------------- Big Water --------------

We arrived in New Orleans for the 2020 Folk Alliance International Conference and drove straight to the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Big Easy. We brought a lot of stuff with us, which we got out of the car and onto one of those hotel carts, as well as having our own cart full of stuff. I left Kristi with all the “stuff” and drove off to find parking. It took me awhile, but I found a place that was $20 a day cheaper than the hotel parking and walked back to the Sheraton. These first minutes were spent soaking in the fact that we were in New Orleans where we had never been before but had heard so much about. Kristi commented that it was a bit like Montreal, but with no snow.

Next on the agenda was getting registered for the Folk Alliance International 2020 Conference. Someone commented before we ever got to the line that we would be impressed with the length of it, and indeed, it was a pretty long line. It wasn’t long before we were having a chat with a large fellow with a big smile who was in line behind us. As you might expect at such an event, he had a colorful name. He introduced himself as “Big” Water, but you can call me “Big”. He is a big guy (hence the name). As it turned out, he is from Portland, Oregon which we think of as one of our neighboring cities even if it is a couple of hours away from us by automobile. Before we got through the line Big was chatting away with everyone within talking distance of him. After registration I took a moment and asked him if he’d like to be interviewed for our blog. He agreed, and here are the results. Big is a little bit awkward. On the other hand, it’s a very friendly thing.

Big: “I have many friends who call me Big.” Steve: What brought you to the FAI Conference? Big: Just kind of a non-sequitur through a guy I met at Burning Man. Burning Man is out in Reno, I'm sure you've heard of Burning Man. It's what I call the creative Olympics of the world. It’s artists from all over the world bringing big art, small art. The way they have their situation dialed last year 75 mayors from around the country came to Burning Man to see the layout of this infrastructure and to see the workings of how the city works. Because it’s a city, it’s 80,000 people. It’s not small. and in the middle of the city they have a center camp area. That’s a main common area for everyone. In that area there’s a stage to perform on, so every year I do a set, a Big Water Set. Five years ago, I met my friend Bruce. He's an attorney from Memphis with purple hair. He comes up to me after my show, gives me a hug and tells me, “I really enjoyed your set.” We sort of befriended each other and it's over the past five years straight I’ve been going to Burning Man, and every year he comes to my set so we just kept talking, talking, and trading info and I have a friend from Clarksdale, Mississippi who grew up in Clarksdale who kept telling me, “Come to Clarksdale to come see the Blues Fest, come see this fest!”. So last October I went to Clarksdale for the Delta Blues Fest just to see, (I wasn’t playing) and I got ahold of Bruce ‘cause I was flying out of Memphis and he lives in Memphis. We met and he does a radio show on WEVL there every Wednesday. It’s an acoustic/folk program. He had me on the show for a couple of hours. I got to play some tunes, and talk. We sat in the radio station and had a blast. Then I went down to Clarksdale and saw the Delta Blues Festival, and that was great. I got to play a couple of places. Then they invited me back to the Juke Joint Festival in April. Bruce and I became new friends. I’ve been out of the country for two months. I just got back on Saturday. Two weeks ago, he wrote me and told me “You should come to this Folk Alliance festival thing in New Orleans’. I said, ‘OK, what’s the dates?’ I looked at the dates changed my flights and got a hotel and he said, ‘if you can come, I’ll buy your ticket and sponsor you’. He bought my ticket and sponsored me. He's a previous FAI board member, and his wife runs the Blues Museum in Memphis. So, they’re both here; they just got in last night. And that's my introduction to Folk Alliance International. I have several friends who are artists who have been here. I’ve got a friend here from Ohio. She has showcases tonight, and tomorrow night, and over the weekend. I’ll see her. I’ve heard about FAI, but I’ve just never been here before.

Steve: “I'm just curious what you do for money? Obviously, you get paid for playing music, but it’s expensive to buy a roundtrip plane ticket to Germany”.

Big: “Yeah I'm blessed, and I’m funded. I am not a trust fund kid. My stepfather passed away about two years ago, so money came from the company, from the business. My mom has been my business partner for years. When I started doing this 35 years ago, with a year left to go in college I went to Germany for two months and stayed for three years. “I said, hey mom I’m going to be a ski instructor.” She said, “Oh great, you’re gonna teach skiing, awesome.” Then I started singing out in bars and then ended up moving back to the states and kept playing, writing songs, playing out and decided that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to pursue music. My mom says “great”. 30 some years later she still supports what I’m doing. Whatever I decide to do, I take seriously. I taught skiing for 20 years. I got my master’s in teaching skiing. Once I grab onto something and take it seriously, she educates herself and becomes a fan of what I do because she’s that kind of a mom.”

Steve: “Have you ever been signed?” 

Big: “No, I’ve never been signed.” Steve: “Have you ever looked for a record deal?” Big: “Not in the ways I probably should. I don’t mind being under the radar. I don’t want to go out and play 200 shows a year. At this point in life I don’t want to do that. I’m 57 years old now. 30 years ago, if I’d have gotten signed, well that would be a different story. I book all my own stuff. I’d like to do more than I do which would be getting help, obviously, but label help? I have 5 albums out that I have produced, written, and paid for. I haven’t done a crowd fund. I’ve always worked my ass off to pay for my records. I was a gardener for 9 years in Lake Tahoe, and San Francisco. Most of my recording has been done in Ohio, because I’m from Ohio. My engineer that I used on my third album needed a gardener so I would do his gardening to pay for time. When he needed a French drain on the inside of the foundation of his house, I worked in a crawl space digging trenches for three weeks to pay for my record. I’ve never been an ‘ask for help’ kind of person. It means more to me when I do things this way. I’m certainly not averse to help in any way for booking things, for advice, management, any of those things. I’ve just been bouncing and pinballing my way through these things I do. I have a great buddy who I play music with. We’ve been playing together for 26 years since I started in Lake Tahoe. He sings, he writes, we both play, do harmonies. We are both guitar players.”

Steve: “How long have you been in Portland?” 

Big: “Been there for eleven years now. I had a girlfriend. We went all over the country looking for where we were going to live. She’s an actress, I was in music. We went to East Coast, Florida, Savanna, Georgia, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Nashville, Boulder, Co, Denver, Nashville, San Francisco, Seattle, LA and Portland was the only place out of all that travel where we both did a double thumbs up. We were on the road for six months looking for a place to live. We were together for a year then we broke up. She’s still there. She’s in film. She produces, and acts. She’s killin’ it.”

Steve: “Do you think you’ll stay in Portland?”

Big: “You know, I’m not a big city person but I’ve got a great friend base there, I’ve got a good fan base there, I’ve got a killer studio downtown that allows me to leave and go away and not worry about being away from home when I want to travel so yeah I don’t see me leaving Portland. I don’t want to move to Seattle. I’ve lived in San Francisco. If I moved somewhere, I’d move where there’s no people.”

Steve: “What I’ve listened to has a very strong feeling of commerce. Do you think about that when you write, or does it come naturally for you to write in genres and with subject matter that has a broad appeal?”

Big: “It’s not something I strive for because it’s not the way I think. I write whatever comes out and I’m inspired by everything. I’m inspired by the stuff around me in my studio. I’ve got a trainyard in back, I’ve got a river in front, I’ve got downtown, a beautiful place where I’m at, and I’m inspired by nature. I’m inspired by love. I’m inspired by anything that’s on the plus side and positive. When I sit down, I’ll just start playing stuff and it just comes out. I don’t think of whatever particular genre it is when I’m writing it. That’s maybe why it comes out in that broad way. It’s not something that I think about or shoot for. I just comes out that way.  I think it’s from having a broad background as a kid listening to rock, disco, classical music, old school crooners from my mom’s record collection. I was in amazing choirs when I was in school. At that time music, sports were really great in schools.”

Steve: “Is your friend who you work with a very big influence on you? You’ve had a long association with him.”

Big: “We’ve never written a song together. We’ve never really tried to write together. He likes working on his own. He’ll bring a song in and we’ll work on it. We’re open to each other’s suggestions. Do we have an influence on each other? Does he have an influence on me? Yes. Do I have an influence on him? Yes. We have an influence on each other, but he writes his songs and I write mine.”

Steve: “It can be dicey sometimes letting the people you work with know that you aren’t happy with something that they are doing. How do you deal with issues as a bandleader?”

Big: “When I play with the band I recognize that I don’t play the drums, I don’t play the bass, and I don’t play guitar like my partner does so I don’t tell people what to play because I don’t want to crush their creative inspiration. I will tell my players what not to play, but I don’t tell them what to play. I’ll tell them, play that thing you were doing, not the one you’re doing now etc. (Gives me a demonstration of how a conversation with a bandmember goes)

Steve: “It’s very hard not to quash someone’s creative input.” 

 

Big: “When I’m playing with other people, I make sure that their input is valued, and let them express themselves how they express themselves.”

Steve: “I noticed that FAI made a point of listing their genres as folk, roots, and blues. They have made it very clear that they are open to a broad array of genres. I’ve seen hip hop here, a folk band using sampled instruments.”

Big: “Isn’t that the modern thing? Cross genre stuff? Mixing elements together. I love that. “

Steve: “I’m not certain. I’ve never been a purist myself.”

Big: “There’s more than one way.”

Steve: “Have barrooms been your main venue that you played?”

Big: “Barrooms, festivals, house concerts, cafes, private parties, whatever I can find. Honestly, a few years ago I just stopped booking music for money and started booking music at places, or opportunities that I wanted to play at. It changed everything. The shows were great. I got a little money in my pocket. It wasn’t the same mentality. It wasn’t the same intention.”

Steve: “We are on the same page. When we were working full-time playing music, we couldn’t do this kind of thing. We inherited a little money, and without that we couldn’t be here.”

Big: “Absolutely. If I didn’t have an inheritance, I couldn’t do this. I’ve always had to work before this. I’ve done every kind of job you don’t want to do in the past.”

Steve: “You’ve been in Portland for eleven years. Are you an established member of the Portland music scene?”

Big: “I wouldn’t say I’m an established member of the Portland music scene. The Portland music scene is quirky and funny to me. You’re either in the little group, or you’re not in the little group. I’ve never been good like that. I just do my own thing. I have a following. I have friends, and fans who come out and support what I do. I’ve got friends and people who travel so much. I can go to Northern California, I can go down to Southern California, I can go to the Midwest, I can go to Montana. I haven’t been to Seattle so much, but I have played there a couple of times. I’ve been invited to great festivals to play with some great musicians, sit down with Grammy winning producers, Grammy winning writers, but something always seems to not work out. I don’t know if I sabotage it somehow. I don’t feel like I’m in the circle of where everybody else is at. I am not always the best at participatory music unless I am playing my own songs. I don’t do cover songs, and I play guitar to accompany myself. It may be that narrow focus that keeps me doing my own thing. I try not to think about it too much and just try to keep doing what I’m doing.”

Steve: “What do you see for your future?”

Big: “Oh, absolutely. For me? I’d love to do another album. I’m trying to finish writing some new songs until I have enough to take to the studio. I’m maybe halfway ready. I have a crazy idea for a project. I’ve got an old 1968 vintage trailer. I have an old Ford truck that I bought when it was new. My truck is red, my trailer is white, and blue. I did a red, white, and blue tour a couple years ago in 2015. My trailer’s name is Lucy. I want to take my truck and Lucy and do a “Live from Lucy” tour. I would have Lucy decked out in cameras and recording equipment and travel around the country to these places where I know touring musicians and Grammy winning people and anyone who will take a minute to sit in my trailer and talk to me, and play a song with me or write a song with me or whatever would come out of it and do a sort of John Lomax kind of deal.  We’ll see what we come out with on the backside. Maybe a new album, or a documentary would come out of it. I’m not sure what would come out of it. Right now, I’m looking at budgets, time etc. I have the resources and the people to go get in touch with. It would be a two-month project. I would collect information and send work to a couple of people who would send the daily recordings to someone to have them start to process it in the studio. I’m a grass roots-y guy. I like face to face. I like seeing people. I like hugging people. I like the tactile part of personal interaction. I’m a loving person. I prefer that to a digital relationship. You can interpret the dialog in a different way in person. “

Big Waters is a really friendly guy. If you see him, be sure to say hello, get a big hug, or if you’re lucky get him to sing you one of his songs, or even better, catch an entire show. In the meantime you can catch his latest schedule at: https://www.bigwater.cc/ or on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/aguagrande/

For more folk music blogs see:  https://blog.feedspot.com/folk_music_blogs/

Interview with Jon Ramm, A Professional New Orleans Traditional Jazz Trombonist By Kristi Nebel

I chose to interview Jon Ramm because he’s a local Tacoma person who moved to New Orleans, having graduated from Stadium High School and performed in the well-known jazz band there.   Back then he went by the name of Jon Ramm-Gramenz.  I had the pleasure of watching him play trombone with a crack band in a packed house on Frenchman Street in the heart of the French Quarter in New Orleans.   He’s making his way along with others in this elite clique of traditional New Orleans jazz players who are good enough to earn a living from tips in the bars in the city.  It should be noted that the songs these players know have been around a hundred years or more and are not in the popular lexicon of reference for people of their generation.  By today’s standards they’re obscure.  I found the complexity and sophistication of the arrangements interesting as they relate to the dedication and time needed to learn them given their obvious unfamiliarity to most people.  I got curious because for a long time traditional New Orleans Jazz was “OG” music, for and by old guys.  And by now most of the old guys have died off.  I know of some people from Tacoma who came to New Orleans to experience traditional jazz and never heard it.  This was about thirteen years ago. So I wanted to hear the perspective from a newer generation of players reviving its popularity in this city of its source.  They’re the newest “comeback kids” for this music.

Question: How did you decide to become a musician?

I had a small music scholarship to go to Lewis and Clark College in Portland but I only intended on minoring in music.  I wanted to keep playing but certainly didn’t think that I’d begin playing professionally.  I started studying with this drummer by the name of Alan Jones.  I was having weekly lessons with him.  Then one day I said, “I think I’m ready.  I want to play professionally.  I want to be a professional musician.”  And he said, “You’re dumb.  No, you don’t want to do that.  I’m going to ask you next week and we’ll see what you say.”  And he kept asking me week after week and I kept saying, “Yes”, and he kept telling me I was stupid, that’s ridiculous, why would anyone do that?  And then after a month I kept saying “Yes”, and he said, “Okay, I believe you.  Now we can work on that.  Let’s do it.”  And so he started helping me learn how to be a professional musician.

What instrument was he teaching?

Well, he was just teaching me music in general.  He had a very sort of wholistic approach to play.  I wasn’t taking trombone lessons.  But we were studying transcribing Miles Davis solos, playing in a combo with other of his students.  We learned how to analyze a solo or a song, transcriptions, playing in a band, how to lead a band, all the nuts and bolts of how to be a professional musician.  I’d already learned how to play the trombone.

Was this through Lewis and Clark College?

I met him through Lewis and Clark College.  He subbed for Dan Balmer, who was the combo instructor at Lewis and Clark.  I called him up after I graduated and started studying with him because he has the Alan Jones Academy of Music and he teaches – like there’s a trumpet player in New Orleans who studied with him, a sax player who lives in New York who’s killing it right now who studied with him, so he teaches everybody.

What instruments do you play and what’s your favorite and what was your first?

I started playing the piano when I was six and then stopped.  I started trombone at ten and never really picked the piano back up again.  I have a drum set that I like to bang around with but I’m not very good and I’m very loud.  So I really just play the trombone.  I always tell people that the trombone is such a bitch of an instrument that it’s plenty of work just as a singular focus.  I don’t have any time to learn any other instruments.

How was the band teacher at Stadium High School instrumental in your interest in music?

He was great. He was young he was energetic, he was a really great band director.  Band was really fun.  All my friends were in band and it was an awesome time to hang out with my buddies and play music.

So he was somewhat pivotal in moving you toward music as a career?

YEAH, but I didn’t really start obsessively practicing seriously until later in college.  I’ve always had sort of a natural talent and I’ve been able to kind of ride that a little bit so I didn’t have to work as hard as maybe other people may have had to.  But when I really decided to start to work hard that’s when it all started to change.

Did the experience of playing in the Stadium jazz band have an impact on your interest in traditional jazz?

No, though it got me down the path of listening to and playing jazz, and because I was in the jazz band  my parents enrolled me at the Stanford jazz camp which I think is a pretty big deal.  {note: for more information on the Stanford Jazz Workshop: https://stanfordjazz.org/}  A lot of times I look back and I wonder how I really learned to play jazz.  It must have been there, and in middle school and high school.

Have you had to learn a specific repertoire to do what you do?

Yeah, for sure.

Do you think musical literacy is essential to learning it?

No, I don’t.  I think it helps.  Because I studied music theory at college level, and harmony, I have these tools I’m very lucky to have, it puts me at an advantage.  I can do a lot of things that people who are learning songs by ear, can’t.  I can transcribe solos quickly and make charts for my band-mates; I can write out a song, with the chord changes.  But you don’t necessarily need to do that to learn a song.  You can listen to a recording until you have the melody and I think that’s what a lot of people do.  But in today’s day and age you can find the sheet music for almost any song, on line.  I like to have the sheet music so if I can’t find it I’ll transcribe it from the earliest recording I can find.  And then I’ll play along with the recording.  So I still like to know the source of the material.  But some songs I just learn on the bandstand.

The songs I heard you playing last night are traditional New Orleans jazz-based.  They have stops that are so many bars in, slides that are so many bars in, and solos that are seemingly pretty improvised so I have to wonder if everybody is always on the same page counting bars to know when to hit that stop or that slide and that signature hook?

YYYes and no.  I wouldn’t say people are counting bars.  You get to the point where you just sort of know instinctively, intuitively, in the form of the song where something happens.  So, like in middle school I was counting bars.  I used to count bars.  But at some point you’re freed from it and you just sort of know where in the form of the song that bar happens.

Do you ever get frustrated with band members who are illiterate when you’re counting on everyone to be totally in the pocket?

I don’t play with a lot of people who are musically illiterate.  I’m lucky that I get to play with super-high quality musicians almost all the time.  So there aren’t that many times where I’m on the stage and thinking, “Man, we are all in different universes right now”.  It does happen.

I’m asking because I read the autobiography of Jellyroll Morton and that’s where he had a division with some of the top players in town.  He left town.

Yeah.

He wrote down his licks.

In the traditional repertoire there is a way that people in New Orleans play them.  There are little trombone parts that you kinda have to play or know where they are so you can at least sort of hint at it.  And that comes from the source recordings but also just playing enough gigs in town to know that.  You know some songs you play not at all like the source recordings and some songs you play just like the source recordings.

The source recordings are almost a hundred years old!

Well I know and you hear a black vein and we’re not; we’re playing a modern jazz vein, but with these songs that are a hundred years old.  The band you saw last night is a really unique example in New Orleans.  Like if you saw any other traditional jazz band it would be way more traditional.  And they’d probably play all the parts.  Certain people don’t hire me because I sometimes get bored playing tired old parts.

Do you feel acquainted with all the New Orleans jazz players?  And is there a sense of community there?

Yeah, there definitely is.  There are cliques.  We’re the only band I know of that are taking the music to that sort of universe.

In that vein, it seems to me there’s a kind of renaissance of traditional New Orleans jazz.  Do you think that’s part of it, to play the music like the original source?

Yeah.  I don’t really know exactly how it happened.  I think it was around thirteen years ago there was a traditional jazz revival and that’s when all the younger people started playing the music here.  But there’s a lot of young cats you can find in New York playing traditional jazz and probably in every city now.  And a lot of them are dressing the part and even playing period instruments.  Like, instead of playing trumpet they’ll play cornet like Louis Armstrong did.

How do you think that renaissance happened?

I feel like I knew at one point.  Somebody definitely told me their theory of it.  But I’m not really sure how it happened.  I just know that when I got here in 2012, everyone was playing trad.  And I had begun listening to it before I moved to New Orleans because I was obsessed with New Orleans and I liked its brass band music, soul and funk.  So when I got here I knew a couple of songs and I could just jump in and sit in with bands full of people who were my age.

Did you find there was any snobbery?

Not at that time.  It felt so welcoming.  A friend of mine, Byron Asher, was playing clarinet in a band and I went and I sat in.  I’ve always had a really good ear so even if I don’t know the song I can pretend I do.  I sound like I know the song.  And I remember after the gig talking to Byron and asking, “Do you think I could…do you guys do this full-time?”  And he said, “You’re gonna be fine.  You’re gonna be able to do this full-time with no problem.  Don’t even worry about it.”  And he was right.  Because there were a lot of young people playing trad and I formed a band pretty quickly after I arrived with some friends of mine that I no longer play with because we went our separate ways.  We were playing traditional jazz all over the world for a little while.

Tell me the name of the band you played in last night and who is the bandleader.

Aurora Nealand is the leader and “Aurora Nealand and the Royal Roses” is the band name.

Tell me about the award you won!

The Best Traditional Jazz Band is an award we won twice over the years; first in 2015 right after I joined the band.  [Then later in 2017}.  I was at the Big Easy Awards Ceremony with the drummer Paul who had been in the band since they started in 2008. 

We both thought the drummer has a lot of little lickety-split little licks that are very genre-specific and tight as can be.  What’s his name?

 His name is Paul Thibodeaux.  He’s the only one in the band who’s actually from New Orleans.

What’s the name the CD you recorded with them?

It’s called “Comeback Children”.  I’m so lucky that I get to play every week with Aurora.  I love the band so much.  [To buy: https://www.amazon.com/Comeback-Children-Aurora-Nealand-Royal/dp/B01E4HZC5C]

What would be a typical routine day for you?  Just pick one as an example.

Yesterday I woke up at eight and did a little work-out at my house.  I also like to go on a bike ride.  Then usually by ten-ish I start practicing a little routine, sometimes scales, but I start with a warm-up and then I just play free for fifteen minutes straight with no interruptions, whatever I want; picking a key or no key, all the keys or some of the keys, and I just play whatever comes into my head at whatever tempo at whatever volume.  And I just try to let it come out, ‘cause I’ve always felt like part of me was blocked from my internal musical self.  I always know that I have all this stuff here but it’s hard to get it out on the instrument sometimes.  So I want to “grease the skids” as much as I can.  Sometimes it’s just being able to put something somewhere even if it’s not the right thing, just to sort of continue the train of thought.

Do you find you have to learn new songs from sheet music now and then?

Yeah, I try and learn a couple of new songs a week.  And in doing that I try to learn to play it convincingly by myself.  Like, is this something that someone would possibly pay to see.  It’s good to know songs that other people know that I don’t know, so I like to brush up on my repertoire.   And I never really play straight up jazz gigs but I like to remind myself of all of those tunes because I learned them all once.  I still love them even though I don’t really play them.  I still love listening to straight-ahead jazz and I probably listen to more of that than anything else.

And then I’ll practice rhythmic stuff, technique stuff, scale stuff, pattern stuff, I’ll play transcriptions, the solos that I’ve jotted down.  I really like Jack Teagarden who’s the great traditional jazz trombone player from New Orleans so I’ll play his solos and try to get into his head and learn to play sort of the way he did.

Do you chase down old recordings on YouTube?

Yeah, I’ll find old stuff on YouTube or Spotify.  Here’s what I wish.  I wish that nobody could use Spotify except for musicians, because it’s such a great school to learn somebody’s music or to do research on songs but musicians don’t always have unlimited funds to go buy artists records.  Spotify’s such a troubled thing.  But it’s so great to have all those things at my fingertips.

More on Aurora Nealand and the Royal Roses:

https://g.co/kgs/S19W7y

Hosting a PGS (Private Guerilla Showcase) at Folk Alliance International Conference

PGS – aka Private Guerilla Showcase.

Symbio - Swedish duo extraordinaire

We hosted a PGS (private guerilla showcase) room for Folk Alliance International Conference in New Orleans this year (2020).  For those of you who don’t know, the conference is a chance for music presenters to get to know performers and vice versa.  There are official showcases, but not nearly enough stages for everyone to present on the official stages.  The official showcases are juried, the standards are very high, and if you get an official showcase you are very lucky.

We have attended 4 FAI Conferences in the last four years.  The first one was with our partner, Gen Obata as Cosmo’s Dream.  It was held in Kansas City, which was handy because Gen’s wife Rebecca has a sister who lives there who was kind enough to offer us a place to stay.  The second year Kristi and I went without Gen, but we still stayed with Rebecca’s sister and husband.  We volunteered for the conference, which interfered with attending showcases.

The third year the FAI conference was held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.  We decided to amp up our carbon footprint and fly.  We also attended as bloggers/journalists which got. attendance fees paid.   Being a writer is a good deal because you have a good excuse to talk to interesting people.

In 2020 we attended as writers and also hosted a PGS room.  That involved booking every night from 10:30 pm to 3 am.  I was a bit worried about staying up that late every night, but it turned out to not be a big problem, as we booked interesting acts into the room and they kept us entertained, and awake although we could be a bit cranky by the time 3am rolled around. 

When you register as a PGS host you are put on a list and start to receive email from artists.  Out of the email you receive you offer spots in your room to the people who you like.  It can take awhile.  I spent quite a bit of time looking at people on Youtube, reading bios and considering what I wanted the room to sound like.  In any case in the end we had a great lineup, and I was mondo happy with the performers.  We met a lot of people, and heard a lot of great music. 

Angela Saini - a fine Canadian singer-songwriter

PGS rooms are just hotel rooms.  Some of the hosts have the beds taken out of the room and book another hotel room to stay in.  The hotels charge quite a hefty amount to get beds out of the rooms, but they had mistakenly taken the beds out of our room, and we were planning to stay in the PGS room we were hosting.  We actually had to ask them to replace one of the beds so we would have someplace to sleep.  The hotels also will rent chairs to you for a small fee.  We had ten folding chairs, which was plenty for our room, although we had people standing at the back of the room for some acts.

I suppose you could simply book acts into your room, wait for them to show up and play and that would be that.  The idea though is to make a room comfortable enough so that performers will feel at ease, and people will want to come into your room to see/hear your performers.  Many hosts of PGS rooms flew in and thus just used the decor of the Sheraton as their backdrop, but we had the advantage of having an SUV to bring a bit of flair for a "stage" backdrop.  We erected a large cloth, bought lamee stars to attach to it, and set digital floor lights on it to give the audience a sense of stage presence for the performers. It was gratifying in that the room filled up consistently and the players loved it.  There is also the matter of publicity to be considered. It is pretty easy, but is, of course, one more chore.  We had a color poster on our door each night announcing who would be playing and what time they would be on.  That was about it on our end.  The conference puts out a book with everybody’s PGSs in it, so if you have someone who is particularly popular (and we had a few), the room will be full of people.

One of the problems with having showcases in hotel rooms is the matter of noise in the hallways.  It is advantageous to most acts to have the hotel room door open so people passing by can see, and hear what is going on in your room.  The downside to this is that there is traffic going by all night long going from room to room and it can generate quite a bit of noise for the artists to compete with.  This is problematic in varying degrees depending on how loud the performers are (how well they can compete with ambient noise).  The organizers gave us signs to put on the doors cautioning people to keep the noise down in the halls, but as the nights wore on the hallway noise was louder and louder. 

. 

Another thing you can do with performers is video them.  I did do this, although I haven’t had a chance to look at the video yet.  As I say, different performers do well in an acoustic (non-amplified) room, and others don’t have the strength in their vocals to get over their guitars, or the ambient noise from the hallway.  I just put a camera up and let it run.  Most of the time I didn’t cut anyone’s head off, and I ran a digital audio recorder as well as cameras don’t really give you great audio.

One thing I haven’t mentioned is that it is customary to have a small charge to help pay for the hotel room.  It is usually between $15 to $30.  As I’ve said, we paid for chairs as well as the room rental, put up lights, and a backdrop.  It meant that we missed a lot of the events in the conference due to sleep compensation, and generally having our activities be centered around being a PGS host.  That said, we did see some great showcases and attended a couple of workshops.  We are looking forward to the next Folk Alliance International Conference February 17-21, 2021 in Kansas City, MO.  This year’s FAR-West (Folk Alliance, Region West) conference will be held in San Jose, CA October 8-11, 2020.  Make new friends, hear great music and attend.

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.