The Return of Folk Alliance, Day 1: Magic and Contradiction

 

A refrain at this first Kansas City Folk Alliance in four years connected Allison Russell to Jason Mraz and countless others, some way of saying, “music is magical.” For the four years before the break, Folk Alliance served as a yearly reminder for so many of us. Especially those private showcases. There’s something to getting away from the mainstage and even the barroom and hearing music in a hotel bedroom, beds generally (but not always) replaced by folding chairs, the hotel room stage either the area in front of the wet bar or the spot in front of the windows. Everyone in the room is engaged in a strikingly intimate ritual, a kind of party where one or four or half a dozen take the others on a mystery tour through their musical ideas, everyone engaged more as participants than audience and performers.

So after the lack of intimacy demanded by the past two years in particular, the magic was especially palpable at this reunion. When Fayetteville, Arkansas’s Patti Steel sang about missing every hug she might have had from her family and friends, she was speaking for virtually everyone in attendance. The conference featured three lanyards—a green one (hugs and handshakes please), a yellow one (ask first), and a red one (no contact please), and it made perfect sense that the green ones were gone by the afternoon. By evening, attendees were writing “green” on their yellow lanyards so others wouldn’t shy away.

Still, pandemic numbers are edging higher again, and the postponed-from-February conference was lighter in attendance than four years ago. Everything was available through remote access, and the halls to the private showcases were far from the brimming chaos of past years, more like any other halls anywhere, though a few people would be crowded outside a door halfway down and at the other end, and, in those muffled distances, beautiful voices clearly sung out.

That said, the International Folk Music Awards filled the great Century C Ballroom, and it was an extraordinary event. Though the politics of past Folk Alliance Conferences have been generally muted, give or take what happened in individual sets, four years of apocalypse had certainly changed that.

On the mainstage of the awards show, singer Diana Jones led the crowd in refrains of “We Believe You,” a song explicitly for Southern border refugees but speaking to all those being brutalized by the current system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0NS9FGERCg While song of the year winner, Crys Matthews declared we all commit to being “The Changemakers.”  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZbJk-WXaSw   

Lachi and Gaelynn Lea of RAMPD

 2016 Tiny Desk Contest winner and cofounder (along with singer Lachi) of Recording Artists and Music Professionals with Disabilities (RAMPD), Gaelynn Lea said that it was important that we recognize disability as not simply a setback but a matter of diversity, raising the issue of equality in a system that is, by design, unequal. For all the beauty of seeing the Folk Alliance celebrate artists as diverse as Bolivian composer Amado Espinoza, organizer of Black Opry Fest Lilli Lewis, Los Cenzontles leader Eugene Rodriguez, Odanak Wabanaki First Nation songwriter/performer Mali Obamsawin, and Africasong Communications founder and deejay Dr. Jonathan Overby, the systemic roots of our oppressions were gotten at by Lea’s comment. Such roots were also addressed by Lifetime Achievement Award Winner Flaco Jimenez when, in a video tribute, he acknowledged his music had long been dismissed as low class and unworthy of attention.

Allison Russell, when she received the first of her two awards (one for album of the year Outside Child, one for Artist of the Year), challenged the room by stating, “we know tolerance is not enough. Tolerance is not enough. We tolerate mosquitoes. Humans need love.” With those clear calls, insisting that it is more than the look of Folk Alliance that matters, the awards ceremony celebration of diversity became a bigger call to think hard about the central problem of equality.

Patti Steel

That theme was picked up by Patti Steel, a remarkable multi-instrumentalist (we’re talking guitar, mandolin, clarinet, and spoons here) with a powerful voice, who sang of the rent being due and all her money spent. It takes more than magic to solve that rent problem, a problem that threatened the lives of millions during the pandemic, a problem addressed by Steel’s "Quarantine 2020." The folks working to solve that problem—like KC Tenants and the Kansas City Homeless Union—can tell us all just how useless magic is in solving that problem. But the magic of music indeed does break down barriers and builds bridges, my own aim of the past thirty years never more apparent than driving home last night past the homeless encampment off Southwest Boulevard, contemplating how the world of Westin Crown Center and such groups struggling to survive might be brought into more immediate dialogue and constructive work, not charity events but strategic planning as equals.

Stillhouse Junkies

My night ended in the British Underground room listening to the Stillhouse Junkies, a band from Durango. Lanky guitar and mandolin player Fred Kosak acknowledged, “Yeah, that’s right, we’re the obligatory Colorado band on your British Underground bill.” Kosak and upright bass player Cody Tinnin picked with an insane urgency, while fiddler Alissa Wolf not only matched their frenetic energy but used her long full bows to lend the music a sweeping, mythical grandeur. In the end, a song about certain defeat became its own refutation, the magic of the music existing in its contradictions.

The Stillhouse Junkies, “Whiskey Prison” https://rhythmic-rebellion.com/video/1a92ebb438/whiskey-prison

 

Gaelynn Lea’s Tiny Desk Concert https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6oSeODGmoQ