The New New Orleans Traditional Jazz

(From Kristi:)

     Ray Benson is at it again and won’t quit teasing me with that blissful tune, “Miles and Miles of Texas”.   We’ve crossed that border again from Louisiana to Texas.  Steve is snoring softly in the reclined passenger seat as I drive, making me happy because he is so comfortable in the safety of my skills.   I don’t ever sleep, no matter who may be driving.   Since infancy I can remember this.  I’ve always been keenly aware of my position as a passenger in a car.  I always feel I’m encased in a fragile metal bullet hurtling through space in search of a target.  But a few hours later the target was arrived at gently and we’re safely in Terrell, Texas for the night, headed for Tacoma in a few days.  Texas roads are wide and comfortably constructed with no sharp curves, steep mountains, narrow or shoulder-less passages, and traffic moves at a good pace. 

     Steve and I had precious little luck finding folks at Folk Alliance who were from our neighborhood.  The O.G.’s (current slang for old guys) we’ve known for so many years were not to be found, but we did run into a couple of youngsters from Tacoma.  The first was Forrest Beutel, a member of the long-standing bluegrass group, Barleywine Revue.   We had the pleasure of hosting him in our Private Guerrilla Showcase in our hotel room.   I recall the night he announced that he was quitting his day job to be a full-time professional musician.   That was while he was performing with the band at the Swiss Tavern in Tacoma about five years ago during one of their gigs.  He has been at it since then, playing as a single, a trio, and with the full five-piece band, at gigs all over the Puget Sound and even for a while in New Orleans.   Forrest has toughed it out as a banjo  player and singer, doing a steady stream of gigs in bars, busking, and private parties, and just recently took a job at Western State Hospital as a music therapist.  We felt the intimacy of his warm and robust musical presence belting out traditional-sounding original Americana in our hotel room.  Passers-by drifted in to listen to his energetic half hour of music.

     Then I happened into another young-ish Tacoma native, Jon Ramm, who was not a participant at Folk Alliance International.   He was performing with a band to a packed house at Maison on the Monday after the Convention in the French Quarter.  This was after I had begun to notice what was seemingly a renaissance of traditional New Orleans jazz bands.  I had seen two of them at the conference, and one in front of Walgreens on Canal Street.  What surprised me is that they’re a third generation of young people playing this music, much of which is around a hundred years old.  The first of the bands I saw was backing Maria Muldaur and she seemed as amazed at this phenomenon as was I.  Maria Muldaur was among those in the second generation, and she is far from young now.  I know of several people who came to New Orleans around fifteen years ago to experience the legacy of jazz and found none of it.  They did see plenty of good music played on the streets, but traditional New Orleans jazz was then nowhere to be found.  Jon tells me there are now about fifteen crack professional bands playing these tunes on horns, drums and banjo, with as much gusto and heart as they were first played in the early twentieth century.  I had the pleasure of seeing five different traditional jazz bands in varied locations; two in the hotel where the convention was being held, one on Canal street in front of a drugstore, and two more in bars.  By the standards of today’s popular musical lexicon these songs are by and large unknown.  There is a repertoire of songs known to this tight clique of players, which are complicated, sophisticated arrangements with multiple parts that include stops, harmonized horn slides, and harmonic hooks more, in between extended solo leads for each instrumentalist.  And in the cases of each band I saw expertise and passion rivaling the playing of those mostly dead guys who originated the music.  There’s no big money in playing this music.  And it's not like the baton is passed down from generation to generation of native musicians from New Orleans.  These young players are from all over the country.  The tradition of New Orleans is to be paid from tips for live music in bars and on the streets.  So how did this new revival happen?   Some speculate that it may have had something to do with Hurricane Katrina, when musicians who were spotlighted from a nation of sympathetic music-lovers, found themselves the center of attention by folks who wanted to associate New Orleans with traditional jazz.  In fact, encouraged by the public on social media, they set out to rescue and revive the remaining old guys who were victims of the hurricane, and to get them playing their traditional jazz again.  But I don’t know if that answers the question of how exactly this renaissance happened with the latest generation.   I haven’t figured it out but it’s some kind of happy miracle as far as I can see.  I only know that what I saw was a joy to behold.  So I stayed an extra day in town and got an interview with Jon to answer a few of my questions about his personal experience with it.

What is Creole?

(From Kristi):

     Today I attended a panel presentation on the subject of Creole, in the heart of its lifeline, New Orleans, with esteemed local hosts to provide context and clarity.  The moderator was Herman Fuselier, who projected his own perspective from being a park ranger at the local Atchafalaya National Heritage Center, as well as a radio host of locally-sourced music.  Also in attendance were three musicians on accordion and banjo, each with very impressive credentials both in the spheres of academia and their own local Creole family histories.   And I got some of what I wanted in trying to get at the mystery of all that encompasses the word Creole.  It’s a language with elements of French and English, which is not yet extinct.  It includes many kinds of very popular and thriving cuisine, which I have yet to sample here in its famous center of the universe.  It is music, some of which I had the great pleasure of hearing at the panel, played by studied, impassioned experts.  The music, food and the language appear to be carefully preserved by scholars and beloved by many.  All three elements of culture have distinct origins: Spanish, French, Haitian, African-American and German with a sprinkling of Italian.  And that said, it can’t be denied as its own distinct culture with multi-faceted beauty.   The panelists all claimed that it comes from a diaspora and that the racial mix is shared by all.  That last claim is no doubt based on the recently-discovered fact that we all share DNA that is racially mixed.   And Creoles by definition since antebellum days have been characterized as being of mixed race.  The Creoles on the panel were indeed of varied hues, and each could rightfully claim deep local roots in the culture, with easy familiarity in the languages, music and lore of all that is Creole.  One panelist briefly mentioned that Creoles emerged from subjugation.  I daresay almost no one in the white audience could guess all that was swept under the rug beneath that one short sentence.  And there’s the rub, I think.   It’s a sin of omission, as they say.  My reading of Alan Lomax’s edited version of Jellyroll Morton’s autobiography gave me some more information on how Creoles emerged from antebellum New Orleans.  When the slave-owning townspeople of New Orleans felt the need to clean up their sexual scandals they came up with a unique and insidiously evil plan.  They in some cases freed their concubine slaves who had light-skinned children  and allowed them to raise them with training in various crafts.  Eventually an educated, highly skilled sub-group emerged who were paid a living wage, and were convinced that they were superior to their darker contemporaries.  Needless to say they were the children of rapist white slave-owners.  Presumably light skin color was an embarrassment to their fathers who thus, as masters felt compelled to free them from slavery.  The old practice of divide-and-conquer worked, and some proud members of what is called the Creole culture believed themselves to be better than the rest of the local dark brown-skinned people for another hundred or more years.   Jellyroll himself believed it; he, among many others, never considered himself to be black and expressed pride in being superior to his darker peers.  When I as a young woman first ran into a Creole woman I found myself shuddering in disbelief.  I was an activities director in a nursing home and had an encounter with a resident who wanted me to know in no uncertain terms that she was not to be considered black like the nurse’s aides who took care of her.   She wanted me to consider her to be a proud Louisiana Creole woman of fine breeding.  She did leave an unmistakable impression on me.  While I can appreciate the panelists creating a newly finessed perspective on the subject, I have to wonder how many Creoles still have a lingering belief in their own racial superiority.  Something tells me those cultural undertones are still around.  And I don’t believe in sweeping them under the rug.  The argument that we all share mixed races in our DNA dilutes and diverts the sources of subjugation and oppression in racism I see all around me in New Orleans.  Positions of authority in this little world of hoteliers and folk music administration are still held by white people while positions of service in housekeeping and restaurant work are held by people of color.  As a culturally-assigned white person I feel a need to call it out.  Without knowledge of the origins of the many aspects of racism it will continue to sprout up between the cracks like noxious weeds in the fabric of American culture.  Somehow here in New Orleans it feels especially shameful.  This city joyfully claims to have given birth both to jazz and blues music.  Jellyroll Morton claimed to have single-handedly created jazz.  His roots were in the popular dance tunes he was required to learn making a living playing for Spanish and French dance halls.  To deny those as well as the African rhythmic contributions from Congo Square would be sins of omission in the great stories and lore of the roots of American jazz.  But to omit the story of subjugation in the mixed racial history of the Creole culture would an equal sin.  And as strange and evil as the story is, it’s essential to the understanding of American musical culture.  I believe that the continuing anxiety associated with living as a black American is enough of a burden and it is, to make an understatement, unfair to expect blacks to do all this explaining to the majority of white people who are ignorant of the many aspects of the sources of racism here. 

     The city beckons and repels me simultaneously.  Since adolescence I began to see the South as drenched in multiple layers of hypocrisy, beauty, and culture that made its way to my life in the North in countless ways.  I was drawn to the great and rich legacy of literature that attempted to explain it to me in works of Tennessee Williams among others.  I knew someday I needed to come here to experience it first-hand because in so many ways I had inherited what began here and lived with it for all of my life.  I’m glad to be here.  I’m still learning.

Sally and the Hurts

     

     They are a proudly amateur band from Manhattan, Kansas.  I love that they are amateur, and the professional attitude that they play with.  They go where they need to go to be seen, and to be  known.  They are a very original, and entertaining ensemble with a great three part vocal sound (female voices), and two fine instrumentalists playing over a solid rhythm section of guitar and string bass.

     She is 3^rd to perform in the song critique seminar at FAI.  She told me that she always does that particular event when she is at a Folk Alliance Conference.   I’m excited to see her.  She is introduced as Karen Schaeffer.  I know her as “Sally” of Sally and the Hurts.  She explains that the song she is about to sing takes place sometime in the middle ages, and the protagonist in the song is writing a letter to their lover, or is about to but does not have any ink.  This sounds a little crazy to me, but on the other hand, I’ve seen Sally and the Hurts and I know that this will turn out well.

     Sally and the Hurts played in our private guerilla showcase room on the first night that we had showcases.  I didn’t know what to expect.  I had liked the three part vocals on their YouTube, and I was not contacted by their manager (to my knowledge they have no manager), which was a plus for me.  The band had a saw player in it.  That was cool as far as I was concerned.

     Sally lives in Kansas these days, was born on the east coast (Delaware)  The song chugs along and I get a happy feeling listening to them.  The fiddle comes in with a snappy solo ending with a “hey”.  They slow it down and it feels like I am riding on a train along the East Coast.  Finally we are at home in “the snow”.  The room explodes in applause, and hoots.  Megan, the fiddle player says “we’re from Kansas”.  Sally then introduces “Honey Baby”:   “He was real good lookin’, had the right kind of pants for his legs.  He had a nice lookin’ beard all cut and manicured and everything.  He was a real purty feller.  But I realized it wouldn’t work out between us on account of he was already hitched.  I wrote him a song.  I don’t know his name, and he don’t know mine which is good because he’d probably have a restraining order.  It’s called “Honey Baby””H

.   The saw starts into a nice intro.  I’m kinda laughing at the lyrics as they are about Sally taking possession of a guy, and it doesn’t sound like she will take no for answer.  There is a saw solo with the fiddle answering and they are totally in possession of this audience.

     I’ve heard people play the saw before.  Sally’s saw player is one of the best that I’ve heard.  She has great intonation and is a very tasty player interacting with the fiddle to best advantage.  Sam, the string bassist is the only male in the “Hurts”.  He keeps a steady beat with solid bass lines.  Megan, the fiddle player is a journeyman, a very, very competent musician with her own look.

    Sally explained to us that the band all saved their vacation time and looked forward to coming to FAI 2020.  She jokingly says she “bribed them with candy”, explaining that FAI 2020 would be like an “indoor Winfield”, a festival which they attend every year in Kansas.  Sally and the Hurts have finished recording their debut album, “Wild Life”.  It is at the mastering studio now.  Look for it online soon.

     [from their promotional flyer]: "Sally and the Hurts is an American Roots band from Kansas.  Band members include songwriter Sally Vee on lead vocals and guitar, Megan Hurt on vocals and violin, Jaimiee Lee on vocals, violin and musical saw, and Sam Trotter on upright bass."

  

    

The Party is Over

FAI 2020 is over.  We'll be writing about it here for the next couple of weeks.  Last night the party didn't end until after 5 am.  We went to bed around 4 am.  The above picture is our room just after we got it set up.  This is Eric of Nefesh Mountain in the picture.

This is how it looks this morning.  The party is over.  We have a few days to enjoy New Orleans, so that's what we're gonna do.  To everyone who played in our room . . . you were awesome!  It was great to meet all of you and we look forward to meeting again somewhere down the trail. 

We are pretty much exhausted for now.  We are staying with friends from Tacoma In New Orleans for a few days.   It is my first trip to the South in a lot of years, and old memories keep springing to the surface.  I can’t help that, but I am reminded that the North is not necessarily a better place if you are black.

I had someone contact me on Facebook and ask me if I am the same Steve Nebel who used to loudly proclaim “higher, higher, HIGHER!” as he came up the stairs in the barracks in Goeppingen, Germany.   I told him that sounded just about right for those days.  I didn’t recognize his name but memories keep flooding back.  I will never forget the woman telling me “We don’t serve the colored with the white” in the barroom just over the border in South Carolina from Georgia.  I will never forget the little shacks out in the countryside of Georgia and someone telling me that “That’s how black people like to live.  They probably have a colored TV in that shack and you see the Cadillac parked by the house?”  It made me weep then, and remembering it and being in the South still does affect me that way.

So yeah.  I’m that guy.  It always hurt too bad and I was always looking for a pain killer.  In Germany I was still a Vietnam veteran.  Now that’s not an identity that I carry with any pride. It is not an identity at all for me.  If you think I can come down here to the South and just forget how I feel, you don’t know me.   I won’t pretend to be any kind of exemplary human being of any kind.  I can only tell you what my experience is and how I feel about it.  When I am told that New Orleans is not the “real” Louisiana, and everything is just OK here . . . well in Tacoma, WA things are not “OK” as far as race goes, and I don’t believe things that people tell me that I don’t see.

Well, in the meantime . . . we had a great FAI Conference.  We saw a lot of people from Far-West, and people from FAI that we only see once a year a well as meeting a lot of really fine songwriters and musicians in our private guerilla showcase room.  It is an excruciatingly white event though, and although there was an effort to make the event more diverse, it was still really white, and easy to sense the discomfort of the participants who were not.  There were a couple of things that happened in our room.  On Thursday night a young black man came into the room and sat through some performances.  Before he left he introduced himself to me and said he would get back to me.  He didn’t, but I found myself looking for him in the crowds at the hotel hoping that I could have a conversation, which I could not in a room where performers had five minutes between performances that were meant to give them an opportunity to connect with potential presenters, managers, and booking agents.  He did tell me, however, that he was a singer/songwriter and his stage name was “Tru”, and that was written on his badge by his given name.

Last night, at the end of the night, a young black woman came into our room.  She introduced herself as “Joy”, which was the name on her badge as well.  I was engaged in conversation with the last singer/songwriter who performed in our room, and also with a couple of other musicians.  We were just blowing steam at the end of a long weekend.  Joy was just kind hangin’ around, not saying anything until some of the guys left and then she asked if she could use our bathroom, and in fact explained (unnecessarily) that she wasn’t “drunk or anything”.  So that told me that she didn’t feel very welcome at this white event.  I don’t know how many white people came into the room (which was open to all) and used our bathroom during the four nights that we had a PGS room, but none of them asked, or doubted that it was OK touse our toilet.

These are not comments about New Orleans, or the South.  We had a conversation with some black women from Canada, just a “hi, how are you?  Enjoying the conference?” kind of a conversation. When we first tried to talk with them (waiting for the elevator) they ignored us.  When we finally engaged them they were relaxed, and easy to talk to about their home province of Alberta.  I have been glad to see that the conference is being more inclusive, and making an effort to make itself so.  Nonetheless I feel the presence of an elephant in the room. It is a big room, and it is a huge elephant.

I don’t know that I try hard enough to not be part of the problem.  I can smell the large hairy beast, and I hear him bellow.He is too many places.  When I smell him my eyes begin to water, and I have to cover my face to not show the world that I am weeping.  On the other hand it reminds me that I am human, and that is not always a bad thing.

    

Folk Alliance International New Orleans 2020

(From Kristi):
High feathered headpieces adorning mannequins I pass on Peter Street in New Orleans seem to tease and tickle me through the shop windows.  Elaborate glittery beaded costumes remind me that Mardi Gras is a year-round industry in the tourist areas of New Orleans.  Steve and I make our way back to the  Sheraton and I feel the need to remind myself of the wealth in the white bubble we’ve chosen here.  That means getting out of the Sheraton to walk around a bit during the precious few moments we have free from the conference.  The turquoise and purple shine and glitter in the shop windows are more of the accumulation of wealth evident in all directions.  

The marble columns in buildings here are topped with ornate Victorian arched facades cornered with bric-brac that shouts of old money.  The Nachez Riverboat rounds the bend within sight of my dinner table and it doesn’t look like much is left of the old revenue from the Mississippi River except tourism at this dock.  I remind myself of the fateful days of Hurricane Katrina when the Sheraton managed to avoid most of the terrible destruction, except for a few blown-out windows.  We’ve chosen to be here as journalists and venue hosts so we have two jobs, allowing ourselves the luxury of not entirely paying for our way to this conference out of  own pockets, yet New Orleans manages to pull money out of my pocket at every turn, for transportation, parking, internet access, beverages and food.

     This city’s architecture as well as its French history remind me of similar walks we made a year ago in Montreal.  We were also attending the Folk Alliance International Conference there.  Of course the connection is very real, with the Arcadian French migration coming directly from there to here 250 years ago.  But I’m otherwise ignorant of too much history to expound on any more connections from my shallow perspective, just looking around.  The narrow streets bordered by tall brick buildings between the major arteries keep putting me back in Montreal again, thinking of how they were no doubt intended for horse-drawn carts.  We don’t have streets like that in Tacoma.

     Last night we attended a concert by Maria Muldaur, backed by the New Orleans-based Tuba Skinny Band.  She was in fine form, playing a blues tribute to her influences, the iconic Memphis Minnie, Blulu Barker, and Sippie Wallace.  Her years of work honing her craft have made her as winning as ever, with a deeper, fuller tone to her voice.  It lends itself better than ever to her belting blues inflections enhanced by playful bumping and grinding.  Today we attended a panel workshop with her entitled, “Wisdom of the Elders”.  She described how early on in her days of the “Great Folk Scare” she joined the Jim Kweskin Jug Band and was mentored by no less than Sippie Wallace on the delicate business of “stage presence”, meaning how to bump and grind.  Her back-up band for this occasion is a six-piece horn-based group with a resonator guitar and washboard player.  She is very affectionately inclined toward them, mentioning that they seem to be as young people, finding a ghostly connection to the music that’s quite real in their own channeling of music that originated in days long gone.

     The panel included Cyril Neville.  Interviewer Gwen Tompkins drew him out to reveal that racism is still “the gorilla in the room”, showing its ugly head by making him as unwelcome as ever in his recent career travels.

     Being located in this capital of blues and jazz, Folk Alliance is doing due diligence acknowledging some of the sources and the performers of the great legacy of music here.  Tonight I saw a fine African American blues singer, Shakura S’aida, performing original tunes with her crack band which included the legendary black sacred pedal steel player, Chuck Campbell.  Notably she featured a song co-written with Keb Mo’ which is based on the legend that the devil can’t hear you when you moan.  Her gigantic voice lent itself to some beautiful moaning but the most remarkable part was taken by the pedal steel.  Chuck Campbell made it sound eerily like a voice moaning its way into a sort of keening pitch that made my spine tingle.

Day Seven . . . Driving to Opelousas - - Louisiana

It has been a momentous week.  We have already been included in the Top 25 Folk Music Blogs and we have only resumed writing this week.  Check them out if you haven’t already seen their list.

https://blog.feedspot.com/folk_music_blogs/

It’s day seven since leaving Tacoma and we’re within sneezing distance of the Big Easy.  It has been easy weather for driving since that first wet, icy, snowy, windy day.  We did a lot of driving long straight stretches today too.

     I don’t mind driving in a straight line, as I previously mentioned.  Once again it gave rise to song lyrics as the states rolled past my peripheral vision.  I don’t listen to music on the radio while I drive; songs just make their own playlists, visiting in my mind depending on where I am in my travels.
     Ray Benson kept repeating a joyful western swing refrain, crooning to me in his sexy baritone, “Miles and miles of Texas” for a couple of hours of straight driving.   Then we began to notice swamp beyond a muddy ditch and Rodney Crowell invaded with

“I gotta roll on between the ditches
It's just an ordinary story 'bout the way things go
'Round and around nobody knows but the highway
Goes on forever, that ol' highway rolls on forever.”

And if you can name that song you know what state we finally made it to.
    Steve somehow makes himself impervious to fear, or so it might seem on the surface, when embarking on a big trip.  He appears not to cross that threshold of terror into which I thrust myself while trying to prepare for every move into the unknown.
     In one of his most recent songs called “The Very First Time” he sings to me, “I’d go to the ends of the earth with you, I’d go to the end of the line”.  Those lines are inexpressibly dear to me.  Right now they’re quite real, too.  We have succeeded this wintry time in getting to a pretty far-flung corner of the continent from where we started.
     We are in Opelousas, Louisiana tonight after a nice drive from Wichita Falls, Texas.  Texas is a state that has a songwriting heritage, and Louisiana is close behind it so inevitably songs crept into my consciousness as we drove along.  You will see Kristi had thoughts of songs too.  "Lonesome, On'ry And Mean" by Waylon Jennings kept crossing my mind.  There were others, all country songs.  Although country music hails from every state in the union, and several countries besides ours I think of it as springing from the culture of the rural South.
     I love singing country songs, the more maudlin the song, the more I love ‘em. If a song works, then it works. That doesn’t mean that every successful song works for me though. I think there’s a good “folk” tradition that is inherently a part of country songs. As a matter of fact, there have been quite a few “folk” songs that have been turned into country hits over the years, and there have been quite a few country songs that in the long run have been adopted as part of the folk repertoire.

     One thing I have to say right here is, don’t take what I say too seriously. I’m just talking off of the top of my head ya know? I have been called a “folk” artist from the start. That in spite of all of my efforts to rock, or to be a country kinda guy. I don’t know that I have any musical authenticity happening for me. I think I am an authentic songwriter though. I just don’t have any loyalty to any particular genre of music. I don’t think of myself as any kind of a purist.

Amede Ardoin

     We have found that most states have information stations, places where you can pick up a map and a brochure or a hundred brochures, but mostly we are interested in the maps of the different states. We keep thinking that we can just set the GPS and go, but inevitably end up desiring a paper map of our destination. We are pretty digital, but sometimes we just hark back to our same old used to be.

Tomorrow. New Orleans.

Driving driving driving 2020

We’re on day seven of our trip from Tacoma to New Orleans.  Yesterday I took the wheel for four of our ten hours from Layton, Utah to Albuquerque, New Mexico.   Today I drove just two of the six hours from Albuquerque to Wichita Falls, Texas.   My mind drifted with the scenery to the act of driving, with scenes and roads of the past visiting my memories.  We followed from southern Utah into New Mexico with the worst winter weather thankfully behind us.  The clouds parted on a hazy day making the best of the pinnacle rocks not worth stopping to photograph yesterday.  Gradually as the Rocky Mountains gave way to the high desert vistas, the roads straightened out and dropped in
elevation.

Steve snored gently beside me as I contemplated the problems of a perfectly straight, dry, unimpeded freeway.   Much can be said in its favor, coming as I am from the colossally congested Puget Sound wherein a 30 mile I-5 freeway drive routinely takes more than an hour.   And after being stuck behind dozens of lumbering trucks up the I-84 turnpike in snow between Ontario and La Grande, Oregon, a deserted stretch is an undeniable luxury.   One might consider such a stretch to be ideal circumstances for travel.   And how exhausting can it be to sit in one spot doing nothing but staring straight ahead with hands and feet barely moving, one might ask?   Then the words of one of my late friends come to mind,   Jimmy Monteith-Towler, half of the duo JIVA.  He and his wife Val, two folk-song-writer pals from Blyth, U.K., drove to visit us a number of years ago.  Jimmy had bitter words to share about our American highway engineers.   He saw no good reason for them not to put curves and bends in every road.  From his perspective the opportunity was lost to try to keep drivers awake in so doing.   He emphatically thought that driving a perfectly straight road for any long distance is an invitation to disaster, and he hated our freeways.  Jimmy was a fine man and we dearly miss him.  But as I drive, I relish the memories of our American versus their British roads, curving endlessly into many days of lost confusion for us as we made our way to folk club performances.   Then I can truly appreciate this long and straight road as boring as it may get.  I can safely go 85 miles an hour in good weather with not a soul in sight.

And on this January day the years seem to peel back to times in my past when my family seemed to have the roads entirely to ourselves in our adventures out West.  I know if I return on this route in July I’ll be in company of heavy traffic, so these thoughts comfort me.  And I consider the roads of the far north I’ve traveled this time of year, encrusted with ice and swirling, packed snow.   Then I’m wide awake, surrounded by beauty and all is well in the great white West. 

Mike Beck - musician - entrepeneur

We are standing in the 5^th floor hallway of The Queen Elizabeth Hotel, famous for the bed in of John and Yoko Ono.  We see him walking towards us down the long hall, uncertain that our interview has finally arrived until his form fills out in silhouette, a tall, slightly overweight figure we are both quite familiar with.  As he gets close in the dim light his features come into focus and we greet Mike Beck who approaches, shakes our hand and apologizes for being late.  We are in front of his hotel room door, which has a sign that designates the room as “Chicago Mike’s Music Joint #513”.

He is “Chicago” Mike Beck to be clearer about his identity.  He explains that there are many Mike Becks in the USA, and there is even another “Chicago” Mike Beck.  I have come to think of him as the one and only Chicago Mike.  We first met in Oakland, CA in 2015 at the Far-west Folk Alliance International Conference.  This is the first conference we have attended that has not included a Chicago Mike PGS (private guerilla showcase).  We are curious about just what it is that keeps him going.

There are several regional FAI conferences every year as well as the big international conference that we are attending in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. We are members of Far-West, but there is also: Folk Alliance Region Midwest (FARM). Folk Alliance Region West (FAR- West), North East Regional Folk Alliance (NERFA), Southeast Regional Folk Alliance (SERFA), Southwest Regional Folk Alliance (SWRFA), and Chicago Mike Beck has booked pgs rooms at nearly all of them at one time or another.

As we settle into his hotel room Beck explains that it is the smallest hotel room in the hotel, and is certainly a fraction of the size of the hotel room that we have booked in a hotel down the street. He finds us chairs and we settle into the room where he does not turn on the lights as night is falling on a snowy and icy Montreal. I’m reminded that when we were working fulltime as musicians our life was considerably at night, and how I was used to the darkness, and in fact referred to myself as being part vampire, preferring not to open rooms to the light of day so I understand the lights out.

We talk informally for awhile and just happen on the fact that Beck started out publishing a magazine at Southern Illinois University, The Carbondale Nightlife with some college friends. We start the conversation around me noting his email address, “bigugly” and his explanation that it came from his partner in the magazine that he started, noting that his partner became little ugly, which is more diminutive than “big” ugly. Beck has a big voice, and a large presence in the room.

We begin to get a much larger picture of Chicago Mike as he explains that he also managed bands during and after college. He published an independent music guide as well as the arts and entertainment magazine. He explains that he called his management company “Big Ugly” and that people never forget that name. He majored in music business in college, is trained as a sound engineer, as well as the other aspects of music business. All along Beck has done music journalism, management, studio work and he explains that in the 90s he moved to Utah where he began to play music seriously.

We are there to interview Chicago Mike about his involvement with Folk Alliance International, and finally I ask him “when did you start doing Folk Alliance?” He says, “I think the year was 2004. It was in San Diego, the year that the building caught fire and everybody talks about the story, emerging with a guitar case completely charred, and black from fire. They opened the guitar case and the guitar was perfect condition.” With the image of a guitar emerging from a fire at an FAI conference we are totally engaged. Beck says, “It was that year that FAI started regulating private showcases. Back before that the private guerilla showcases were just that. There was the Folk Alliance event and then there was this pandemonium that would take over the hotel. You didn’t need arm bands. Anybody could have showed up and just gone room to room.”

I ask if Beck leaves the dates of the regional FAI conferences open so he can attend. He tells me he has staff that substitute for him if he can’t make the trip to the regional showcases. He says he has ten people helping him this year in Montreal. I ask him,” Are you able to pay all of your expenses?” He answers, “We cover most of the expenses. We don’t come away with anything, but we do help defray the costs of the people who help us host the rooms and the rental of the rooms. We’re not going into debt to host the rooms.”

Beck says, “I like having a purpose here. I love the community that comes out of it. My music career is on a different trajectory from the performers that I meet here but the people that I’ve met here have opened up the world to me. I spend a lot of time touring overseas and to be able to share those contacts, and there’s a woman by the name of Cassie Butcher who I met at Far-West last fall and she just got back from Japan and we have a mutual interest in touring Japan and so we’re trying to help each other.”

I ask Chicago Mike about his own music. He says his shows can include Gladys Knight and the Pips to Otis Redding to Frank Sinatra to Frank Zappa, to The Rocky Horror Picture Show Soundtrack. He says his own music is kind of “southern rock, country rock, Leonard Skynyrd, Eaglesy, John Hiatt that vein”. He says, “I play whatever I feel the audience is likely to enjoy at that moment. Sometimes that’s Chicago Mike Beck, sometimes it’s Stevie Wonder, or whatever”.

His organization is called “Film Access” so I ask him, “What do you do with video?” His face lights up and he grins as he explains, “. . . I shoot every one of my shows because you never know when you’re going to be brilliant, or when you have one of those moments when you capture on film that you can share with people on YouTube, Instagram or Facebook, or Instagram, whatever. Cameras are so inexpensive . . . I think every artist should be taping every show every time. I’ve got 30 terabytes of hard drives that I travel with that has all the video from the showcases. The video from Folk Alliance is just because there’s such amazing musical experiences here and I come to so many of these events that I want an opportunity to remember., the mission of Access Film Music is to help the artist get their music placed in movies or TV.”

Now that he is talking about Access Film Music, he is on a roll. He is talking with his hands and his voice is rising in volume. “We’ve been a partner with a film festival in Paris that happens in April or May for twelve years now. We are the official music for the film festival. We do a closing party on a riverboat on the Seine. It is introducing music makers to film makers.”

Beck continues, “Sixteen years ago a songwriter, Burt Hurner (still my partner in this enterprise), approached me and suggested we do a showcase during the Sundance Film Festival. I said, ‘That sounds like a great idea. We’ll get some music, try to get some film people out and see if we can help artists get music used in film.”

Chicago Mike offers up a gem, “There are more people making money off of musicians than musicians making money.” We gradually transition from Access Film Music to his music making career. He says, “Musically things have been rewarding. The shows have been great. I feel like I’m making decent dough at each of my gigs now, it’s been a building process. My year is half full already just by going back to the places I go every year. It’s been stressful. I’ve lost an eighteen-year relationship due to my being a touring musician.”

As Chicago Mike tells his story I’m reminded of the old joke; what do you call a musician who breaks up with his significant other? Homeless. One of Beck’s partners, Dennis, has been listening in on the interview. Beck asks him if he may use his guitar, picks it up and starts to sing:



“What do you call a guitar player ain’t got no girlfriend

Homeless is the answer well, here I am again

Don’t know if I’m goin’ big

Don’t know where I’ll go

Just a lonely guitar picker lookin’ for a home.”



Chicago Mike Beck sent me this followup from the road:



Hi Steve:

Great to be with you and Kristi in Montréal! Glad to hear you made it home safely! Apologies for the delay in my reply -- Gave a talk last night at Berklee College of Music in Boston and now finally have a chance to get caught up on emails.

Nashville is a totally friendly town in my experience, with a great co-writing scene. I recommend a visit highly! Nothing to be scared of at all. Perhaps consider coming to AmericanaFest in September -- Not as much love as FAI, but tons of amazing music (one night, I saw John Prine, Graham Nash with the Milk Carton Kids and Van Morrison!) and it's a great music community.

My studio CD was originally released in 2002, with a slightly improved version released in 2003. I've been in the studio since then, but since then, the only studio recording I've released was a single last Spring (link provided below). I'm still trying to finish the rest of the recordings for my followup release! I need to focus on that this Spring! I also have some studio time booked with producer Nico Outhuyse in Leeuwarden, The Netherlands in early May of this year. He's awesome and produced our recordings "(If) The Soup Is Good" and the new single "How The Hell Did I End Up Here?!".

I also released a live CD a few years ago. Here are links to studio and live recordings and some live video from the Sundance Film Festival a couple years ago:



Chicago Mike - Video - Live @ Sundance Film Festival

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1A0K-wK0N8VwkjPHxq1ptJtGEmn1XfSEM/view?usp=sharing

"Chicago Mike Beck" studio album https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LQgXeWyEz8fNukawqJvMLP056fDD0YMO/view?usp=sharing

"Chicago Mike Live Bootleg"

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BiCM_-ykaVmr1-XQln-XHoUqD2b8E1Re/view?usp=sharing

New single, released May 2018: How The Hell Did I End Up Here?!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MIqcxqiGX55kb6X0I3n5E1PYklki-Bke/view?usp=sharing

. . . Chicago Mike Beck plays a Line6 Acoustic Variax guitar. There are 132 people in Beck’s band, although they’ve never had a performance where they were altogether, and they live all over Europe and the USA. He says, “A recent gig in Salt Lake City featured sitar and an amazing didgeridoo player! Totally unexpected and unplanned.:

When you see that Chicago Mike Beck is in your town, go and see him. You’re guaranteed to have a lot of fun, and if you’re not depend on Mike having it for you.



Steve Nebel 3/4/019

What is, will be, was?

I’ve been thinking about what is, was, will be folk music.  It brings back memories of my family gathered around the piano singing songs . . . badly but with gusto.  I remember my father singing songs in the car.  He had favorites, some of them folk songs like “The Frozen Logger”, or “The Old Settler’s Song”.  For some reason he had a fascination with the American Civil War and had learned some of what would have been popular songs during that time period.  He used to sing, “Just Before the Battle Mother” (not sure of the real title), “I’m a Good Old Rebel Soldier”, and other songs.  Maybe it’s because he was born in Morgantown, West Virginia.  His family was from Illinois though.

Personally, out of the family songs my favorites were stories maybe with a twist of humor in them.  The lyrics were what was important, and nobody in my family was a particularly good singer.  My mother played the piano although not with any virtuosity and the only time she played it was when she was feeling a little down.  She would go down in the basement where the piano was and play old hymns.  We never bothered her when she would do this, and I suspect that a bit of that banging away on her mother’s old upright piano made her feel a bit better about her role as a woman in the 1950's and 1960's. 

My parents were both conservatives and I’ll never understand why they loved the Weavers, but they did.  Mom also liked the occasional country and western song.  My father was most enamored of classical music, and mom seemed to feel like she had to make a little fun of herself when she put on Tennessee Ernie Ford, or started singing Ray Charles “Born to Lose”.  Radio in those days (I’m sure I’ve already dated myself), and where I am from was a variety.  The radio might play “Jack to a King”, “Ring of Fire”, then switch to “Maybelline”, or “Johnny B Good” just before they played a Perry Como, or a Frank Sinatra hit.

My sister became a Peter, Paul, and Mary fan, bought one of their records and although I don’t think that most of my family were hard core fans of the likes of “The Kingston Trio”, or “The Brothers Four” I took to them readily, and memorized Smothers Brothers songs and bits of their comedy routines.  Someone brought a hootenanny to town and I remember attending it in the high school gymnasium.  I think that’s where I first heard Hoyt Axton’s “Green, Green” and was fascinated with the idea of going away where the “grass is greener still”.

Through all of this musical culture seeping into my bones I never did think of myself as a singer, or musician, didn’t play an instrument, didn’t join the school choir, or band.  I just liked what I liked, and that included a healthy dose of rock 'n roll.  I did apparently like to sing to myself.  I don’t really remember.  I had my first taste of musical performance when I joined the army and started singing a capella with another soldier who sang harmony with me.  I don’t know why, or even how we managed it now but I had memorized some songs and he sang along with me.  I think I was like my mother, singing because it felt good, made me feel better and believe me, as a young man in Army basic training, I needed something to make me feel better.

Singing was, and still is what music is all about to me.  I just like it, like to do it, and the better I do it, the better it feels.  I like to be telling a story, or detailing a feeling.  I don’t pick out, or write virtuoso material.  Truthfully, I’m not certain what constitutes “folk” music.  I think I remember Woody Guthrie defining it as music for the folks.

I’m telling a bit of “my” story.  We are safely in Pocatello, ID where we are visiting friends.  I won’t go into detail, but Kristi has known Becky Hardy for a long time now, and they immediately fall into intimate conversation. 

Becky with her snow shovel

                                                         Kristi tells a funny story.

It was an easy drive here.  There is snow along side the road between La Grande, Oregon, and Pocatello, Idaho but the road was mostly bare and dry except for a few places.  We have been listening to an audio book while we drive.  I take a few pictures, but road pictures fade into more road pictures with minute differences.  I want to have my camera capture the colors, textures, and shapes that occupy my mind as we drive along.  It doesn’t happen easily enough.

Tomorrow we are playing in Utah.  That will be interesting.  Then it is on to Albuquerque, NM.  I am thinking about International Folk Alliance daily.  I get email from different arms of the conference, and we are looking forward to seeing, and hearing the many fine acts that we have booked in our PGS room.
From Kristi: The drive was acutely windy.  At many moments in my movements in life, song lyrics involuntarily visit my subconscious.  Here's a folk song name-this-tune test for you from the song that haunted me on this drive:

'Way out on the windswept desert where nature favors no man
The buffalo found his brother at rest on the sun-baked sand
He said, my brother, what ails you? Has sickness got you this way?
But his brother never said, for his brother was dead
Been dead since way last May

(yodel) Oh-de-lay-ee, ah-ee. oh-ay-ee."

Sadly, I cannot deliver this song as I am hopelessly yodel impaired.  I consider it a disability.  And BTW, can you name the songwriter?

On Our Way to New Orleans and FAI 2020

We are headed to New Orleans for the Folk Alliance International Conference.  We are driving in the interest of keeping our carbon footprint as low as we can.  I do wonder about our state of mental healrh as we start out in winter weather. 

Our plan for today was to get to Baker City, Oregon from Tacoma, Washington where (as most of you know) we live.  It seemed like an easy drive.  We had done it in the other direction in what I thought was somewhat fluke-y conditions.  We had ended up in Baker City because the highway out of there was closed.  I don’t even remember what our travel goal was for that night, but I distinctly remember that the highway was blocked when we got there.  We had no choice.  We were just lucky we got there in the nick of time to get a motel room before all the rooms were gone.

If I’m truthful with you I have to say that I’m not generally familiar with these kinds of conditions.  I have driven over Snoqualmie Pass in all kinds of weather.  There have been times when the pass was closed, but usually just for a few hours at most.  Perhaps I’ve just been lucky with that.   I’ve made trips south down I-5 in the winter and never had any blockages.  There was a detour once for a mudslide.  The most memorable was the ice storm of 1995 when we were booked in Forks, WA for NYE.  It was like we were in one of those computer games where you keep falling down wells, and having buildings collapse.  I won’t go into the details.  By now you’d suspect that the first sentence of this paragraph is a lie.

What I’m trying to get to is the fact that we are in La Grande, Oregon tonight.  We are not in Baker City.  Fate has thrown its’ dice and stopped us dead in our tracks.  We stopped here to fill up our gas tank, which was near empty, and when we went to the freeway entrance to get back on, the freeway entrance was blocked with those plastic cones, and as it turns out is still blocked to my knowledge. 

We also were required to put on chains today.  That’s a new one for me.  It has been literally YEARS since I have had to use chains.  That was to get over Snoqualmie Pass and I tell you I did not drive anything on Snoqualmie Pass today that really required me to be wearing chains.  I have driven in much worse conditions without them.  I suppose it was a good “Experience” though in that it gave me an opportunity to use a perfectly new set of chains, and was a good refresher course in how to install chains on our car.  It was as much work as you might think.  I will tighten them better if there’s a next time.

I have looked at the FAI schedule, and both Kristi and I are stoked about the workshops they have planned.  I haven’t looked at the official showcase schedule yet, but we always love those.  I am also excited about running a PGS room this year.  We have some great acts booked in our room, and it will be great to see them close up and personal, and to make some new friends.

Tomorrow we are going to drive to Pocatello, Idaho to visit our friends, Becky Hardy and David Van Hemert.  Kristi went to the University of Idaho with Becky many, many long years ago and they are still best of friends to this day.  Kristi tells me that it is supposed to be better weather tomorrow.  I haven’t looked yet.  It will be what it will be.

One thing about traveling in different seasons is that things look a lot different in the winter than they do in the summer.  That is not to say that they look better in either, but it is interesting to experience places at different times of the year.  Today we were driving somewhere near Umatilla and we hit the top of a hill and looked out at the hills with a smattering of snow on them across a river valley.  I don’t exactly know where we were, and by the time I got a camera out it was too late to take a picture, but I will remember that vision for a long time.

In the interest of a spousal opinion, I have known for some time now that the decision to drive the most direct route from the relatively mild (though today it’s snowing) Pacific Northwest coast to New Orleans in the heart of winter is taking pretty much total leave of our senses.  But in making a ridiculously microscopic and fairly impossible, useless study of predicted weather outcomes, I talked myself into believing a few inches of snow on one day of the trip shouldn’t be any problem, after our decades of driving through all kinds of sub-arctic snowstorms in the far north west of the continent.   Wrong.  As of now my microscopic study (on local trip websites) tells me these few inches have created closures in three spots on this interstate freeway within a fifty-mile perimeter.  People are crashing their cars all over the place.  But to quote Scarlett O’Hara, “tomorrow is another day”.   The Rocky Mountains await us and like an eager sled dog I’m ready and energized to go.