Excellent Exciting Excursion Exploration Expedition and Escape on Six Trains

Feb. 20 through March 3rd

"The earthquake was 5.4 on the Richter Scale and there are reports of cracks in roads so the bridge may be damaged", said our Canada Via Rail activities director.  This pulled the rug right out from under my magical mystery tour.  We had just left Vancouver after riding Amtrak up from Seattle, spending the night in a hotel, and visiting the wonders of the Vancouver Art Gallery https://www.vanartgallery.bc.ca/.  

                                               Vancouver Art Gallery: Firelei Baez

Steve and I took advantage of the tour package tickets to ride the elevator up to the Vancouver Lookout https://vancouverlookout.com/.  Things thus far were living up to my escape plans which were to cut the elastic on my ties to all that may seem stressful or humdrum in my life, and experience something excellent and exciting.  Hope springs eternal.  I left behind the work to make bookings for our music, meal preparations, housekeeping, phone messages, and more.  Now the man continued, "We may need to wait a while before we can leave".  As we sat for two and a half hours with nothing to think about but news of an earthquake, the elastic pulled me back psychologically to a wee bit of stress.  Finally we lumbered ahead onto the trestle over the great and mighty Frazer River.  At mid-span Steve said, "Here's where the bridge might collapse under us!"  Maybe he was channeling his great-grandfather's train wreck recorded in his song, "Great Grandfather": https://steveandkristinebel.bandcamp.com/track/great-grandfather.  Someone else from another seat piped in, "They've done some work on it recently so maybe it will hold up".  The redheaded burly young man next to him said, " I'm an engineer.  It will be fine!"  I say with over-confidence, "I believe  you!"  The he sheepishly admitted, "I really don't know that".  By now we've made it over the river safely.  

The trip to Vancouver disgruntled me as we had reserved seats facing eastward toward the industrial effluvia of the cities of the Puget Sound, as opposed to the beauty of the sound itself.  So after taking about as much as I could of it, I wandered to another car full of empty seats and we relocated.  By then we were taking in the waterfront glories of Everett, Bellingham Bay, and Vancouver.  I'm not letting trivialities like reserved seat assignments keep me from enjoying the matchless beauty of our Washington coast, even on a cloudy day.  The next morning we awoke hungry, and the three of us made our way to breakfast in a Turkish bakery down the street from our hotel.  I ate a sublime cake-like pastry with feta cheese and luscious spices leaving me happily sated.  Few things delight me more than tasting a wonderful discovery I may never learn how to cook or find again.

                                                      Selfie on the Vancouver Tower 

                                                       Vancouver from the tower

Then off we went on Via Rail Canada to the next leg of the package.  The first order of business was the attempt to make ourselves at home in the sleeping berth.  We each got a bed and three hot meals every day on the trains, as part of our package.  Ideally perhaps I'd have worn one set of clothing throughout the twelve days of travel and laundered them nightly but then who knows where I'd hang up the undies.  As it was I took three full sets of clothing to alternate and couldn't fit my roller bag  under my seat, meaning it had nowhere to go but on my armrest and then at the end of my bed at  night.  Hence the mess you see in the picture.  As well we were assigned a small bench seat that folded into a bed at night, and somehow wound up in two upper bunks, meaning the lower bunks and opposing seats were assigned to two other people.  

You're looking below at Steve on his bench with his guitar near the ukulele of his bunk-mate, Aaron.  Don't ask me how Amtrak Vacations found two bunkmates for us who were a married couple of folk musicians, about our age with similar political ideas, but it worked out unbelievably well.  We didn't ask for that; it was pure serendipity.  The second photo is what my bunk looked like.  I thought it somewhat too cozy until I moved to the American version of the same thing on Amtrak and then cozy went to quite cramped.  At least here I could sit up to squirm around while dressing in the morning.  

Steve and I bought guitars especially for the purpose of playing on this trip.  They're both very small.  Mine is a bass-uke, with a fret board so tiny I have to stare at it lest my muscle memory takes my fingertips to the wrong places. 

                                                             Me and my UBASS

 Aaron started strumming on his ukulele, inviting us to join in.  One thing led to another until he and his wife Barb invited us to perform just for them.  Soon the very narrow corridor was plugged up with nine listeners as we continued for about a half-hour, pulling together all the train songs we knew plus a couple more.  We had decided not to bring the guitars out to perform in one of the two community spaces in the cars, unless we were invited by the management.  This it turns out was wise.  We let everyone in our listening audience know that we wouldn't be asking for permission ourselves.  But several of our fans did so.  Then the activities director gave us a cheerful but adamant talk all about how and why we can't under any circumstances, play in "public".  Canada Via Rail has an application procedure for their hired musicians and, you see, how can they otherwise know how bad we might be?  Even after we explained this to people, one of our fans continued to harangue the poor guy.  We take no responsibility for that, but it was kind of flattering.  Steve and I are no strangers to the difficulties of performing in Canada as Americans.  Still, people kept presenting us with Canada Via Rail's web page for musicians to apply, which we know would do us no good because we're not Canadians.  That was the only performance we did on the trip.  Barb with her lovely voice sang duets with Aaron on a couple of folk songs familiar to me from Bill Staines.  Our connections with our bunk-mates seemed to transport me back to my memories of college dormitory conversations between bunk roomies.

                                             Typical dome car view on Canada Via Rail

Meals are a particular pleasure on Via Rail Canada, and undeniably a social experience.  The food is hand-prepared by a chef each day, with fresh-cut vegetables and fruits.  All meals were great, with desserts especially spectacular.  I totally threw caution to the wind and gained three pounds.  The waiters usher passengers into a small table for four and almost instantly usher a couple of strangers to sit across from each other.  In such circumstances introductions and conversation ultimately follow.  By the end of the trip I was on first-name basis with about a dozen riders.  

One of them had listened to our music in the corridor and found her way to our dinner table to pepper us intensely with questions.  She cut a striking figure, a thin and willowy Canadian with a shock of gray hair pulled back from her inquisitive bright blue eyes.  She had heard one of Steve's songs that seemed to launch a difficult dialogue within herself regarding the limits of capitalism, and Steve and I were quite willing to take on one side.  The song is "Dark Days", and she loves it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmSz0dIPFFk.  She reluctantly answered a few of our questions revealing that she's and actress preparing for a lead role in a movie soon to be shot in Edmonton.    We got out for a short stroll in Winnipeg and while clutching my arm as we navigated the icy road, she explained that movie producers take out insurance policies on the health and lives of their leading actors, making them promise to avoid specific risky behaviors.  So we quickly found a safe spot to walk, and as we passed a parking lot I couldn't help noticing Canadian flags on car antennae, no doubt making their stand against American trade tariffs and other such nonsensical intrusive hubris.  Anyway she was a bright spot in our memories on Canada Via Rail.

  

Train song lyrics hound and haunt me.  "And the sons of pullman porters and the sons of engineers ride their fathers' magic carpets made of steel" [Steve Goodman, City of New Orleans].  That's Steve, the great grandson of the engineer who among others took Lincoln's remains across the country for the public to view after his assassination.  "Mothers with their babes asleep are rocking to the gentle beat and the rhythms of the wheels are all they feel".  I woke up one morning when that rhythm stopped as we waited in Cleveland.  It should have been perfect for sleep; no sound and no movement, utterly still.  I guess something deep inside connected that rocking, rolling and gentle jarring to the comforts of the womb.  I wanted it to begin again, partly because in my position lying on my belly, I felt so directly connected to the earth below me.  "From the great Atlantic Ocean to the wide Pacific Shore...as she glides over the woodlands on the hills and by the shore" [Box Car Willie, Wabash Cannonball].  

Via Rail Canada has no internet access, probably in part due to cars that remain well-preserved and just as they were when built in  1955.  The experience throws one into interior ponderings, or if you will, trains of thought.  With many hours to pass, the alternatives are reading books, playing board games, wine tastings, lectures by the activities director, or just being alone with ones' thoughts.  It feels like a throwback to culture before obsessions and addictions to digital electronic devices.

We made it, after our first night on board, to the peak of the Rockies past Jasper.  The activities director warned us that Jasper's housing had half burned down last summer and that the town was in grief, with many residents having left town for good.  We see signs out the window of the thousands of black tree corpses still standing yet burnt, right up next to the train tracks.  The remaining green ones at this latitude and altitude in many cases appear to me kind of scrawny and underfed, though that's just the natural appearance of alpine firs.  Still I'm grateful for their greenery after the dismal vast expanses of mountains with nothing left on them but what appears from a distance to be thinning black hair on these giant mountainous heads.  So far we're only two hours late due to the earthquake which makes no difference to us since we have two days to kill in Toronto before catching our next train.  The rivers and streams are frozen and the snowy peaks towering over us right and left reminded me of why I was making this trip.  

It included several stops for embarkments as well as dis-embarkments.  The first stretch to Winnipeg seemed to have an international array of passengers from England, Germany, New Zealand, America, and Canada.  The last stretch to Montreal seemed to usher in a younger demographic of Canadians using the train for utilitarian rather than entertainment purposes.

                                                        Rolling through the Rockies

                                                                   Burnt Rockies

                                 Valemount Hotel where we played music a while back

In Toronto we had two nights to spend in a comfortable suite downtown, and tickets to take another trip up to an iconic landmark designed by the same architect who created the one we went up in Vancouver.   It's called the CN Tower. Taking the taxi across town we drank in the beauty of the city's buildings.  

                                                                   The Mall

We went looking for a nice sit-down dining experience, following signs through a mall that seemed to be enormously tall and long; witness the ceiling on the above photo.  Just the search was a big adventure.  It took us so long that by the time we found a place that sunlight pictured above was gone. We finally settled on an elegant-looking Italian place, not the one we wanted which was closed for renovation.  Steve ordered what he thought might be an interesting meal but due to translation difficulties turned out to be plain old macaroni and cheese.  Oh, well, seize the day!  It was our last day in Canada before catching another train to New York.

                                                              Toronto CN Tower

We arrived in the big apple at around 10 pm with just enough time to make our way to our hotel and turn in.  Our schedule was a bit packed.  The connection left us barely enough time to take in the sights of the city.  We had tickets as part of our package, to the "Hop-on, Hop-off" bus, which we mistakenly assumed would pick us up at Penn Station.  Instead it required us to walk a mile.  After sitting on a train for six days no doubt it was just what the doctor ordered to regulate our systems, but made me plenty nervous, as I didn't really know where we were going nor whether we'd have time to do this and make our connection for the train.  It turned out to be at the M & M Store.  Yes, you read that right; a three-story big store devoted to nothing but M & M candies and swag.  Fortunately it had a bathroom too because after spending three hours of walking and touring we were about to wet our pants.  The tour was fine, though a might chilly on the roof of a bus in the winter, and as one might predict, pretty slow-moving through downtown Manhattan traffic.  Then we quickly walked back another mile.  That stress took some enjoyment from the experience though the sun came out and the tour was otherwise reasonably worthwhile.

                                 Knish for breakfast in Penn Station 

                                  The chilly top of the bus tour of NYC

                                We love the message, "Stop Wars" vs "Star Wars".

On the Amtrak American side now, we glided through what looked like Bible-drenched other-side-of-the-tracks humble abodes.  It's Hoosier Country and we were due to be in Chicago in an hour and a half, waiting for the Empire Builder to carry us home.  

                                      Note the Amtrak red stripe now we've left Canada         

                                         Sunset on Amtrak

 

                                              Hoosier Country

                                        Slightly different look to Amtrak "Roomette"

                      In Canada it's called "Dome Car" and on Amtrak "Observation Car"

The train stopped in Spokane in the wee hours of the morning to take on riders and release the back half of cars for a separate train going to Salt Lake City.  Knowing I'd missed the beauty of Glacier Park in the dark, I was eager for one last glimpse of mountain scenery before arriving home.  So I forced myself out of bed to head for the observation car to watch the Cascades roll by.  It was then that I felt the shock of amputation as it had left us.  It was a rude awakening.  But in the dawn's dim early light the great and mighty Columbia River began to show herself out our roomette window, and then the Wenatchee Valley wherein there are no bad views in any direction, even from my north-facing dining car window.

                                    Dawn's early light over the Wenatchee Valley

For the last few hours we glided past many lovely views of the Skykomish River raging and cutting through the steep banks of the North Cascades.

Then we're back home again!

------------- 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. 

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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.