different and maybe it’s still helpful in a general context… We feel more confident in the fact that, ‘Hey, this is just great music’ and people are going to catch on and gravitate for the fact that this is something different and people are going to be okay with crossing a lot of ground.

HM: Well, okay, let me expand the question. Now that you feel that the festival is financially secure, like you’re going to have enough people there, do you feel now that you can make the decisions in programming that you couldn’t make when you were trying to attract a large crowd? Do you feel that at some point you had to sacrifice your vision in order to get people in?

ZS: No. We’ve been foolish enough to never really care about that and just believe that quality would work over time. So, I still feel that way. Our line-up is crazy, I really think that if you look through this and marked who’s obscure and who’s not obscure, a good chunk of this, 50% of our line-up, is close to zero draw in Portland. We always have been doing that, it’s just that the choices we get to make are just a lot easier for us because we do have all this love from the community artists and booking, and now we have a history with them. They’ve had a great time; it’s working; they’ve actually seen their market grow substantially after playing Pickathon, and so the eco-system is starting to re-inforce itself… It’s becoming easier to program Pickathon; we’re having to do a lot less explaining of ourselves. We don’t take that for granted at all, we are super-honored that we have this ability now to be more, instead of the begging side, more of a curating side.

HM: Right, right. So how did you survive for 7 years when you had relatively small audiences? How did you manage to keep that going?

ZS: I have a day job. It’s called a day job. The festival never even broke even until year 10.

HM: Holy shit! [laughing]

ZS: That’s called 'for the love of it,' right? [more laughing]

Get a preview of what you'll see at Pickathon 2012:

Kentucky artists Matt Bauer, Ben Sollee, and Daniel Martin Moore talk about their heritage..
 

Nestled into a circular booth in Seattle’s 100-year-old, local-favorite bar Hattie’s Hat, we’re getting ready to order the chicken-fried chicken, a dish so delicious that it occasioned a wistful chain of emails between me and Kentucky indie songwriter Matt Bauer. Matt’s here in Ballard, Seattle’s old Scandinavian working class neighborhood, to play the Tractor Tavern, and we’re eating dinner with the band and chatting about his new album, The Jessamine County Book of Living. We’re in the heart of Seattle’s hipster Americana movement, and the whole area is full of half-remembered history and urban yearnings for rural life. By the time the chicken-fried chicken arrives (worth every email), we’ve settled into a comfortable conversation about childhood roots, about the things we experience as kids that burn a place into our minds. This isn’t idle talk; this is an attempt to understand Matt’s dark, almost terrifying new album and how his childhood in Kentucky influenced the imagery of his songs. Matt grew up in Eastern Kentucky, but his parents were both from New York and he currently lives in Brooklyn. His accent is ever so slight and only noticeable when he starts talking about his Kentucky home. Bauer’s the perfect example of today’s urban roots music, at once informed by a hazy, almost mythical rural connection, but also by cities full of new influences, new ideas and new sounds.

Matt Bauer: Useless Is Your Armor


On his new album, Bauer returns to the woods of his native Kentucky for inspiration, tapping into the eerie, heartless aspects of our natural world for his inspiration. He traveled to Kentucky to record half the album. “I could see a lot of the places I wrote about out the windows as I was recording,” he says to me. But talking to him about his influences, I start to realize how much he’s soaked up from living in a more cosmopolitan world. Trying to understand his intense use of natural imagery, we touch upon the work of Japanese filmmaker Hiyao Miyazaki, who’s famed for using Japan’s animist religion, Shinto, to animate the natural world. “These weird animal / god things in Princess Mononoke to me are wildly beautifully imagined embodiments of the natural world that have nothing at all to do with the way we see things as Western-thinking human beings,” Matt says. “There’s no such thing as good and evil, just life spilling over so much it’s destroying things, and death that’s creating things left and right instead of being a destructive force.” The single off his new album, “Blacklight Horses,” features this kind of imagery, as well as the haunting vocals of indie folk artist Jolie Holland. Talking about his banjo accompaniment, we touch on his love for the interlocking melodies of Indonesian gamelan, which he emulates in the song “When I Was A Mockingbird.” In a departure from his previous albums, he incorporates avant-garde classical strings into his sound, and does it to stunning effect. The strings do more than flesh out his music, in the opening track, “Useless is Your Armor,” they actually unsettle it, at times even disturbing the listener. But despite all of these urban and global influences, Matt’s childhood in Kentucky is still the muse he draws from the most. The surroundings he grew up in, as much as the music of Kentucky, has inspired Matt’s music. “No matter where else I go, it’s the original version of what the world is to me. My reference point for everything. There’s something in music that moves me in a really similar way home does.”

Blacklight Horses by Matt Bauer from matt bauer on Vimeo.

Matt Bauer’s part of a new renaissance of Kentucky roots music. But where he draws from his childhood memories while living in Brooklyn, other artists are working in the heart of Kentucky’s music communities. Nowhere is this more evident than the fiercely regional music of Kentucky cellist and songwriter Ben Sollee. Calling from his tour van on the road between Asheville and Carrboro, North Carolina, Ben talks in a slow drawl about how growing up in Lexington, Kentucky’s second-largest city, influenced his music: “My family is of the mountains, but I’m very much of the city and in the way of being honest to my own story and the story of Appalachia… I got to tell it from that perspective. I grew up listening to hip hop while I was learning folk and that’s what this music for me is all about: it’s contemporary folk produced now.” A classically-trained cellist, Sollee had troubles bringing classical music back home to his family, especially to his grandfather, a noted old-time fiddler in Kentucky. “I had this kind of dual life, where I would be studying cello, playing classical music and all that stuff and then I would go home and hang out with family and friends to play music and they’d be like, ‘Well, that’s real pretty but I can’t play that along with you.’ I kinda had these two things talking to each other; I had this social music background and then, an institutional music life.” These two worlds came together with Ben’s first major gig, playing cello for Abigail Washburn & The Sparrow Quartet. Formed by banjo-playing spouses Abigail Washburn and Bela Fleck, the Sparrow Quartet toured the US and China, and was a critically acclaimed success. But for someone who’s so connected to a global music community, Sollee has always been deeply tied to local communities. He’s best-known for his collaboration album, Dear Companion, with fellow Kentuckians Jim James (of My Morning Jacket) and Daniel Martin Moore. Released by Sub Pop Records in 2010, the trio recorded the album to call attention to the controversial practice of Appalachian mountaintop removal mining. This form of coal mining literally decapitates mountains, dumping huge amounts of earth into surrounding valleys and vastly polluting the surrounding communities. It’s an issue that affects many people living in the mountains of East Kentucky, home to a long history of coal mining. Dear Companion proved to be not only a critical success, but it also proved to be a showcase for new roots artists in Kentucky. The album’s star power came from Jim James, of My Morning Jacket, but the real star of the album was the subtle interaction between Sollee and young songwriter Daniel Martin Moore.

Calling from his home in Cold Spring, Kentucky, a town of a few thousand that lies along the border with Ohio, Daniel Martin Moore’s soft voice has little trace of an accent, and he speaks with slow, measured words. “Ben sent me an email when he heard the song, FlyRock Blues,” remembers Daniel. “I posted it on My Space just when we recorded it... He had been thinking a lot about mountain top removal and had written a couple of songs and we live very close–we live like an hour and a half away from each other.” Flyrock Blues is a remarkable song. It sounds for all the world like a simple folk ditty, but it’s actually a reference to the huge rocks that come flying out of mountaintop removal explosions, occasionally flattening houses and killing people. Of course, songs about the plight of coal miners aren’t new to Appalachia, and Daniel himself came to the struggle against mining companies through the traditional route: he was inspired by the songs of Kentucky’s folk bard Jean Ritchie. A seminal figure in the folk revival, Ritchie was born in the tiny mining town of Viper, Kentucky, but became a star after moving to New York and sharing her many Appalachian songs and ballads with urban folkies. Daniel’s clearly a big fan of Ritchie, and credits her for her lifetime of work representing Kentucky mountain music and culture. “She’s a hero of mine. A musical hero and you know, just an outstanding person. She has worked so hard to use her influence and use her knowledge to be a positive force in the world and project Kentucky and lift it up and show people how wonderful it is. She’s been an outspoken opponent of mountain top removal coal mining and strip-mining in general since it really started in Appalachia in the late ‘60s. She’s been on the vanguard since then.” True to Ritchie’s legacy, Dear Companion was critically acclaimed and it helped Moore and Sollee take the issue of mountaintop removal mining “beyond the choir,” as Sollee says.

Following the success of Dear Companion, Moore and Sollee have returned to their respective Kentucky homes and released two deeply personal solo albums in 2011. It may seem like a retreat from the political nature of their first collaboration together, but Sollee sees it as a more connected process. “All the social issues in these songs have always been personal. You know, they come from a very personal place. I always try to write as personal as I can, because I feel like, if you do that honestly, you will achieve a more universal accessibility to the song.” Ben Sollee’s new album, Inclusions, is full of personal stories, of people he met on the road or of friends and family. But the album’s also a chance for Sollee to personally flesh out his musical vision, to showcase his fractured folk take on the urban sounds of R&B and funk. It’s strange to hear a crooned song like “Close to You” (I want to be close to you/But you’re miles away), that would fit easily into any Motown playbook, with raggedy strummed mandolin and a shattered brass arrangement based on a field recording of Basque folk music. Sollee’s percussive cello playing informs the album as well, but his voice overrides everything else as the album’s shining light. It’s so soft and light, with an element of quavering heartbreak, and it fits perfectly with his stripped-down songwriting. On “Electrified,” he sings about our digital world (“If you’re old-fashioned, you will be modernized / Everything is electrified”) and you get the feeling that unlike most folkies, he’s happy to embrace a new digital era of American roots music.

Ben Sollee: Electrified

 

For his 2011 release on Sub Pop Records, In the Cool of the Day, Kentucky songwriter Daniel Martin Moore returned to the gospel folk songs of his youth for inspiration. Some of the songs are taken from traditional sources, songs Moore remembers hearing his parents sing when he was a child, but others are written by Moore himself. It’s a testament to the timelessness of his writing that we frequently can’t tell the difference. He keeps his softly sweet vocal delivery–a voice that almost whispers at times but never loses its rich, singing timbre–to draw us into the songs. He originally conceived the album as a gift for his parents, a thank-you for bringing him up with these old songs. “I had been thinking for a while I wanted to make some recordings just to give to my family,” he told me, “Some of the old songs that we all love… Those ended up making their way to Sub Pop. They were into the concept, so they decided to make an album, an actual album with a barcode... But I still think of it that way, I still think of it as a gift.” Moore’s album has real substance. This isn’t another hipster adopting old gospel songs in an attempt to tap into the ‘old, weird America.’ This is a young songwriter who grew up in the folds of the tradition and who’s able to translate the old ways of Appalachian culture into new sounds. And he does this without losing sight of what made the music powerful to begin with.

Daniel Martin Moore: In the Cool of the Day


Bauer, Sollee and Moore are just three examples of artists who’ve been able to translate their Southern roots into a new brand of urban folk. It’s a talent shared by their peers in Kentucky, like Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Jim James, and Cheyenne Marie Mize, and it’s a hallmark of this new community of rootsters. “There’s a strong community of musicians that have grown up with all these traditions, kind of floating around them, fiddle music and all this stuff. But we’re also, some of us, trained classical musicians and some of us grew up listening to a ton of indie-rock and hip hop and soul music… It’s a crossroads, physically and culturally in Kentucky. It always has been and will remain so.” Sollee couldn’t be more right; Kentucky’s always been a place where the roots of the music have informed any new adventures. From Bill Monroe’s bluegrass to Merle Travis’ innovative guitar picking, to Loretta Lynn’s progressive rural ballads even to Nappy Roots Southern drawl hip-hop, Kentucky has historically been a musical crossroads, a hotbed of innovation. And today’s community of roots-minded urban folkies have taken this legacy to hand.

Purchase the Music in this Article (support the artists, support Hearth)

Matt Bauer. The Jessamine County Book of the Living.
2011. Crossbill Records.

Ben Sollee. Inclusions.
2011. Thirty Tigers.
 

Daniel Martin Moore.In the Cool of the Day
2011. Sub Pop Records

Daniel Martin Moore & Ben Sollee. Dear Companion.
2010. Sub Pop Records.

Levi Fuller's a musical explorer. Sounds cliche, I know, but I do tend to think of him with a pith helmet and machete, wacking his way through an underbrush of lame MySpace pages and Web 1.0 sites to pull forth little gems of cultural brilliance. He's a songwriter and performer himself, but through his series of regularly released compilation albums, Ball of Wax Audio Quarterly, he's been promoting many other artists from the Pacific Northwest. The Ball of Wax Audio Quarterly has been going strong for quite a while now (the newest one is volume 26), and it's been a work of passion for Levi that's let him bring forth some fascinating bands that most people likely hadn't heard of. I pride myself in being relatively familiar with many NW bands, especially folk and roots bands, but I'd only heard of 5 of the 19 artists on the current compilation. And that's more than on previous compilations!

For the newest Ball of Wax compilation, Levi put the word out that he was looking for covers of songs from the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music. The idea with most Ball of Wax releases is to compile songs/music submitted or recruited by artists, print and press the album, then put together a live concert with some of the artists where the album is given away for the show's ticket price. It's a great way to build community and to bring a bunch of artists and musicians together. And that's exactly what's happening with the new Ball of Wax. Working with us here at Hearth Music and Greg Vandy at American Standard Time (and KEXP's The Roadhouse), there's gonna be a whole evening Tribute to Harry Smith at Columbia City Theater (TONIGHT: Friday November 25).

The artists on the new Ball of Wax run a wide gamut of styles, though most hew to a rough-edged indie-folk sound. And like the original generation that picked up on Harry Smith's quasi-mystic, borderline-insane Anthology, these artists are here to celebrate the twisted sounds and thoughts at the heart of the "Old, Weird America." Seattle busking sensation Ben Fisher nails the matter-of-fact broadside sensationalism of "Frankie and Albert," and sounds like an 19th century sheet music folio seller hawking the latest sensationalist ballad of sex and murder in a young America. Seattle alt-country oufit Amateur Radio Operator go after "Oh Death, Where is Thy Sting" and bring a creepy 16 Horsepower vibe with the song. Montana artists Nate Biehl and Caroline Keys (Caroline's with indie-folk outfit Stellarondo) do a nicely downtrodden cover of the classic "John Johanna." I've been a fan of all these artists, but the best part of the album are the new discoveries. Chicago based indie band The Way It Is have a great version of the Carter Family classic "Engine 143," and I'm totally in love with the world-weary, cracked vision that Seattle songwriter Jeremy Burk brings to one of my favorite old gospel blues "Shine on Me." There's lots more on this compilation, so I'll let you discover the rest for yourself. Head on over to Bandcamp and have a listen, and be sure to keep in touch with Levi Fuller's Ball of Wax! After all, he's done all the hard work of finding these bands, now it's up to you to check 'em out!
 

Ben Fisher: Frankie and Albert


Jeremy Burk: Shine On Me


Amateur Radio Operator: Oh Death Where Is Thy Sting

Portland's Tucker Martine is the storied producer and visionary behind much of today's best indie roots music coming out of the Northwest. He's the man behind The Decemberists 2011 album, The King is Dead (see our previous AST review), which rose to #1 on the national charts, and he's behind a host of other beautiful albums coming out of PDX. His ties to the folk and roots worlds are strong. Though he's worked with artists like R.E.M., Spoon, Mudhoney and My Morning Jacket, he's also produced all of indie-folk shining star Laura Veirs' albums (ok technically they're married, so that helps), as well as the lovely 2011 album from renowned banjo luminary Abigail Washburn. This album married Washburn's wind-swept vocals with Martine's aesthetic for soaring fiddle arrangements and lush instrumentation.

We just found out recently that Martine was actually friends with Harry Smith back in the day, and counts Smith's oeuvre as a large inspiration for his own work. Like Smith, Martine cut his teeth releasing wildly creative, eccentric field recordings. Released by NW label Sublime Frequencies, Bush Taxi Mali is an album of recordings from Martine's 1998 trip to Mali in Western Africa, and Brokenhearted Dragonflies is an album of "insect electronica," hyper-accurate recordings of insects in SE Asia. And like Smith, Martine has continually plumbed the depths of the American roots music for inspiration.

Thanks to the upcoming Tribute To Harry Smith that American Standard Time, Ball of Wax, and Hearth Music are producing at Columbia City Theater (Nov 25), we asked Martine for his memories of hanging out with mad maegi Harry Smith, and how this has influenced his own work. Here's what he had to say:

Tucker Martine on Harry Smith
"I got to know Harry because he came in each day to the coffee shop I worked at in Boulder in 1990 and 91, the Trident Cafe. The owners of the cafe, knowing my interests - suggested that I spend my breaks sitting at Harry's table getting to know him. He was usually wearing a blue and white pinstriped jacket that reminded me of the candyman. He would often pour a bottle of technicolored pills out on to the table and begin to organize them while talking to himself. He was always very happy to talk when I sat as his table, a complete stranger in the beginning. I never studied with Harry - at that time I'm pretty sure he wasn't "teaching" anymore but the Naropa Institute had taken him under their wing and were providing housing for Harry, who wasn't necessarily great at looking after himself. He would usually do all of the talking, I was happy to listen. He talked often of his many buddhist kittens and their rapidly expanding population in his apartment. He said there were even a few Buddhist squirrels on the Naropa campus as well. I wish I had kept the phone message he once left me where he was hoping I would take one of his new Buddhist kittens that he said had successfully completed it's basic Dharma training. My time with Harry mostly preceded my immersion into his life's work. By the time I had fully realized the profundity of his life, he was gone. I was left with fond memories of this warm, eccentric man that I felt drawn to - though didn't understand why until after he had passed away. Harry has inspired me in so many ways, as a field recordist, a guerilla ethnomusicologist and as a lover of things natural, manipulated and surreal."

Inside the Trident Cafe, Boulder CO

Laura Veirs: John Henry Lives (from The Triumphs & Travails of Orphan Mae)
Martine-produced track inspired by Mississippi John Hurt's "Spike Driver Blues" from Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music

NOTE: This article first appeared on American Standard Time, the blog for Greg Vandy's The Roadhouse on KEXP. Check it out:

Join us on November 25 for an all-star Tribute to the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music, featuring Kevin Murphy (The Moondoggies), RedDog, Kevin Barrans and Friends, Folichon Cajun Band, Pacific Northwest Sacred Harp Singers, Jeremy Burk, Colin J Nelson, Sokai Stilhed, Norman Baker, Ben Fisher, and Virgin of the Birds.

Plus a Harry Smith story from John Cohen, animated by Drew Christie!

Friday, November 25
Columbia City Theater
$10 advance / $15 doors

Free copy of Ball of Wax 26 - a tribute CD to the Anthology of American Folk Music - with entry.

Next Gen Folk Column
Victory Music Review October 2011

Note: The Next Gen Folk column is intended to be more than just a perspective on roots musicians from a younger generation. The goal of the column is to show positive ways that different generations work together in roots music. The goal is to show how music is passed on and celebrated from generation to generation. The Congolese band Staff Benda Bilili is a powerful example of this kind of work.

Staff Benda Bilili. Très Très Fort.
2009. Crammed Discs.

When writing about music from Africa, it’s all too easy to get caught up in the stories behind the music. Africa has traditionally excited Western imaginations (and stereotypes) more than any other place. And sometimes the story is so powerful that you can’t ignore it, which gives the music a special meaning. This is the case with the Congolese ensemble Staff Benda Bilili. You just can’t make up a story like this.

The musicians of Staff Benda Bilili are handicapped and live on the streets outside the Jardins Zoologique in Kinshasa, the capital of Democratic Republic of the Congo. Riding around on motorized tricycles all day (local kids push them when the tricycles run out of gas),they hustle a living from the city streets. They’re surrounded by, and have taken in, street children, or sheges. One of these former street kids, Roger Landu, is also a stunning virtuoso in the band. A mere 17 years old, he built his own instrument: a one-string lute he calls a satonge. It’s got a tinny sound from the homemade materials (a coffee can), but despite its humble origins and single string, he blazes through guitar riffs that would stun any six-string instrumentalist. I can’t imagine the ingenuity and creativity it would take to rise above a life in the streets with an entirely hand-made, self-taught talent like that. All the members of Staff Benda Bilili have hard-won stories like this. One example is Bandleader Ricky Likabu who works many odd jobs, hustles alcohol and cigarettes from his tricycle outside clubs, and, according to the liner notes, still sleeps on cardboard in the streets.

But despite the hard-luck exterior image of the group, handicapped people in Kinshasa occupy a key role in the city (at least according to the album’s liner notes) running goods back and forth across the border (due to an exemption on customs taxes), and enjoying a reputation as fearless, well-educated, outspoken advocates for themselves and others less fortunate (the sheges, or street kids, whom they protect). This is reflected in the lyrics of Staff Benda Bilili, as they sing about the importance of polio vaccinations (their handicaps stem from polio afflictions as children), speak out against corporate control of food, present a call to action for Africans “Black man, get up, stand up, Africa is being destroyed./If Africans don’t unite they’re going nowhere/Africa belongs to Africans/Let us love and help each other,” and admonish those who would judge them, “Don’t judge the life of a man/one doesn’t choose one’s life.” The songs are sung in Lingala, and are heavily informed by Congolese music traditions which were themselves originally inspired by Cuban music that had traveled back to Africa. The more you look into the modern history of music, the more you see music turning in circles, traveling away from and returning to the source endlessly.

On the one hand the music of Staff Benda Bilili is a powerful testament to overcoming adversity, but on the other hand, it’s a more positive vision of life in the Congo. A sign that life goes on, no matter where you are or what your circumstances, and that hope unifies us all. Staff Benda Bilili are now touring internationally and have a critically acclaimed documentary of them making the festival rounds. In the song “Tonkara,” Staff Benda Bilili sing about chance, and how it can strike anyone at any time. “I once slept on cardboard/Good luck hit me, I bought myself a mattress/It can happen to you, to him, to them/A man is never finished/Chance can hit you without warning/It’s never too late in life/Someday I’ll make it too.” Think about the kind of chance that brought these street performers across the world and landed them brand-new careers as international stars. Now that’s an inspiring story.

Staff Benda Bilili: Moziki

Staff Benda Bilili Documentary

Roger Landu on the santonge

NOTE: This article first appeared in the Victory Music Review, a monthly publication for acoustic music lovers in the Pacific Northwest.

I was thinking this was gonna happen! Lafayette, the capitol of Cajun Country in SW Louisiana, has a rep for being one of the hottest music spots in the state, and not just for a whole new generation of young Cajun musicians. It's also got it's share of indie bands too. I got hipped to this thank to Valcour Records, who released the debut album from a little indie band called the Givers a year or so back. Now The Givers have blown up and are getting lots of great press and attention, and people are starting to realize that there's a lot of great music coming out of Louisiana's "Cajun Country."

This split EP, The Color Sessions,  is a great example of Lafayette's fertile music grounds, with indie-Cajun band Feufollet trading off songs with indie-rockers Brass Bed. Though trading off isn't so much the word, they're actually covering selected tracks from the other band's albums. Which is even cooler because it means that Feufollet sings in English and Brass Bed sings in Cajun French. But both bands are closer than you'd think. Their press release states that they've played together, lived together, shared a keyboardist, and shared plenty of drinks at the heart of Lafayette's music scene: the Blue Moon Saloon. It's not a huge stretch for either band, but it does make for a great album.

The fun here is that covering another genre brings out new sides to the bands. It's great fun to hear Feufollet tear through an indie-rock summer romp like "Bums on the Radio," just like it's surprising to hear Brass Bed totally nail a subtle Cajun song like "Le Berceuse du Vieux Voyager." So raise a glass with me to the fine young kinds in Lafayette, Louisiana, long may the bon temps roules!

Feufollet: Bums on the Radio


Brass Bed: Le Berceuse du Vieux Voyager