Sound Fourth, Bend Style 2011

After a one year hiatus while the Bend (Oregon) High School auditorium was being renovated, the Sound Fourth concert is back.  For you Bendites, the time is 3:00 on July 4th (gives you plenty of time to enjoy the festivities downtown) at Bend High School auditorium.  The pre-concert show is provided by the Bend High School band.  The concert features the festival chorus directed by Dr. Clyde Thompson and the Cascade Horizon Band. 

On being busy

Some folks have told me that they don't understand how I can do all that I do.  I am busy, and I would be the first to admit that, especially at this particular point in time, I am too busy.  The busy-ness (perhaps this should be confused with business) seems to be cyclical in terms of coming to a head at about three or four times in the year.  Most of it coincides with the end of term at the local college, where I am NOT a teacher, and the other undertakings in my or my family members' lives. 

I think there are activities that will have to go come the end of this year.  I'll keep my favorites and jettison some dabblings and hope to simplify my life's schedule to a degree that approximates manageable.  But I think that having times like these, where I am overextended, makes me really examine what's important. Often, when I drift along comfortably, I don't question whether what I am doing is really important or worth doing.  There is also something to be said for that period of time where you are completely and utterly pressed for time that makes you value the moments of stillness.


Tonight I am going to a concert by Great Big Sea.  Yes, it's Sunday night and it has been a hell of a week replete with stressful work, choir concerts, dance performances, classes and lessons, but this concert tonight, while it will be loud and exhausting, is goof off time.  I don't have to perform, I don't have to produce, I get to go and enjoy.  So think about this the next time you are feeling stressed and overtaxed - perhaps it is time to rant and roar!

All that jazz

I have long been a fan of jazz, with my active participation in the genre waxing and waning over the years with a recent long dry spell ending with a gift of a ticket from a friend for a concert at the local college.  The music at the concert, particularly the small combo pieces, evoked memories of former lives where I spent evenings in smoky bars in Rochester, NY listening to great jazz from musicians inspired by Miles Davis or Chick Corea.  No vocalists stick in my mind from that time, all instrumentalists.   The Manhattan Transfer had made their mark earlier than this time and Harry Connick, Jr. had yet to hit it really big.  Or perhaps if I did hear any vocal music during this time I blocked it out because the way smooth jazz was becoming white bread left me totally cold. 

What resonated with me vocally left me feeling very displaced in terms of the times I was living in because I listened to the likes of Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald.  Nobody was singing like that, at least not when I had the opportunity to listen.

I don't know where this came from, this affinity with jazz.  I remember my siblings (all older) being into rock, folk and the inevitable classical in piano and violin lessons.  There was a hefty dose of Broadway and movie musicals, too, I have a vivid memory of belting out songs like, "There is nothing like a dame," as a six or seven year old.

It was a long time later, when I put on some music, it might even have been a Sarah Vaughan album, when my dad, a Julliard-trained organist, expressed surprise at my knowing "those old songs."

Anyway, I'm grateful for the opportunity to re-explore some old territory and get to know some of the newer artists at work today.  Ella Fitzgerald is still unbeatable, and what a kick to listen to, especially on those recordings where she forgot the words and started making stuff up.  She also, which is a game in our household, inserted words or motifs from other songs into whatever she was singing. 

That's not allowed for a "legit" singer and it certainly wouldn't make a "best of" album these days.  You've got to sing what's writ.  With classical music, the most improv you might get to do is in ornamentation or coloratura, but even then I've heard about and witnessed directors who transcribed a singer's noodling in the expectation of hearing it sung the same way at the next rehearsal or performance.  Even worse is asking a singer to sight read and then perform a scat as written (yes, that really happened).  That particular experience left me speechless and just a little bit irked.  It makes me wonder if the quest for the perfect presentation can obscure the adventure that is musical performance.

Right on, Ella.

2010 Wild Rye.mp4

Here's a video of the local (Bend, Oregon) band, Wild Rye on YouTube.  This debut appearance at the Tower Theatre contained some technical difficulties, but the band played along, even if partly unplugged for a chunk of the performance.  I attended the gig the following night when they were spot on, technically and musically.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATeh5TRyLuk

Locally Grown Rye

Wild Rye is defined in Wikipedia as "a term used for several grasses. They are natively found in parts of North America (as well as elsewhere) and are valuable in the control of exotic invasive plants and as a rotation crop."  A pretty boring description from a non-botanist's point of view.  Especially because the name itself connotes a certain image - full of waving tufted seed heads in a plains-y kind of land.  Wide open spaces and big skies.  The kind of place where a certain Mimsical dog would streak around with wild abandon until finally plopping down panting in the shade of a shrub.

The music that arises out of such a vision is also tinged with wildness and abandon that comes from the roots of the land, which is a reason that I think the locally grown band, Wild Rye, is aptly named.  The roots of this group's music reach into Irish and Scottish traditional fiddle music with strong influences from modern takes on the genre from the likes of Alisdair Fraser, Natalie Haas, and Hanneke Cassell (you can see a clip of Natalie and Hanneke playing at  www.hannekecassel.com).  Which isn't to say that the band's influences are entirely Celtic, because they've pulled Americana and rock songs into their unique style, including a great version of REM's "Driver 8." 

While there may be some resistance or perhaps bias in some quarters to being defined by the term "Celtic," I thought it was interesting to do a quick look at the history, Wiki-style, to find that the heartland of Celtic culture appears to have been southern France and: 

"Genetics suggests the Celts were descendants of people who originated in southwest Asia between 4,000 and 8,000 years ago.^[7][8] Celtic origin legends recorded in Medieval Scotland and Ireland suggest a possible beginning in Anatolia and then to Iberia via Egypt. It has been noted ^[9] that the distribution of the gene for lactase persistence apparently originating near the Baltic Sea between 4,800 and 6,000 BP indicates a spread from there to both the British Isles and to Iberia."  

An interesting article, all in all, particularly given that one of the citations is entitled, "How did pygmy shrews colonize Ireland?"  But I digress from my point, which is that, given the historical spread of Celtic society and the more recent (the potato famine being recent in the grand scale of things) spread of the Celtic influence to the music and dance of southeastern states in the US, there are few cultures today that can't claim some tie to this heritage. 

And I think Wild Rye, the band, pays homage to these deep and varied roots by blending traditional musical elements with modern texts and tunes.  Take a quick listen.  Imagine those gently waving tufted seed heads...imagine that touch of wildness and abandon....

An Old Found Land

I was cruising through my iTunes library this morning and stumbled across an album a friend had given me after her trip to Newfoundland a year or two back.  I had taken a trip there many years ago with my spousal unit and in-laws (though they might have been out-laws at the time) during the off season when everything seemed half-shut down.  We had a good time exploring the back roads and playing chess on a giant garden set that was the biggest I'd ever seen.  I'm a terrible chess player but that particular encounter left me with a much better understanding of the game, I think because I was actually on the battlefield.

Anyway, these memories came flooding back, not because the music triggered them in the way some people's memories are triggered by music from a significant high school encounter, but more in the way a string of related thoughts link together and tumble each other from the edges of your mind.  We were listening to a demo track that Wild Rye had recorded a week or so ago and iTunes popped up a tune by Great Big Sea after the demo track because I had left iTunes on shuffle.  Great Big Sea is a Newfoundland band that, on their debut album from the mid-1990's, sounds a bit like a collision between the Crash Test Dummies and your favorite pub stompin' ceili band.  Makes me wish I had been an Irish dancer back then haunting the pub scene in Halifax...