The Buskers Blog

Some Random Numerical Observations Upon Returning Home

6 days on the road. 6 shows. 6 croissants bought in Dorian, Québec. 6 hours’ drive home.

1050 miles of driving.

42 gallons of gasoline.

$4.31 – the price per gallon of fuel purchased at Nice’N’Easy, Watertown, NY.

2 [free] mixing sessions at the NCPR studios in Canton, care of the Up North Project.  Two border crossings.

3 swims in Lake of The Woods.  Our 3rd tour of Northern New York. 3 new songs mixed.

18 CDs sold.

79 (of 500) “Ray’s Vacation” CDs left. Time to reorder.

15 years of playing together.

X cups of coffee of varying quality to stay awake on the drive home.

1 suitcase, sm., dirty laundry. One rainy day. One request for "Proud Mary." One nation under God.

The Accordion Angels -- Dying To Hear Them Play

The Accordion Angels: Mark Nathanson (accordion); Genevieve Leloup (accordion); Carl Riehl, (accordion); and my friend  Bob Goldberg on accordion, in Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn, NY.

On July 23 they move up from underground to perform for the living at the Brooklyn Lyceum (227 4th Ave, between Union and President Streets, Brooklyn, NY 11215 at 8: and 9:30 pm, as part of the Jazz on Wednesdays Series (curated by Joe Phillips) Admission is $10.  The Lyceum is located nearest the R train station at Union Street.

Bob was my bandmate in The Reggae/Polka Pickup Band, which performed once in Brooklyn in 1987;  in the orginal prototype of Le Nozze Di Carlo (1988?) [their album reviewed in this blog]; and he filled in for Kathy once with The Buskers (on accordion, not fiddle) in Tilton, NH around 1995?

I haven't heard the Accordion Angels yet, but if Bob is involved, they might go off but they can't go wrong. Not in shades and a beret.  Please go see them and report back. Thanks,
Craig

Two Chemical Free Stay-Awake Techniques For Late Night Drives

June 26. The Buskers play a city-wide block party in Troy, NY (“Troy Night Out”).  It’s a hot Friday night. We get lost coming into town, but we park and call our liason and she sends her lovely assistant down the street to find us and steer us in the right direction--“You won’t miss her.  She’s wearing a pretty flower print summer dress.” Correct.  Then an off-duty cop appears and insists he get in his car and lead us to our spot.  It couldn’t be more than four blocks away, but as Troy seems to be all one-way streets, we accept.  My car is right behind his; apparently everyone on the street knows this guy. They wave, smile, call out greetings. Mayberry, RFD or the Twilight Zone?

We play in a wide plaza, within hearing distance of two other bands (maybe somebody overbooked?); plenty of room for people to dance, and it’s a great night.  Paul Knowles swings hard on the drums. When we’re finally packed up at the end pf the night, it must still be 80 degrees. Sweaty and tired, I decide to drive home instead of spending money on a motel room.  It’s a four-hour drive.

There are many ways to stay awake driving late at night.  One method I've been told: roll down your window and put your left hand out there in the breeze holding a crisp twenty dollar bill.  If you fall asleep, you relax your grip; if you lose your grip, you lose that money–and money usually being tight for musicians, you don’t want to do that.

I discovered a new method to stay awake on this drive – I accidentally bit my tongue really deeply on a piece of chocolate. Copious bleeding, interesting level of pain, a big flap of tongue I couldn’t resist touching to the roof of my mouth over and over again.  I was still wide awake at 2 am, with no coffee, even. I don’t exactly recommend this, but it beats flipping over a guardrail.

Next week The Buskers play five nights in Northern New York. I think we’ll be able to do most of the big drives by day.

Link To Buskers Interview

I found this link to a brief interview The Buskers did for New York State's North Country Public Radio last sumer. We're not ready for Fresh Air yet, maybe, but it went better than some of our interviews.  They also put on the site a couple of the tracks we recorded--in about two hours studio time, mind you (i.e. very rushed): two folkier things of Paul's, Blue Horizon Line and  Riding High In Lowville.  Fortunately we get to go in and work on those tunes some more when we're in the area this summer--redo a couple of tracks and remix.

here it is:  http://www.upnorthmusic.org/performers/thebuskers.htm

...and you can vote how much you love us. Pump us up and vote five stars, whether you dig those tracks or not?

Floyd Cramer! George Winston! A Workingman's Bag of Tricks

For several  weekends I've been happily employed as session player at Westerman’s studio in Webster, NH.; first with Joe Droukas of The Parlour Band--mandolin and accordion, if I remember correctly, for a project of his; then Diane Kordas of the mostly bluegrass band Late Night Radio called me in for some childrens’ music she is recording. We had a lot of laughs, and the music was perfect developmentally for little ones, even if the repetitiveness drove Westerman crazy. The experience reminded me of my first real job, when I was still in school at Sarah Lawrence, playing for Pam Finney’s wonderful childrens’ dance classes in Bronxville.  

Then last weekend Brad Parker, a country-ish singer/songwriter who at times sounds a dead ringer for Waylon Jennings, had me lay some piano tracks for an album he’s making.  On the first track - kind of a rocking thing- I first tried a driving left hand that reinforced the acoustic guitar, but it didn’t take long to find what he really liked was a little contrast, a light ivory tickling in the upper register.  “That’s it! Keep playing that Floyd Cramer thing! I like that!” Brad called from the control room. I couldn’t remember for the life of me who Floyd Cramer was, though I’d heard his name mentioned over the years as a Nashville guy, but evidently I know how to sound like him (of course, I've since  looked up his discography, etc). Then a few tunes later, on a B minor ballad, I went for an expressionistic folk/jazz mood, which was enthusiastically received, too.  This time Westerman called out from the control room, “George Winston!”  Hey, whatever is called for.

I have always had a great time in the studio, though: energized, productive, relaxed – at least when I’m not paying – which I will be next weekend, when I go in to finish mixing some Buskers tunes and add the vocals for Spank That Tambourine.  I think I’ve finally learned to keep sessions down to four or five hours, before the ears get too tired.

Next week the Buskers will use up a few hundred dollars of fossil fuels to perform in Glens Falls, New York. Paul and I sometimes drive together, but he has aging parents out that way and plans to stay on and visit, so I’m on my own.  Good for songwriting, these long drives. Especially since my iPod died.  Kathy tried hard to get a companion gig to make the trip more affordable, but these are hard times.  At least  they’re putting us up at a hotel. Let’s find some place to busk. We’re headed back to the area later in the Summer, to Saratoga Springs.

Two Cuckoos With One Stone

May 17, Nashua, NH. Michael Timothy’s. Nice place, good crowd, but claustrophobia load-in. Run the gauntlet from the packed waitstation by the back door, where I almost get plate scrapings flung on me - an accident, I think - out to the front of the room, four, five trips, banging amps and keyboards into walls, chairs, a waitress, a patron or two - excuse me, sorry. Setting up I discover I’m missing a cord. Great. Just the power cord to the piano, but since it’s a Groovemakers gig, I also have my Hammond clone; I’m a two-keyboard man. What the hell, I play organ all night and it turns out great; I would do it again, well-supported by band leader Paul Bourgelais, who pulls out some greasy blues and some hard-driving swing, and drummer Tim Gilmore plays his brand-new Canopus kit, sounding sweet as sugar.

KZ is here for our annual Buskers new material woodshedding and rehearsal week. She wrote two very pretty pieces over the long winter – what else is there to do on the Canadian border? - and Paul and I have been writing, too. So we’ve been throwing it down, as they say, in rehearsal.

And the other night we tried a slowed-up Zydeco cover of Chuck Berry’s Maybelline, that was cool; and we brought Cecilia back to life (a 1929 song we used to play with Richard Danahy, not the Paul Simon tune). I brought Cecilia out at the Groovemakers gig, too. Paul and Tim had actually never played it.

The lyric, though—“does your mother know you’re out, Cecilia? Does she know that I’m about to steal you?” …you get to a certain age – that might sound sketchy when I sing it. Too old. One song I wrote but for similar reasons never play (plus it’s just not very good) has lyrics that begin, “on a Sunday night the college is quiet / but there’s a little light that shines / from under the shade in her window / in the dormitory, she’s waiting up for me / and she’ll have new stories / to tell to me as we fall asleep tonight.” Well, no, I wrote it when I was twenty-two. It’s all about context. “It’s a nice day for a (!) white wedding.”

But back to musical cross-pollination – music you pick up from one group in one genre that finds its way into new contexts: One tune I called with the Groovies the other night was Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s Serenade To A Cuckoo. It was on my mind because I’d overheard guitar teacher David Young teaching it to a couple of his Sant Bani students a while back, and decided I’d steal it for the school jazz band. Just transposed down to E minor for the sake of the two violins and the cello (and no horns) I currently have, or rather, for the sake of anyone listening. A lot of mileage on that little tune in the last few weeks. What do you bet one of the Groovemakers will call it some night soon? And so it goes; like an annoying chain email, good tunes go round and around making the rounds.

Maybe The Buskers should play it Wednesday night at Giuseppe’s, which, I’m sad to say, may be our last gig with drummer Kyle Crane, as he’s headed out to L.A. in June. Graduate school. He just graduated from Berklee in December, for crying out loud. We’ll miss him.

Spank That Tambourine

Yesterday The Buskers went into the studio again; old friend Chris Westerman at Blackwater Sound; recorded a little finger-picking instrumental Paul wrote called Apples & Rice, and my song Spank That Tambourine, the lyrics of which I will now share with you, since it is actually about buskers.

spank that tambourine © 2008 craig jaster

the muse smiles as she walked away
she says they’re just the same old used to be
a little out of tune, maybe, but hey, that’s OK
they put their heart in every note they play
so take some time, stop & listen
it might keep em out of prison
if you throw a dime
god bless you, have a great day

so spank that tambourine
break out the accordion
if that don’t drive the audience away
they’ll stand out on the corner there forever
like there’s nowhere in the world they’d rather be
and they’re quick to admit, the fact is
they could always use the practice
but wouldn’t it be great if they got paid?

so drop a dollar in the case
let the buskers save some face
or make ‘em pack up in disgrace and go away
drop a dollar in the case
it might not save the human race
but if you’ve got some time to waste
listen to ‘em play

mama always said don’t play out in the road
she must have known it’s safer on the sidewalk
on the corner of some busy block
now that’s the place to go
it may not be exactly Carnegie Hall
no flowers at the curtain call
you play a little harder when your back’s against the wall
they’re not just putting on a show

so spank that tambourine
play that fiddle good and loud
maybe if they draw a crowd, they’ll sell a few CDs
they know that they’ll never see their names lit up on a marquee
they’ll always be completely unknown
nobody says you have to throw those dogs a bone
but what else in this world but love is free?

so drop a dollar in the case
let the buskers save some face
don’t make ‘em pack up in disgrace and go away
drop a dollar in the case
if you want to hear some bass…
and if that’s not to your taste
come back some other day

go on, make a request
put these buskers to the test
and they’ll do their level best to play your song
but their memories get blurred
and they’ll forget the chords and words
if, of all the songs you’ve ever heard
you only want to hear - Free Bird!

We’ve played it out a couple of times before, but an earlier draft, written in the first person plural, like it’s about us, which could seem like we’re literally asking the audience for money, which is OK when you’re busking, but feels greedy at a concert where you’re getting a check at the end of the night.

The gold standard song about Buskers is Joni Mitchell’s For Free, that windblown street corner magic ballad (Tom Scott on saxophone?), but call me a cynic - I’ve heard so many truly shitty street musicians over the years that I can’t just sing their praises straight out. Call it ambivalence.

It’s a noble calling, for sure, like feeding the poor or developing alternative energy technologies, but then I remember this girl on the street in Northhampton, MA,, last year, strumming a non-chord and singing, sort of, “pleeease give me some moneeeey, come on, somebodyyy, how about a dollaaarrr” Wow. She was stoned, of course, but… so was Satchmo. So was Jaco. But they could play.

4/28 Great New Yorker Article On Folk

We’re dense, naive, clutching at straws when we try to unravel the many strands in our music, and The Buskers have been known to blunder onto that elusive word “folk” as a self-descriptor, knowing full well it’s just opening a big old can of worms.

There is a great article in the April 28 issue of The New Yorker entitled The Last Verse; Is There Any Folk Music Still Out There? by Burkhard Bilger. It’s a profile of folk music collectors and anthologizers Art Rosenbaum and Lance Ledbetter which also charts the changes that cut a highway through the middle of the folk landscape: the end of the isolation that once made “the Appalachians…a kind of cultural Galapagos,” the advent of recorded music, which confused as well as cross-pollinated, and eventually replaced “scrappy regional bands…like the Skillet Lickers, the Yellow Hammers, the Dill Pickles and the Gully Jumpers…with full-time professionals… Before 1945… you could tell which side of a ridge a banjo player was from; after 1945, most just played like Earl Scruggs.”

Burkhard spends no time on the history of the folk revival or its giants like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, etc. For Rosenbaum, “folk music (is) the art of the anonymous.” –-and really, The Buskers, though we are as compromised by homogenization as anyone else, have at least this in common with the Skillet Lickers—despite our best efforts, we are pretty fucking anonymous!

Rosenbaum’s criteria for recordings:

The songs had to be traditional, the music learned from relatives or local musicians…The difference wasn’t always clear. How old did a song have to be to be traditional? When John Lomax first recorded the blues, the genre was newer than hip-hop is today, and both Leadbelly and Robert Johnson learned songs from records.

As he freely admits, “There is no purity…music is always an interchange.” It gets sticky fast, and the folk enthusiast’s traditional holy grails of authenticity…purity…. sound like promises made by snake oil salesmen at the county fair.

No doubt something beautiful has been pretty much lost. Rosenbaum says, defending his passion foe finding and saving old folk music, “We’re getting close to the time when there might not be any family or local music traditions. So I’ve concentrated on preserving those.”

But Burkhard finds much to be optimistic about. Folk is certainly not dead. Of course scratchy field recordings of obscure folk music don’t have much market share, but he points out that the influence of Ledbetter’s boxed set anthology, Goodbye, Babylon, is wide—nominated for two Grammys; Neil Young mentioned it in an NPR interview; and Arcade Fire’s widely acclaimed last album, Neon Bible, was reportedly written under its influence.

And he suggests there is a new audience for this stuff—not baby boomers, but the kind of adventurous listeners like Ledbetter himself, who follow “scruffy indie labels and were just as likely to be fans of synth pop, German noise rock, or minimalist soundscapes.”

So folk isn’t dead yet. I’ll close with one more quote from the article.

A good folk song is easy to learn and hard to forget. Its melody is brief, its chorus repeats, its rhymes lead from line to line like base pairs in a chain of DNA. A folk song is a meme, an evolutionary biologist might say—the cultural version of a gene. It passes from generation to generation, evolving as it goes, till every clumsy or extraneous line is stripped away…you have only to hear it a few times to know it by heart.

Shakespeare Meets Arcade Fire and Nelly Furtado (?!)

Having written new music for a production of Woyzeck I just directed, I am sensitive right now to the depth of resonance the right incidental music can add to the theatre experience...which reminds me of the following:

A while back I took some of my high school students on a theatre field trip. Friday night we saw an unforgettable Julius Caesar at American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, MA, and Saturday (as if one Shakespeare political tragedy wasn’t enough) we caught Richard III at Trinity Rep in Providence, RI.

In both productions at a key moment the climax of Arcade Fire’s “My Body Is A Cage” blares over the speakers. In Julius Caesar, I believe it was just before intermission, after the assassination: the light changes, Caesar gets up, crosses down stage center in his bloody clothes, faces the audience, and suddenly gives an agonizing, slow-motion howl of pain as the organ wail crescendos.

In Richard III I think they played the song at the end of the curtain call—I forget now; but is that weird or what? Is the theatre world so incestuous? Or was this pure coincidence? Can anyone tell me? I have to admit the song worked powerfully well in both settings, though we were all so surprised to hear it the second time, it didn’t have quite the same effect.

On Sunday we saw one more play and were all half expecting to hear it again, but it was a period piece and a comedy, so no go.

A nice jazz trio--vocalist, guitar and bass, was also worked into the production of Julius Caesar, which was given a very resonant Kennedy-esque setting. But at the curtain call, the whole cast, including the numerous dead, all come out and dance together to “Say It Right” by Nelly Furtado.. ”oh, you don’t mean nothin’ at all to me…” Again, it worked, at least for me. Some kind of dry catharsis after all that naked ambition and murder and battlefield warfare.

Cajun Wedding

Just got home from the wedding of dear friends Henry Hample (formerly of Washboard Jungle, now in several Cajun bands) and Yvonne Olivier, in Arnaudville, Louisiana, in the neighborhood where Yvonne was born and raised.

At one point during the ceremony, which was held in the shade of some large trees outside their beautiful 1840 home, a beat-up old truck drove by on the dirt road just as the wedding musicians played the Mazel Tov hora, and I whispered to a friend, "just another Jewish wedding on the bayou." To be fair, in addition to Henry’s soon-to-be-ordained-as-a-rabbi brother, a Catholic priest also officiated; all was right and proper, and you couldn’t have asked for nicer people or a happier mix of cultures than this mostly New York City and Southern Louisiana gumbo.

At the reception, Henry, still in tails and top hat, played a short set of classic Washboard tunes with the band before turning the stage over to the best Cajun band in Southern Lousiana, The Lost Bayou Ramblers. Featuring a couple of the Michaud brothers, with various other relatives and friends sitting in, they blew us away like a happy hurricane. My lovely wife, who despite having once been a professional modern dancer (in fact, we first knew Yvonne through the dance department at Sarah Lawrence College), has always been too shy to dance at weddings, etc., but we spent the night on the dance floor last night. It was heaven there on Bayou Teche, I have to say.

Of course, I may be over-romanticizing the place, having left New Hampshire in yet another $%^&* snowstorm a couple of days ago, and returning this morning to, unbelievably, another--who knows how I’d feel if I was down there in August, no air conditioning... but I can see why Henry came and stayed.

Though I was having too much fun dancing to care, the locals put us to shame at waltz and two-step. Dancing is clearly a tradition passed down generation to generation, and it was sweet to see, for example, Yvonne’s elderly father on the dance floor as much as ourselves, with dozens of pretty nieces and grandnieces and granddaughters and daughters and what-not for partners, all of whom knew their stuff. Of course with Yvonne’s background in modern dance, you might expect that some of her girlfriends would get pretty interpretive and expressive and generally out there, too, and they did.

We had a little time earlier in the day, and drove over to, as the highway billboard sign reads, "Historic Downtown" Breaux Bridge, a one-stoplight, just a half block in each direction town with more music per square foot than you can shake a stick at, where we listened to a good Zydeco band while we stood outside the window of the very crowded Cafe Des Amis. There was also a Cajun jam at the coffee shop catty corner across the street.

I have since learned that the Lost Bayou Ramblers were nominated for a Grammy last year, and that they performed up my way not too long ago, in Wolfeboro, NH. I hope they get lured back up there soon. Masters at lock-step Cajun grooves. mm-mmm.

On the other hand, maybe The Buskers can get some gigs in Opelousas or Lafayette. I think we’d fit in pretty good there. And I think I know somewhere we could stay.