WRITING AROUND THE MUSIC

Cannon to the right of them

Cannon to the left of them

Cannon in front of them

Volleyed and thundered

Stormed at with shot and shell

Boldly they rode and well

Into the jaws of death

Into the mouths of Hell

Rode the six hundred

Too many mornings to count while I was growing up this is what I heard being not recited, but declaimed by my mother as she fixed scrambled eggs, toast, and frozen OJ for breakfast.

“Was there a man afraid? “ Yes. Four of us who knew this was the morning wake up call. And we better be up or fixin’ to be.

I had no idea where this and all the other poetry she knew by heart came from. Only later did she tell me that at Manchester High School in Manchester Iowa learning the greats by heart and reciting them ; Wordsworth Frost Tennyson et al was part of the English curriculum in her time.She must have been a good student cause she had dozens of them on speed dial.

Many years before she died this July 31st at age 98 that voice had been taken by age and illness, but I still can hear it. “Into the valley of death, rode the six hundred”

I can also hear her talking about the last Opera she saw or listened to on the radio. “ I liked Pavarotti in that role better than x. And “when I was at the Met I saw Domingo with Sutherland in X.

Although she couldn’t carry a tune in the proverbial bucket she loved opera,musicals,and choral music. My love of musicals and appreciation for Opera came from her. She made me go to Town Theatre to see Guys and Dolls in my early teens. I loved it. And music has been a large part of my life since then.(except for choral music unadorned by a plot or staging. That still leaves me cold)

Despite her very frugal mindset, (is it okay to say Scotch? ), she found the money to pay for accordion lessons for me for several years. But god help you if you missed a prepaid lesson. I once did a jail break from an after school detention imposed by an overzealous (okay I was most likely guilty as charged) nun so I could walk the few blocks to my lesson. The wrath of Kathryn , an Episcopalian , would have been worse than anything Sister Timothy Marie could have dealt. And when the good sister called to report my transgression, my mother backed my play.

She loved reading. And once told my wife that given a choice between cleaning the house and reading, the book not the vacuum always won. While my wife does clean the house, it was the books that brought them together. On her visits to the upper Midwest the two of them could talk for hours about what they were reading.They both loved a good cozy mystery and could both almost quote C.S. Lewis word for word.

She had definite opinions on many things and could be a total snob at times. She did not suffer fools. Thank you Mother for passing on that trait.(white tee shirts should be worn with a “real” shirt over it. Not alone. (Ask Pete Darling about this).

However when her children made mistakes or lapses in judgement, she might voice her (disapprove, but always come to their aid if said lapse needed her help.

Too many examples to tell but there was the time in my misspent 20’s and early 30’s when she kept my crazy Golden Retriever for me for several months because my housing situation was,shall we say, situational. We both laughed about it later..well she sort of smiled anyway.

She told me once that really all she wanted was to be loved and needed and to raise her children well. Despite the financial and personal struggles she did just that.

All four of us loved her and needed her.

Godspeed Mama. I love you.

Johnny

The first summer I lived in the Twin Cities we went to the bar and restaurant at the top of the IDS tower to hear Butch Thompson play piano. There was hardly anyone there so we sat right at the bar right next to the piano and Butch. We could watch his hands as they “strode” from chord to chord on the left hand while the right provided the melody. Amazing.

We also chatted with him at the breaks. What a lovely guy. And he signed a napkin for us to add to our collection of local players. (I think we sent some of those off to our New England friends to impress them with our hipness!)

That same year we saw him playing clarinet with the Hall Brothers at the old Emporium of Jazz in Mendota Heights. Still miss that venue.

A few years later I was fortunate to have him as a guest on my program at KFAI. If time had allowed I am sure we could have listened to and discussed the entire stride piano catalogue and history. And as always he was so very gracious,

Thank you Butch, for the tunes and the craic. Godspeed.

So it only lasted 40 to 45 minutes and there might have been 20 people in the crowd but it was so much fun to play music for people in the flesh.

The gig was one of those where each performer, or group of performers gets an hour on stage. Something I normally don’t enjoy. By the time the act before you gets their stuff off and you get your stuff on there is little time to actually play much.  And sure enough we were schedule for 7 but it was 7:30 before the first note was played.

Saving grace was that we were the last act so we got to go past the 8 o’clock end time and drop in a couple of more tunes.

It was this particular configurations’ first “playing out “ so there was a bit of anxiety. Just reminded ourselves to have fun and remember there were not going to be any producers or recording moguls (do we still have those) in the crowd.

Folks seemed to enjoy the tunes and some were even dancing.   That’s why I keep doing this.

Several years ago we attended a not very well attended concert at the Cedar Cultural Center by a group from Canada called Vishten.  About all I knew about them was they played a mixture of Acadian and Celtic tunes and one of the members played the piano accordion, not a button box. This was during my late in life attempt to play Celtic music on that same maligned instrument.  (I had made a lame attempt at the button box but could not get the push pull thing down so I went back to the instrument of my youth.)

The empty seats in the venue missed out. The trio of Pastelle LeBlanc, her sister Emmanuelle LeBlanc, and Pascal Miousse kicked out great tunes and some great steps. And like any successful group they all looked like they were having such a good time playing and singing and dancing.

I was, of course, completely enamored with Pastelle and her accordion. And like her band mates she was comfortable on a number of instruments- bodhran, guitar, piano, and guitar.

Over the years I bought their albums and hoped to see them live again either here (though doubtful given the small crowd at the Cedar that evening) or at Celtic Colours on Cape Breton or perhaps on one of our trips to the Maritimes and their home province of Prince Edward Island. Pastelle was an instructor at the Acadia   School of Traditional Music in Bar Harbor Maine a number of years, so maybe that would happen.

Didn’t.

Vishten live streamed concerts from their home during the time of the pox, 2020-21, and were featured in concert during the live streamed 2020 Celtic Colours Festival      I tuned in to all of them. The concerts from Pastelle and Pascal’s living room in Charlottetown, PEI, remains one of my favorite “home” events. You could feel their desire to connect with an audience but also the relaxed presentation a live stream can offer.

Today I read that Pastelle had died, April 8^th, of breast cancer. She was 42.

Here are a couple of links to check out if you are interested.

Here is a jam from New Old New Prague.

Very raw recording. IPad. Nothing mixed down etc.

Killed or Caught

A little late to this but just watched WithoutGettingKilledorCaught, the documentary about Guy Clark. If you’re a fan of his, or if you are a fan of american/folkacana/singersongwriters/poets etal youo should enjoy this film. go to www.withoutgettingkilledorcaught.com to download.

From Alycia Putnam, a Fiddler (and also Concertina player) from Nova Scotia. We met Alycia and her parents Rob and Kelly several years ago at the Celtic Colours Festival in Cape Breton. Fingers crossed we will see them in October of this year after a two year absence due to the Pox.

What does music mean to me?Music is so much more than a hobby or a job. It is a way of expressing myself without words and connecting with others – whether that be inspiring people to dance at a pub, putting smiles on faces at a house party, moving a patient to tap their toe for the first time in months, experiencing fun new places, or contributing a meaningful melody to an important event such as a wedding or funeral… and, experiencing all of this with my parents. Together, we’ve performed at thousands (yes… THOUSANDS ) of shows over two decades. That’s special.Music brings people together. It creates a live energy that doesn’t quite translate virtually – for musicians or the audience. Since I started playing and performing when I was 9, my life centred around music. That changed drastically as a result of the pandemic, creating a gaping hole in my heart over the last 2 years that I can’t describe in words. Performing charges my battery and I’m completely depleted. All that said… I’m grateful that we were able to have more jam sessions and do some more live shows this past year, compared to 2020. I’m optimistic that 2022 will be the year we’ll be able to reconnect with this part of ourselves and get back out there spreading music and smiles.Happy New Year, and happy 37th wedding anniversary to mom and dad. Here’s to a healthy 2022, filled with music, shenanigans and laughter

Guest Blog from Steve Petrini

S. Petrini 6/2021

Grey Larsen, in The Essential Guide to Irish Flute and Tin Whistle, reminds us, as Americans, that “… coming to [Irish music] without growing up in it is very much like learning to speak a foreign language in a foreign country.”

This observation immediately took me back to an excruciatingly embarrassing year I spent in France as a young stranger in a strange land. Even after four semesters of French at university and eight months living in France, I struggled to ask directions, no less make simple conversation with someone across from me on a train. My French was all in my head where I had to translate it from English. A few American friends I’d met who were studying there had related the experience of suddenly waking to realize they’d been dreaming in French. They’d finally practiced enough to break through the barrier from translating to thinking in the language itself.

And there’s the rub: not only in speaking but in playing music, to “…know the language well enough to eliminate the step of mental translation.”

Larsen speaks at length — in two separate chapters — about the similarities between spoken language and music. There are some obvious parallels: individual notes are like syllables (sound units in words), the articulation of a note is like the hard or open consonant or vowel at the beginning of a syllable. Groupings of notes make up “words” (think of three-note groupings in a jig), and several words join together to make phrases. Phrases make up sentences, sentences form paragraphs (think stanzas of songs or A and B parts of a tune). Medleys, or sets, of tunes make an entity, a kind of story.

Ultimately, of course, in speaking as well as in music, the goal is “…to master the technical aspects to such an extent that we naturally enter into the playing experience at the level of meaning.” Words, sentences, and the structure of verbal language have meaning intrinsically in that they refer to objects, actions, concepts. But the structure and playing of music, when performed in some inexpressibly satisfying way (transcending the technical “translation” of notes to sounds), also results in “meaning” on an abstract level.

One of these days, perhaps in this lifetime, I hope to wake up dreaming a tune, to find myself thinking in music as fluently as I think in my native English.

(All quotes from Grey Larsen in the tutorial book noted above)

Everyone had been shot, once or twice depending on the bullet. The waiting periods were over. A gathering was in order.

Jim Drum came armed with his pandemic toy, an electric drum kit. How was that going to sound?

Dave brought, in addition to the Resonator, a raft of mics and other electronic things to record the event. Do we really want to know how we sound after so many months away?

Enter the horn player Steve with his saxophone and whistles and his toned up embouchure ready to blow. How long will the mouth muscles cooperate?

The accordion player brought his older box down from the second floor studio and plugged in. Does an accordion need amplification?

The tuning begins. A blast and a squawk from the sax leads into some mellow notes. Jim tries the kick, the high hat, the snare. Looking for the right tone, volume and timbre. Dave plugs mics into boxes, boxes into other boxes, and Ipads into more stuff. Then tunes the guitar. Accordions are either in tune or no. Tune to the box.

Pulled out a couple of minor key tunes from the Czech Republic then moved on to some Dave originals. Then on to Warren Zevon and Robert Earle Keen songs. There were nice sections; rough patches; wrong key changes; bumpy transitions; But it was live and the players were all in the same room.

Here’s to more of this for everyone.