Weekend of Music in Champaign-Urbana

A quick report from this weekend here in Champaign-Urbana.

On Friday night, I was back at the Research Park at the University of Illinois to see an evening of bluegrass music. Because it had rained throughout the day, the crowd was a lot thinner than it had been for the Kathy Mattea show two weeks ago.

My new political science colleague Tiberiu and I had stopped off for a beer on the way to the show, so we arrived at the end of High Cotton's set. A traditionally-oriented bluegrass band based here in Central Illinois, we caught "No Hiding Place," "Man at the Mill" and "Orange Blossom Special." I wish that we had made it there to see their full show, and I look forward to catching them next time around.

The headliner for the evening was Hot Buttered Rum, the West Coast acoustic string band. My first exposure to these guys was my first day in Indonesia. I met a couple from Berkeley that was staying at the same homestay in Jakarta as me; mentioning bluegrass, they asked me if I knew Hot Buttered Rum and hooked me up with a disc. Friday was my first time seeing them live.

Their set started off fairly slow, I thought. I wasn't feeling the groove all that much. We were seated off to the side, so the sound was a little more muffled than if we had been in the direct line of the speakers, so that might have been it. We also struck up a conversation with Jim from John Deere who is running the John Deere research center at the Research Park, so maybe it was learning about dry-land farming in Montana that kept me out of the groove.

But then -- after a while and toward the end of their set -- things started to pick up. "Blackberry Pie" brought me in, and then they laid down some serious groove on "Up on Cripple Creek." There was a funkified version of "Walls of Time" and then some solid flute-playing on the final song, which -- I'm serious about this -- made the dance pit come alive. In fact, I think I would have had a much different concert-going experience if I had been down in that dance pit. A lesson for next time.

The most interesting thing, I thought, about Hot Buttered Rum was the quality of the drumming, which propelled even the songs where I wasn't feeling the groove. The rhythm was steady and only fancy when it needed to be. I also was surprised that the solos were not a bit more aggressive; the band played in a pretty chill fashion, not letting the individual members shine as much as they might. Maybe that's a West Coast thing.

On Saturday, at the Urbana farmers' market (Market at the Square, if you like), there was good and/or interesting music at every corner. The guys who really caught my ears were Tom and Matt Turino, a father and son playing accordion and guitar respectively. They had a great sound together and played a couple of really nice tunes while I was picking out some handmade soap and considering the merits of a second loaf of bread.

Matt and Tom will be having a CD release party this Saturday at the Iron Post -- just a few blocks from my apartment. Unfortunately, I will be in Toronto, attending to professional duties.

Tom is a member of the music department at UIUC; he studies Andean and Latin American music and has written a book on the music of Zimbabwe.

Little did I know that I would be seeing more of Tom later in the day. While I was at home working on my lecture notes, the Urbana Sweet Corn Festival was going on two blocks away. When some seriously good Zydeco music started floating in the window, I decided to make my way over to see it in person. The group was Big Grove, featuring Tom Turino on accordion and vocals (and fiddle on a tune or two), Ben Smith on fiddle, Ben Hay on guitar, J.B. Faires on bass and Gordon Kay on the drums. (Matt Turino plays with the band, too, I guess, but he wasn't on stage with them on Saturday.) They had plenty of two-step swing and played some lovely waltzes. There was lots of room for dancing, although only a limited number of people doing it, but I saw some lovely waltzing and some smooth two-stepping.

They'll be playing at the Alto Vineyards tasting room in Champaign on September 12th.

Mandolinist Doppelgangers

I'm listening to The Moonshine Show this morning, where James Reams is sitting in with Jeff Kandel. (They were kind enough to dedicate a song from The Bray Brothers' Prairie Bluegrass album to me. When Jeff announced their Urbana address (419 W. Main Street), I realized that I sometimes walk by it on my way into the office!)

They just played a track from Ricky Skaggs' forthcoming solo CD, Songs My Dad Loved. (Ricky plays all the instruments and does all the singing on the disc.)

I went to the Skaggs Family website to check out the album and found this cover photo:



Ok, so is it just me, or is Ricky stealing some of Marty Stuart's hairstyle secrets?

You be the judge:



Long lost brothers? Maybe...

Radio Station Doppelganger

This photo from the New York Times article about legendary New York City salsa DJ Polito Vega has had me doing regular doubletakes. Taken at WSKQ-FM in New York, it looks quite a bit like WKCR's studios, as maybe can be seen below -- same racks, same board, same walls! Spooky.

Mountain Stage Newsong Northeast Regional Round

Dr. Kari Groff-Denis -- who appeared on the Moonshine Show with the Kings County Strings back in January of this year and who also put together a band for my birthday party in April -- has let us know that her song "Sad is Not Forever..." as performed by Kristin Andreassen and Jumping Through Hoops (a group that includes Chris Eldridge, Rob Hecht, Paul Kowert and Kari herself) is one of the competitors in Mountain Stage's Newsong Northeast Regional Round. There are some other cool songs in the running, too -- including one from my and Ellen's old friend Teddy Goldstein -- so check it out!

Bye-Bye Album Format?

Back at the beginning of the month -- in response to Charles M. Blow's column in the New York Times -- I was speculating about the future of the music industry a bit.

Eric Pfanner's recent Times piece on Radiohead raises some interesting ideas, as well.

[W]hen Mr. [Thom] Yorke [of Radiohead] announced a change of course for the band, saying it planned to stop making full-length records and turn its attention to singles, it sounded like an epitaph for the album, the broken backbone of the record industry’s longtime business model.

“None of us wants to go into that creative hoo-ha of a long-play record again,” Mr. Yorke told the Believer, a literary magazine based in San Francisco. “Not straight off. I mean, it’s just become a real drag. It worked with ‘In Rainbows’ because we had a real fixed idea about where we were going. But we’ve all said that we can’t possibly dive into that again. It’ll kill us.”

Radiohead’s shift to singles reflects a change in music fans’ preferences. Instead of buying whole albums, they now stream or download just the songs they want. That, along with unauthorized copying, has decimated industry revenues.

Indeed it does seem to me like an inevitable transition: artists producing "just-in-time" singles (to borrow a phrase from the academic literature on "flexible production") instead of going album, break, album, break, album... Why delay getting a song out there if someone is just going to download that song only anyway?

Of course, for those of us who love the album format and have spent considerable time contemplating (for instance) the way in which U2 designed Achtung Baby to rise and fall from Side A to Side B -- oh, wait, I guess that is already an antiquated concept -- this is a sad outcome.

But I'm also the first to admit that there are albums that I bought for one song and that's the only song that I really care about (and consequently I listen neither to those CDs nor the single song on them all that much). The opposite is also true -- I've purchased albums based on one song and discovered a whole bunch of other great ones on the same disc. As far as the former is concerned, we should see much less of that: the days of paying for 12 songs based on the quality of one and then ending up with 10 or 11 duds should be over. And as far as the latter is concerned, I suspect that people will continue to release "albums" -- or some similar collection of songs -- when they are warranted.

I thought that the following bit of news was also quite welcome:

Apple and the major record companies are reportedly working on projects to include liner notes, lyrics, artwork, music videos and other extras with digital downloads.

Because if there is one thing that I don't like about downloading, it's the loss of information -- songwriters, musicians, stories about the songs -- that one can usually find in a CD booklet or on the back of an LP.

"Wild Horses" Piano Playing

Memphis piano player Jim Dickinson passed away this week.

Here's the story of how he became the piano player on the Rolling Stones' "Wild Horses":

At a recording session in 1969 at the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama, Ian Stewart, the Stones pianist, abruptly left when it came time to record “Wild Horses.” Mr. Dickinson sat down and filled in.

“After we’re doing it for about 45 minutes, Jagger’s in the control room, listening, and he says to Keith, ‘What do you think about the piano?’ ” Mr. Dickinson recalled, referring to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. “I thought: ‘Well here goes. I’m going home now.’ And Keith says, ‘It’s the only thing I like so far.’ ”

Ten years later Mr. Stewart told Mr. Dickinson he left that day because he did not play minor chords.

Al Bell Back in Memphis

There was a great piece in the New York Times the other day about Al Bell, the one-time owner of Stax Records, who has now returned to Memphis to head the Memphis Music Foundation.

There are some great stories in the article, like the tale of his time with and then ultimate separation from Dr. King:

After high school, in 1959, Mr. Bell went to work under Dr. King at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He spent a year in Georgia until “breaking rank” with the nonviolent-resistance ethos at a march in Savannah, Ga. When a hostile bystander spit on him, Mr. Bell pulled a switchblade from his pocket and plunged into the crowd. Fellow marchers restrained him, “fortunately,” Mr. Bell said, but Dr. King was not pleased.

Earlier, Mr. Bell said, he had brushed aside Dr. King’s concern about his switchblade by joking to him, “Well, Doc, Jesus had Peter with him, and Peter carried a sword.” But Mr. Bell said that after the march Dr. King, calling him Alvertis, rebuked him for his increasing advocacy of self-defense against the police and their dogs. “So I said, ‘O.K., Doc.’ And I left the next day, with love.”

Or there was his little gambling run in response to Otis Redding's death:

On Dec. 10, 1967, when Mr. Bell was attending a radio industry convention in Las Vegas, a loudspeaker announced that Redding, 26, had died in a small plane crash near Madison, Wis. “I lost it,” Mr. Bell said. That night he drank himself into a stupor while playing craps. He learned the next morning that he had made $85,000. “But Otis was still gone,” he said.

His roles in bringing Stax artists to the Apollo Theater in Harlem, the production of Isaac Hayes' Hot Buttered Soul and the 1972 Wattstax Festival in Los Angeles are described in the article, too. And finally who can beat the buttery radio sign-on described here:

Back in Little Rock, Mr. Bell, while attending college, resumed his radio career, eventually graduating in 1961 to WLOK in Memphis, where he used this sign-on: “This is your 6 feet 4 bundle of joy, 212 pounds of Mrs. Bell’s baby boy, soft as medicated cotton, rich as double-X cream, the women’s pet, the men’s threat, the baby boy Al” — and then he rang a bell — “Bell.”

Oh, that is so good!

Also, in an example of the New York Times getting itself involved with awkward expressions because it won't print bad words, there was this:

his [1975 bank-fraud] trial included testimony that a local banking official had bragged, using a racial slur, about “running those” blacks “and especially the chief” black “out of town”....

The trial ended in acquittal for Bell, by the way.

Lawrence Lucie (1907-2009)

Jazz guitarist Lawrence Lucie passed away earlier this week. I wish I could say for certain, but I do think that I once had the pleasure of shaking his hand when he appeared on one of Phil Schaap's radio programs on WKCR.

The following from his obituary struck me:

He began studying banjo, mandolin and violin at an early age and played in a band led by his father.

It looks like he could have been in a bluegrass band!

Kathy Mattea at the UI Research Park

Kathy Mattea's set last night was terrific. A mix of songs that I know by other people and songs that she's made famous and reside somewhere in my subconscious combined with a crackerjack band made for a wonderful evening of music.

Her latest album is called (and is about) Coal, and the songs from that disc formed the core of the set, although she did not shy from dipping into other parts of her repertoire.

The band was quite good, and they had their own crew man (originally from Champaign) running the sound and lights, which were both (for the most part) excellent. Fiddler/mandolinist Eamon O'Rourke was spectacular. Originally from Ireland (and recently married in New York, we were told), his nimble fingers and tight bowing produced an attack that was a mix of David Oistrakh and Michael Cleveland. He got better as the night went on, and by the end of the show, I was saying, "Wow!" every time that he soloed. David Spicher -- son of bluegrass fiddler Buddy Spicher -- was on bass, and he got to take surprising number of solos, and he never disappointed when he did. The soundman made sure that his solos were audible, although early on, he was pushing the bass a little too loud, almost to the exclusion of the other instruments. Bill Cooley provided solid lead guitar chops, although he didn't blow my mind the way that he has that of some other bloggers. The other great thing about the band using their own crew person was that the spotlights were always on whoever was soloing -- I've seen too many shows at clubs in New York where that's not the case.

Kathy offered up what seemed like a genuine compliment of opener Ryan Groff's voice, complimenting his pipes and joking, "It ticks me off that he sings higher than I do!" I thought it was very professional of her to provide such honest thanks of a local opener.

The set list went like this:

• Dark as a Dungeon


• Goin' Gone - beautifully done, and a great choice to jump into a big hit after the opening Merle Travis tune


• Untold Stories


• The L & N Don't Stop Here Anymore


• You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive - a fairly standard treatment of this Darrell Scott classic, but what a great song


• Red Winged Blackbird - a Billy Edd Wheeler song, not to be confused with the David Francey song of the same name; from the Coal album


• Coal Tattoo - back-to-back Billy Edd Wheeler


• Love at the Five and Dime - Kathy told two good stories about her (and Nanci Griffith's) first hit, one involving a bug flying into her mouth on the last chorus the first time that she ever sang it live and one about connecting with her mother (who was suffering from Alzheimer's) through the song


• Time Passes By


• Come from the Heart


• 18 Wheels and a Dozen Roses - Kathy got all of us to sing and then to sing louder, and then she said, "That was lovely. Now can someone tell me what an Illini is?"


• Harley


• Gimme Shelter - a very solid acoustic Rolling Stones moment with excellent work on the lights


• Where've You Been - written by Kathy's husband Jon Vezner


• Mr. Smith Had an Oldsmobile


• ENCORE: Black Lung - Kathy sang this Hazel Dickens classic a capella


• And then -- to end the show on a slightly more upbeat note than "Black Lung" -- the band came back out, and Kathy picked up the penny whistle, and they played a set of Irish tunes.

All in all, it was a great show with everything in place: solid musicians, beautiful vocals, good sound, a good-sized crowd, good lighting and a beautiful prairie sky.

First Post from the Prairie

Not only is this my first post about live music in Champaign-Urbana, my new home, but I'm writing it on my iPhone, also a first.

I'm sitting in a big grassy area at the UIUC Research Park. The crowd here is substantial, probably upwards of 500 people. It is a free outdoor concert sponsored by the Krannert Center.

Opening act Ryan Groff just finished. The highlight of his set for me was his acoustic guitar cover of The Postal Service's "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight." On that song and others, he made extensive and worthwhile use of a digital voice recorder to add his own backing vocals and harmonies. After he finished that song, he played one about a woman in downtown Champaign who used to pretend that she was homeless, much to the consternation of local business owners.

The intermission music has included some contemporary bluegrass and right now an old-time fiddle tune!

Main act Kathy Mattea should take the stage soon. There has been significant conversation behind me -- sadly to the detriment of me being able to hear Ryan Groff -- about whether she will play country music or Appalachian music. I'll let you know soon...