“Oh geeeeez, so this is how my students must feel!”  That’s what I was thinking as I tried to relax at the beginning of my one-time lesson with fiddler Laura Cortese today.  I had gone down to the Harris Arts Center in Calhoun, GA, for an event billed as a concert with a workshop afterwards.  Well, the workshop ended up being a private lesson, and I had the instructor’s undivided attention (gulp!).  First order of business, naturally, was for me to play something for her so she could gauge my skill level and look for things in my technique that could use a touch of improvement.  So, after enjoying a marvelous performance by the impeccable Laura Cortese Acoustic Project, I’m now alone in a room with Laura Cortese trying to remember how to make my bow work, definitely feeling humble, and then feeling this glee come over me when I realized what a rare opportunity this was for me to trade places and be the student for once.  As soon as I realized what was happening, that my job was to listen very closely to what the teacher played and what she told me, and that her job was to take me by the bow arm and pull me over into that zone just beyond what I’d call “comfort”, it all started becoming a lot of fun.  I started using more of my bow, making bolder (note, I did not say more beautiful) sounds, exploring the many different effects that a fast bow versus a slow bow will make, and the effects of deliberately applying more and less pressure.

“Give the open G enough of a push that it sings while you play that part of the melody.”

“Make it growl, if that’s the kind of sound you like.”

“Try it with the B as a harmony note.  Now try it again with the A.”

“See if you can make that tune sound great in super slow motion, and then bring it back up to speed.”

She was showing me these little snippets of her technique, and all the while I noticed how her own fiddle brings her such joy– and dang, really, how could it not when every single note she played sounded perfect, executed with such graceful confidence?  I felt about as graceful as a manatee on rollerskates, but kept trying to make my instrument mimic the sounds of hers.  I know just enough about teaching to know that Laura was definitely on top of her game not just as a performer, but also as a teacher; her pacing was just swift enough to keep my attention the whole time we sat there together, but never once did I feel lost or overwhelmed.  Impressed and inspired, yes, but not overwhelmed or discouraged.  In fact, the magic “p” word came up a few times, yes, that same “p” word I neglect day after day, and Laura affirmed that even just 15 minutes a day alone with my fiddle revisiting the things we tried in our lesson would make a big improvement in my playing.

“Don’t think of it as ‘practice’.  Think of it as experimenting with your fiddle.”

Actually, that helps.

It’s not but once in a blue moon that I sit in the student’s seat.  Most of what I’ve learned of my fiddle I’ve learned in the context of jams, parties, sitting out on the porch on a nice day, or through my own teaching.  But to be a student and have your teacher say, “you can do this, you’re on the right path” is such a satisfying feeling.  I don’t think my time and money could’ve been spent any better today.  The next time I put my bow to those four strings, I’ll have Laura’s advice (and hopefully some of her verve) still resonating in my mind.  In fact, the next time is now.

Thanks, Laura, for a very worthwhile hour.  I hope our paths will cross again!

-Christie Burns, January 2012

Or, Questions raised and lessons learned at the Hoots and Hellmouth / Holy Ghost Tent Revival show at Rhythm & Brews, March 9, 2011.

Ok, so if a tree falls in the forest… and it happens to be a truly magnificent tree, a tree pounding with life and energy generated by seven souls, a tree so mighty because it was nourished through its roots by the music of its entire ecosystem… If this tree falls in the forest–no wait, let’s say the tree is a band– If this band comes to Chattanooga (albeit on a rainy Wednesday evening) and plays for an noticeably sub-capacity audience at Rhythm & Brews, does it make a sound?

Holy Yes.

I’m talking about Holy Ghost Tent Revival, the glorious septet from Greensboro, NC, who above all else make incredible music together.  They also put on an uncompromising show, and I believe shows like last night’s really reveal the character of a band or soloist: If they can play to a near-empty room with the same passion they’d beam from a stage at Bonnaroo, I’m impressed.  [*sidenote: My respect for David Mead increased tenfold when I saw him perform at Charles and Myrtles, and gave all six of us gathered there a performance that still inspires me when I think about it.]

So here’s what I want to know.

Chattanooga’s this small vibrant city on a highly-publicized trajectory of improved downtown living, great educational effort being put forth, a more diverse social calendar than ever before, more bars/restaurants/venues opening every month, more clever 30-somethings making entrepreneurship look like a cool new sport.  This city is starting to make the state, the region, and even the Southern US look appealing to people and corporations from all over the world– and yet probably our most valuable asset is that we have a creative, critically-thinking, conscientious population who isn’t content to settle for “good enough.”  So we point out the things that bug us, we make suggestions and initiatives for improvement, and we occasionally make a trip out to another really great city (Austin? Asheville? Boulder? Portland? Philly? Chicago? San Fran? You name it.) and bring back a good idea or two to enhance our group project of a town, Chattanooga.  So when a city like Greensboro sends us their very best, these smart and strong young musicians who are giving their all to their art (and nailing it), shouldn’t we roll out the red carpet?  Or at least come out to meet them and find out what they have to share with us about the world of music, youth, and hip-city America?  Whether we acknowledge it or not, these boys are our city’s ambassadors too.  They’ll be in Nashville tonight, and surely someone will ask them how it went last night in Chattanooga, and they’ll have to say, “Well, it was a really small crowd, again.”  Or actually, who knows what their impression of our city is.  The point I’m trying to make is that Holy Ghost Tent Revival is one of that handful of bands we’ll see on the giant festival stages someday not too long from now, and me and my friend will say, “Hey, remember when we saw those cats at Rhythm & Brews and like nobody was there?”  Wouldn’t we want to be known as a small-but-mighty city that nourishes bands of this quality?

Ok, now, this time for real– THIS is what I want to know:

1. Am I correct in assuming that Chattanooga wants to be increasingly more connected to the hip cities of the South and beyond, and that one of the easiest ways to do this would be to make a good impression on the artists who travel between these cities?
2. If so, what’s our best plan of action to ensure that we make the impression we want to make?
3. And on a more personal note, I’m asking myself and the community: What can the Folk School do towards this goal?
4. Does the investment of time, energy, and even money in our visiting bands come around to ultimately improve the lives our local musicians?  Could this perhaps raise the standard of cultural life in Chattanooga overall?

If you have any answers to these questions, (or more questions to add to the list) please email me: christie@chattanoogafolk.com

(or just do something effective to address these issues and maybe somehow let us all know about it.)

Closing thoughts:

Holy Ghost Tent Revival and Hoots and Hellmouth (last night’s opening act, also excellent) have permanent positions on my list of bands I adore and trust to never let me or anyone down.  So if you hear me or anyone talking about these guys in the future, pay attention!  I confess: I was supposed to write up something about HGTR before the show last night to help get the word out, but being a folk school director and not at all a journalist, I just let that deadline whizz right past while I was focusing on other business.  I was tasting bitter regret over this last night as I sat and selfishly devoured every last morsel of the feast Holy Ghost Tent Revival served up.  From the chorus of horns that opened the show to the MOST AMAZING a cappella trio of voices that sent us to heaven on our way out the door, I compiled a long list of friends who I wanted there with me (some local, some not) because this music is just too good not to share with the people you love.

As a musician, Holy Ghost Tent Revival inspires me to sing and play like they do, from the very depths of my knowledge and experience, to hold nothing back, break through boundaries of my own personal limitations in music.  As a member and sometimes leader of many different teams, I’m inspired by their teamwork and unified effort– so effective, such a beautiful communal focus of musical understanding.  As a folk school director and music teacher, I’m grateful that Holy Ghost Tent Revival gave Chattanooga another chance (and hopeful that they’ll give us yet another), because they have such great power to make us know and feel the mind-and-body effects of music, unfettered and unapologetic.  And that brings me back to the first sentence of this paragraph, the one about making music, the most sacred thing I’ll ever, and always, do.

The best things in Chattanooga aren’t things.  They’re opportunities.  Even places like Rock City and the Aquarium, grand as they are—the nicest part is that they provide an opportunity to share a memorable handful of hours with your friends and family.

So much of the fun and good times we get to enjoy in Chattanooga are simple opportunities created by small business owners, directors and the small dedicated staffs of non-profit organizations, church communities, neighborhood associations, and individuals with an ounce (or more) of vision for how they can take something they enjoy and turn it into something that everyone can enjoy.  Local musicians Ken Doyle and Mark Pitner are in this category.  They love Irish traditional music.  No, I mean REALLY love it.  They get together every Sunday to play their favorite Irish tunes in “sets”, or medleys of tunes all strung together, with Ken on the flute or whistle, and Mark on bouzouki or guitar.  They can lock in together on a reel and make it fly so fast that you don’t even see it coming when the second tune kicks in.  Your foot is tapping to the beat without you even realizing it.  Guinness just doesn’t taste this good on a regular day.  This is—no mistaking it—Irish traditional music, played and sung just like they play it and sing it in Ireland and in little pockets of Irish diaspora all over the world, just like they have sung it and played it for centuries.

But this isn’t about Irish music.  It’s about opportunity.  And about one of the many small things (read: opportunities) that make Chattanooga great.  After living in Cork, Ireland, for the better part of three years, I don’t think I would consider moving to a city that didn’t have at least one good Irish session.  Like a waterfront, a few good festivals, a university-hosted public radio station, a decent Thai restaurant, bike paths, and a crazy good breakfast café, an Irish music session is one of the things a good city should have.  And lucky us!  We’re all set!  We have Ken and Mark tuning up their instruments and voices every Sunday to deliver the finest in Irish tunes and songs.  And us luckier still, they do it out in the open where anyone can access it.  Musicians who are learning Irish tunes can sit in and play (and/or record tunes to take with them as “homework”), others can sit near and enjoy, or perhaps be inspired to start learning an instrument or this very special style of music.

From what I’ve observed, playing in Irish sessions in New Jersey, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Ireland, England, and now Chattanooga, there are a few ingredients that go into the making of a good session:

• - Musicians with a passion for their particular style of music that it borders on obsession.
• - Beer. And food, if available, but this is less important than the beer.
• - A crowd who appreciates that live community music is a rare commodity these days, and that like locally grown organic produce, it might not look or sound as pretty as the commercially produced stuff, but there’s no question it’s better for you.
• 
  

Now I’ll elaborate more on these critical ingredients. The musicians pretty much have it together now.  Ken, Mark, Casey, Robby… These guys know a lot of tunes.  When they’re not at the session playing tunes, they’re somewhere else—playing tunes.  Collectively, I’m certain they know over 300 tunes.  And that’s not even counting the tunes that other musicians sitting in might bring to the table.  It’s an open session, so anything can happen, and anyone is welcome to join.  Anyway, the point is, they’re not going to run out of tunes, nor the energy for playing them—as long as the other ingredients for their session are in place.

Beer. If you’re concerned about beer protocol at an Irish session, yes, it’s totally cool to buy the musicians a round if you’re enjoying the tunes.  If you feel that’s a little above and beyond, or if the bartender tells you the musicians are already covered, a simple mention to the management that you appreciate the music goes a long way towards the sustainability of a session.  By the way, this applies to all live music scenarios in bars and restaurants.  Always cool to buy the musicians a round, and always a good idea to mention it to the folks in charge if you’re digging the tunes.

The crowd.  I’m talking to you.  Maybe you’re thinking that Riverdance wasn’t exactly your cup of tea, or maybe you’re thinking that Sundays were created only for sports (ok, maybe there are 6 million people in Ireland who would agree with you).  Maybe, baby, it’s cold outside.  Maybe you’d like to use Sunday to recover from your wild weekend and get ready for the workweek ahead.  But you are one of the critical ingredients in the success of Chattanooga’s only Irish music session, without which we’d be living in a far lesser city.  And this coming Sunday it counts double.

The boys have struck a new deal with this new venue to host the weekly session, and everyone’s making an extra effort to make this Sunday’s first-session-in-the-new-place one to remember.  They’re out to make a good impression on the new hosts, and part of that is showing that an Irish music session can generate a warm and lively scene in your bar/restaurant.  They’re going to prove that, together with the venue, they have the three necessary ingredients for a successful weekly session: good music played by good musicians, good beer, and a good crowd there to enjoy it all.

So here’s your big chance to earn your double culture points this Sunday.  You can play your part in nurturing one of Chattanooga’s unique cultural features, the weekly Irish traditional music session, AND pay a visit to one of Chattanooga’s newest drinking/dining establishments.  Come have a beer and test-drive the reuben with me (my personal litmus test for any new bar menu).  We’ll raise our honest pints to Chattanooga’s people-powered, all-natural, 100% organic, locally sustainable, living music scene.

Details:

What: Irish Traditional Music Session

Where: The Honest Pint, (where Parkway Billiards used to be) 35 Patten Parkway, between Georgia Ave. and Lindsay St.

When: 2pm, Sunday, Jan 2nd.

P.S. Did you know that you can get info about Irish traditional music happenings around Chattanooga from the Folk School of Chattanooga Facebook page?  The Irish session has a page too.  And so does The Honest Pint. While you’re there, it’s not a bad idea to drop a little note on one of these pages saying what a great time you had (will have had) on Sunday!

Learning the fiddle is scary.  Ask anyone who’s doing it.  And I say “doing it” rather than “done it” because I don’t think anyone would admit to having learned the fiddle.  I’m pretty sure any fiddler you find will tell you they’re still learning.  It’s scary because of a few obvious points. 1.) No frets, and 2.) the bow.  No frets on a fiddle means you’re holding this screeching soundbox up to your own face, so close you can’t see what you’re doing (but no worries at all about hearing it!) and even if you could see what you’re doing, it’s like your fingertips are blind, having to just feel and listen their way into the right places to make notes that don’t sound awful.  Believe me, it’ll take dozens and of hours to make sense of even a basic major scale, and that’s just a start.  As for the bow, once you get that past the stage of feeling incredibly awkward, there’s only a world of infinite possibility waiting for you.  You might work out the bowing to your favorite tune, only to have some other fiddler come up and show you another way to play the same tune… and then weeks or months later, another.

When I started playing the fiddle, at the risk of losing my friends and the sympathy of my neighbors, I practiced a lot. (This kind of motivation in my life is rare, so please don’t get the wrong idea.)  I also took every opportunity to sidle up next to any and every fiddler I could find.  Fortunately around this time, Alan Jabbour paid a visit to my town and I took my very first formal fiddle workshop.  I was in over my head!  He was teaching to a room of fiddle students all at different experience levels, and asking us to do things like (gasp!) use our pinky fingers and hold down two notes at once—all unexplored territory for me at the time.  But I hung in there the best I could, and took home these hacked-up versions of “Ebeneezer,” “Henry Reed’s Breakdown,” and most hacked-up of all, the ought-to-be-lovely “Rocking the Babies to Sleep.”  All three of these are still works in progress for me, but I feel comfortable enough leading those first two in a jam session—and they are both great party pieces!  What I also took home that day in 2005 was a direct appreciation of Alan Jabbour as a player and a teacher.

So a few months ago, when Ken Perlman and Alan Jabbour said they were going to be on tour and wanted to make a stop in Chattanooga, it was a no-brainer.  We opened the doors of the Folk School and tried to make them feel at home during their short stay.  Their performance at Barking Legs was excellent, as expected.  But what surprised me was how much I got out of Alan’s workshop the following morning.

Usually when we host workshops at the Folk School, I’ll stay behind the scenes, and let the others do the learning while I make the coffee, catch up on emails, or update the website.  This time, though, I had insisted that my student Sydnie take Alan’s workshop, and thought it would only be polite if I sat in there with her.  So Sydnie’s there with her fiddle, pretty much at the same level of playing as I was back when I took that first workshop with Alan.  I’m there, expecting only to play a supportive role to my student, and pick up the new tunes just to be able to help her with them if she needed it later.  Here’s what I forgot: Just how nice it feels to be led through a new tune, phrase by phrase, accounting for each directional change of the bow and every grace note and embellishment of the left hand.  I also forgot (or perhaps never fully understood in the first place) the magical transaction that goes on when one fiddler sits with another.

I’ll probably never forget the three hours spent with Alan that morning, nor the two tunes we worked on: Henry Reed’s “Fire on the Mountain” and “Shoofly.”  Alan has a great way of teaching where everyone in the room keeps their bow moving; everyone is expected to work nearly the whole time, with short breaks where we listen to Alan tell an anecdote or interpretive note about the tune.  Repetition, repetition, repetition of each phrase gets the tune into your ear, into your brain, and into your body.  Ok, so there are the notes you’re expected to play, the sequence of down-up-downs and up-up-up-down-ups for the bow, the little tricks like rolling the bow from one string to the other or grabbing a chord on an offbeat.  Think you got all that down?  Well ok, now consider the small variations on the melody, the fact that the rhythm that the bow is generating ties the music to its African American roots, the tiny details of buzzes and slight dissonance created when you play unison notes on adjacent strings, just the way Henry Reed might’ve done it.

That’s right, I said it again.  Henry Reed.

And you’re thinking, “Who’s the Henry guy?  Was he teaching the class?  I thought it was Alan Jabbour.”

This is where the magical transaction takes place.  Without getting into the history and biography of Henry Reed (that’s what the internet is for, isn’t it?), let me first just say that in a way, Henry Reed was present at the workshop last Saturday morning… Or as present as he could’ve been.  A quote from Alan’s notes inside the 2002 recording, “A Henry Reed Reunion”:

“Henry Reed was my main mentor on the fiddle – the man whose playing I tried hardest to emulate.  He taught me scores of tunes, and I taught them in turn to the Hollow Rock String Band and the rest of the vibrant oldtime musical circle in Durham, North Carolina, during the later 1960s.  His impact on all of us then was huge.  He revolutionized our sense of the dimensions and character of the older repertory of Appalachian instrumental music, and our sense of what the older Appalachian style was capable of conveying expressively.  It was as if we were in search of good tunes and found great art.”

Alan pointed out to us (and we could sense his sense of wonder still at this fact) that he learned his tunes from Henry Reed, who was born in 1884, and that Henry Reed had learned many of his tunes from Quince Dillion, who was born in 1827.  It’s not hard to be amazed at this: that for all this historical periods between 1827 and 2010, when you look at that span of years in terms of fiddle tune transmission, you have only three generations.  Well that’ll make you sit up and pay attention.  What did we get for our three hours at the Folk School that morning?  Just another couple of fiddle tunes?  Yes, that, and a chance to link up directly to this legacy of tune transmission.  We got the experience of sitting with another fiddler and trying our hardest to make our bow do what his was doing—and by spending that time in such a way, we participated in something that connects humans in the past to humans in the present in ways that recorded history can’t.

I think I just discovered what we really mean by “folk.”

-Christie Burns

August 6, 2010

On southbound I-75, on the way back from Clifftop.

Listening to: Soundwagon, tunes from Mississippi.

One thing I’ve observed about old time music, or fiddling in particular, is the way that it never sounds as good when played by one person alone as it does when played in a group.  No wait, let me clarify.  When someone like Joseph Decosimo picks up the fiddle or banjo and plays a tune solo, it still sounds like a little slice of paradise.  I suppose I can only speak for myself (but old time players, wouldn’t you back me up on this?): something about the unity of a group elevates my playing to a place I simply can’t get it to when I’m playing alone.  Ok, so take that handy socio-musical phenomenon and multiply it by 5000.  And that’s Clifftop.

Last Monday afternoon, I arrived at the George Washington Carver State Park in Clifftop, WV for a festival officially titled, but never ever called by its name, “Appalachian String Band Music Festival”.  To all these players who come from nearly all, if not all, 50 states, and from many foreign countries, the festival is Clifftop.  The official dates of the festival also don’t matter.  If the start date is Wednesday, August 4, a small village of tents and RVs is already developing down in the wooded holes and up on the flatlands by the Thursday prior.  This means that the person walking in on the official first day of the festival sees, hears, and smells a population of players who literally have kept music going nonstop for seven days. There’s no paid entertainment at this festival.  The participants are their own entertainment, in the form of jams, contests, dinner parties, Swedish toasts, conversations, strolls through the maze of tents to hear the walking tour of old time music…

Fiddlers, clawhammer banjo players, and guitarists all sitting knee-to-knee in tight clusters under a canopy with the bass player tucked in close behind, playing the most hypnotic groovy music you’ve ever heard—the Oomp, Oomp of the bass’s one/five alternation, and the oomp-chack oomp-chack of the guitar, the ticka ticka ticka ticka of the banjo and the sea-like rises and falls of the melody coming from the fiddle.  The whole band falling into deep stealth mode with the tune, and then reemerging with a great crescendo that literally makes dancers leap to their feet.  And you might think this great crescendo, like a fireworks show, would indicate that the end of the tune is near.  But you’d be wrong.  Come back 15 minutes later, and they’re still reveling in the same tune.

Regarding my observation about the unity of a group of players elevating any one of those players’ own music making, and my simple equation of multiplying this by 5000 to equal Clifftop… Well, it’s a loose calculation to begin with, and to quantify Clifftop means nothing as of Sunday when all these musicians will travel back to their homes (or to the next festival) to bring their old and new favorite tunes to old and new groups of players.  We were bees working inside the hive this week.  Some essence of the experience will travel with us as we go.  And once again, speaking only for myself, I know that my own musicianship has been kicked up a notch, if only from what my senses took in this week.  Certainly, the callouses on my fingers have never been thicker—even typing feels funny in my left hand now.  I don’t think I’ve ever played with such open abandon and been swept up so helplessly in the current of a festival full of players.  And the best part about this is that the elements of this experience were there in abundance, maybe even the loaves and fishes trick, where no matter how much we played, we never ran out of tunes, friends and strangers to play them with, and energy to make that bow move across the strings a few more thousand times before laying it down for a rest.  Players at any point along their learning path participating in this week of total old time immersion could not possibly walk away unchanged.  I got the sense that we’re all working on our music year-round, and coming together to celebrate that work and that learning.  I still struggle sometimes to fiddle a flawless “Half Past Four”, among thousands of other tunes and styles I have yet to practice and perfect.  But maybe it’s not about perfection.  Maybe it’s about being there in the cacophonous woods as that second (or third, or tenth) fiddler who’s going to help elevate the group’s experience.  It’s a pot luck where all the guests bring their own special dish of tunes, passion, and then some more passion.  And just a few more tunes.

-Christie Burns