Love Comes Down: Finding Unity at Folk Alliance 2024, Day 2

 

Mireya Ramos & the Poor Choices

“I break your soul!” Mireya Ramos shouted and smiled as she delivered the translation of the Cuco Sanchez cover she sang with her current Kansas City-based band, The Poor Choices—Beau Bledsoe (acoustic guitar), Trevor Turla (trombone) Jeff Freling (electric guitar), Marco Pascolini (steel guitar), Ezgi Karakus (cello) and John Currey (drums). Ramos and the band delivered a sterling, rousing set rich with both the rancheras she loves and their cousins among rock and country classics such as Roy Orbison’s (always ranchera influenced) “Blue Bayou” and Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces.” The brilliant set ended with a cumbia as exciting and joyous as Ramos’ soaring vocals. The night before, Puerto Rican Ramos sang Chilean Victor Jara’s movement defining “Manifesto,” and on this night, Ramos only further underscored the easy unity forged by musical forms that truly have more roots in common than the markets and national divisions that strive to keep them separate. https://mireyaramos.com/sin-fronteras/

Connie Kaldor

One beauty of Folk Alliance is the way it thrives on crossing such lines. Before Ramos’ set, Canadian songwriter Connie Kaldor explained that she’d always loved the kinds of sea shanties artists like Stan Rogers specialized in, but her home in Saskatchewan (“just about straight north [of Kansas City] and a little west”) was about as landlocked as she could get. So, she wrote a rousing “she shanty,” “Come All You Women,” directly inspired by an encounter with a friend at a previous Folk Alliance. It’s not only tempting but useful to connect the prairie origins of that song to the common ground between Kansas City’s Poor Choices and Ramos’s rancheras. https://www.conniekaldor.com/

Rayna Gellert and Joachim Cooder

And it’s not a big stretch to connect Tennessean Uncle Dave Macon’s influence on Ry Cooder’s son Joachim who covered and transformed Macon’s songs in the next set playing his electric mbira, a derivative of thumb pianos played in Zimbabwe. Joachim Cooder has played with musicians from all over, famously including the Cuban Buena Vista Social Club, but you couldn’t miss the excitement in his voice that he was sitting next to the great fiddler Rayna Gellert, who may be known for her work in Ashville and Nashville, but who notably also grew up in landlocked northern Indiana. 

https://www.joachimcooder.com/

And the songwriter’s circle in Aoife Scott’s Women of Note room pulled even more of the world together to collaborate. The circle featured Dusky Waters (Jennifer Jeffers), a banjo player from Little Rock, Arkansas who has also migrated to New Orleans; Thea Hopkins, a member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe of Martha’s Vineyard; and Grainne Hunt of Kilcock, Ireland. Waters opened the set singing “Pass It On,” the title track of her new album, a powerful song of communal responsibility that soon led to Hunt’s contemplation of intergenerational trauma, “So I Can Leave.” Scott and partner Andy Meany led a sing along including all the vocalists dedicated to a friend who lives half the world away from his old home in Pimlico Dublin, but Hopkins sing along just before served as a sort of spiritual crescendo to the evening. “Love Come Down.” The whole room sang those three words like a prayer, and something holy gathered all around us.

Thea Hopkins

https://www.theahopkins.com/

https://www.duskywaters.com/band

https://grainnehunt.com/

https://www.aoifescott.com/

Dusky Waters

Grainne Hunt

Andy Meaney and Aoife Scott

Moments of Silence and Risk: The Alchemy of Folk Alliance 2024 Day 1

 

Shabankareh Honoring Lopez-Galvan

The evening before the 36^th Annual Folk Alliance International Conference, Kansas City’s KKFI DJ Tommy Andrade hosted a special tribute episode of A Taste of Tejano dedicated to his co-host Lisa Lopez-Galvan (Lisa G). Lopez-Galvan’s death by gunfire—amidst twenty-two other victims of the mass shooting that took place during the Chiefs’ Superbowl celebration—stunned the world, but the loss could be palpably felt among the international community built by the music Lopez-Galvan and Andrade celebrated every Tuesday night on our community radio station. The tribute show was an outpouring of grief, yes, but also joy and love. Listen here: https://kkfi.org/program-episodes/tribute-to-lisa-lopez-galvan/

A shrine honoring the place where Lopez-Galvan lost her life formed just catty-cornered from the Westin Crown-Center Hotel, the place Folk Alliance International has held most of its annual conferences over the past decade. The event has always been a celebration of the community that surrounds music—fans, musicians, and DJs and community organizers like Lopez-Galvan. So, it was more than appropriate and extraordinarily important that FAI board president Ashley Shabankareh opened the first all-conference convocation, the awards show, by speaking of Lopez-Galvan, calling for a moment of silence, and then urging everyone in attendance to reach out, look after, and take care of each other over the next four days. 

Joy Clark Honors Tracy Chapman

The theme of the conference is “Alchemy: A Transformative Force,” and the night’s award recipients built their careers upon and underscored their commitment to the idea that music can change the world. First up was a lifetime achievement award for Tracy Chapman, whose appearance with Luke Combs last week at the Grammys said volumes about music’s desire to tear down the walls that separate us. Last night, New Orleans’ great songwriter and guitarist Joy Clark rocked the awards hall tearing into “Give Me One Reason” with the house band Steel Wheels.  

The other winners were a diverse list of world changers—Huddie (Leadbelly) Ledbetter’s great great niece Terika Dean for her work in part as chair of the Blues Foundation, the LEAF Global Arts Festival for its efforts at environmental sustainability, and Victor Jara’s estate, for the great Chilean songwriter’s revolutionary career transforming his country’s music into a vital force that led to revolutionary change (and, as has too often been the cost) his martyrdom. Contemporary artists who won were as vital and diverse as popular music at its best—Guatamala’s great “rising tide” winner Sara Curruchich, as well as FAI favorites Iris DeMent, Billy Strings, Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway, and Hurray for the Riff Raff’s Alynda Segarra. Segarra used the moment to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

With the loss of Lopez-Galvan in mind, particularly poignant were the tributes to the DJs:  Folk Alley’s Linda Fahey, Just Us Folk’s Jan Vanderhorst, Mountain Stage’s Larry Groce, A Celtic Sojourn’s Brian O’Donovan, and Woody’s Children’s Bob Sherman.

Northern Resonance

After the awards ceremony, the event moved upstairs to the private showcases in the hotel rooms where guests had sheltered in place the week before during the events surrounding the shooting. It was in these rooms six years ago that an artist from my hometown, Chris Lee Becker, organized a performance in response to the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. I wrote about that here: https://takeemastheycome.blogspot.com/2018/02/once-was-blind-but-now-chris-lee-becker.html

In one room, the Scandinavian musical trio Northern Resonance built infectious reels out of instruments like the Swedish Nyckelharpa (a string instrument with 37 keys on its neck), the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle, and the seven-stringed viola d’amore. In another, I heard such a jaw-dropping solo performance by Trinidad-born UK singer Michele Stodart that I hesitate to try to say more here. Stodart wields a voice and guitar as tough and ambitious as blues and pop get. https://www.northernresonance.se/

Michele Stodart 

https://www.michelestodart.com/home-1

But I find myself thinking about the smaller moments—the ones in which we did, indeed, seem to be taking care of one another. During his often-hilarious set which featured sing-a-longs to squirrel cookouts and bumper sticker wit, Kansan Sky Smeed decided to try out a new song to see if he could get any help figuring out “what’s wrong with it.” Before playing the song, he said, “This could be where it all goes south, and I’m okay with that.” What he played was heartbreaking and beautiful. https://www.skysmeed.com/

Similarly, Canadian singer Ken Presse stopped at one point and asked the small group gathered to hear him if he should play “a cover, the song I was going to play, or a French song.” We gave him carte blanche. His cover of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” managed to evoke a moving whisper of a sing-along, appropriate to the size of the room and the fact that he went acapella for the refrain. The audience happily encouraged the French song as a follow up.

Ken Presse

But it was an earlier moment that most stood out. Presse mentioned that he was about to have a child, and that he regretted how much of his life he’d spent working. He said the song, about another way of living, was called “Someday.” And he added, “Maybe I can learn from it.”

Of course, the unstated truth was we all could. On this night, perhaps more than ever before, Folk Alliance felt like a place where the music was there to teach, and we were there to learn.

https://www.kenpresse.com/

 https://www.rainbowgirlsmusic.com/

https://blues.org/about/terika-dean/

The Rainbow Girls Honor Terika Dean (and Leadbelly)

Cause of Joy and Light: Emma Langford at the Irish Center of Kansas City

From the auditorium stage of The Irish Center of Kansas City last Thursday, Emma Langford and crew served up a dizzying array of characters in story and song—a dear uncle who demanded a song days before his death (thereby inspiring both song and coda), a twelve-year-old Langford with vocal nodules maintaining silence so her older self could sing, climbing trees as characters born from the memories roaring through insomnia, and a suite of songs revolving around St. Abigail, a healer and a fighter who measures souls without judgment. Throughout, openess and compassion fueled the show.

Early in the set, the Limerick, Ireland native dedicated “Sailor’s Wife” to her mother, whom she’d promised (and forgotten) to tell when she landed in the U.S., a tour that took her on nightly dates from New York to St. Louis, Chicago, and Milwaukee the week of the KC stop. Langford cast herself as the title character at sea, and she would carry this tension forward with “All You Want,” a song from her 2017 debut about a family trying to understand the risky and seemingly directionless life of a professional musician.

The opening line of that song voices the wide gulf between the artist’s sense of self and that of the audience, speaking the inconceivable: “There is nothing stunning about me.” Of course any listener can personally relate to that perspective. But stunning is just the word when she dismisses her “voice like velvet” as it floats “to the floor.”

What Langford means by that, I don’t quite know, but I damn well know she means it. As achingly beautiful as her voice is, such perfection can be problematic. Her technical strength must be matched by all the warmth and conviction it can carry. Otherwise, the technique might ring cold, float right past us rather than connect. As far as I can tell, Langford always connects.

And with that connection, rooted (as is all connection) in vulnerability, comes a good deal of humor. Inviting the audience to sing along with “Tug ‘O War,” a blues about wrestling with demons, she suggested ways the audience might do so to the point of giddy hilarity, offering up three possibilities in terms of harmonizing “ooohs.” Hell, the show ended with “Goodbye Hawaii,” Langford performing what can only be described as mouth trumpet, as if she were soloing on a horn rather than humming away with (just barely) puffed cheeks.

Langford’s not the only one who is funny: her core band—Alec Brown on cello and woodwinds as well as Hannah Nic Gearailt on keys—hold their own. That night Brown was happy to hint that he was the man caught in the menage a trois suggested by her song, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” And Nic Gearailt seemed to be the instigator of an ongoing gag—a la Pee Wee Herman—which asked the crowd to go wild whenever anyone uttered the “secret word” cork. Since the St. Abigail songs (about five if I have the right count) were all set in County Cork, the word came up a lot even if Nic Gearailt hadn’t found extra opportunities to work it in. 

It's a fine trio.

The show disarmed in countless ways, including a gorgeous rendition of Paul William’s (by way of Kermit) “Rainbow Connection,” a song Langford said she and Nic Gearailt played during so many fallow moments that it made Brown’s “ears bleed.” And Langford started the second set, just her and Nic Gearailt, with Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” a song she explained was part of a project called Irish Women in Harmony and a fundraiser for the Aisling Project (a holistic after-school program for children https://www.aislingproject.ie/).

Joined onstage by Lawrence, Kansas’s Carswell & Hope, Langford and company reached numerous powerful crescendos, not least of which was the night’s performance of “Abigail,” an incredibly beautiful song I wrote about when I first saw Langford at Folk Alliance last year (https://takeemastheycome.blogspot.com/2023/02/folk-alliance-day-four-yearning-hearts.htm

Another highlight that night was the powerful “Birdsong,” rooted in a traditional Irish form of chant singing. You can see a clip of it, and get a feel for what she does, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5ZkH1a-t1w   

At Kansas City’s Irish Center, Langford recruited three young dancers to stomp their way through the rallying cry, the effect almost too beautiful and moving to take. 

And that’s Langford in a nutshell, or perhaps an acorn husk—almost too beautiful and moving to bear, but the “almost” there is key. Langford uses her music—wrestling with the dark nights of her own soul—to help the rest of us bear the heavy loads we carry and find ways to keep going. The stop in Kansas City last Thursday night was nothing less than a vision of multi-colored paths forward, delivering new heights and promising even more just around the next corner.

To order "Abigail": https://emmalangfordmusic.bandcamp.com/track/abigail-tomhas-ghobnatan

For all things Langford: https://www.emmalangfordmusic.com/

Thank you Mike Warren and Ben Bielski.

Also, thank you to the Irish Center of Kansas City, who provided this Birdsong video: Birdsong in KC

Since You Really Matter, Lilli Lewis's "All Is Forgiven"

 

Perhaps rather than start with why and how I identify with this album more intensely than any multi-song progression I've heard in recent memory, I should talk about Lilli Lewis's voice. 

Whether someone is technically proficient or not, whether someone is a virtuoso or not, it's never about that, not really. Some of the greatest singers have terribly limited vocal ability, but they know how to use that limited range like no one else. Lewis is sort of the exception that lends insight to the rule. As she proves many times before the operatic lullaby, "Ciel Eternel," Lewis's abilities are singular and profound. If I say the opening three cuts move from a distinctly NOLA version of blues confrontation to an epic self defense that calls to mind the grandeur of "River Deep Mountain High" and then the kind of garage soul one might associate with Smokey Robinson sifted through Steve Van Zandt, this would be selling each song short simply because of Lewis's voice. This isn't about Lewis's voice being better than Tina Turner. It's about why such distinctions don't matter.

What matters is neither woman would entertain such a silly comparison because what makes them sisters is a vision as big as rock and soul itself. And that vision is why the three soaring piano ballads at the center of the album hit as hard as the rest. These songs ask the questions that are most central to the musical vision that waged a series of cultural revolutions. Lewis asks us to consider the weight of our convictions. If our one life matters, just what is indeed possible?

In the tumultuous currents of "Possible"--buffeting harp and piano crested by splashing cymbals--Lewis declares a fundamental conviction that is certainly core to why I have devoted my life to writing about this music despite the entire playing field and the role of writers themselves having changed in such quantitative ways that the work feels fundamentally different today than when I started--when rock and hip hop criticism played a prominent role in a series of great cultural upheavals. 

But the basic job hasn't changed. The community feels as alien to me, in many ways, as Lewis's old sense of community (the focus of so much of this album) feels alien to her. If you've been in the room with Lilli Lewis playing her organ and singing or if you are immersed in it on headphones the way I am right now, it's every bit as huge as those rock records that used to crack open the eternal sky as well as the punk and hip hop records that blew holes in that vision of the sky. 

All is forgiven here, for Lewis and for me, because we share an understanding that what matters is much bigger than our personal disappointments, our own failures, and the failures of our old communal homes. She says it plain as day in "Possible"--"I'll never be flattened by perfection/Best to expand by nature's laws." 

We're all trying just as hard every time we sit down to perform because we know in this act we learn, individually and together. And it's been there since people began to recognize something new was taking hold, asking Beethoven to roll right on over because that's alright mama, any thing you do.

It's no surprise then that Lewis closes this album with the epic rock guitar of "Firefly." One of the greatest voices I've ever heard asks the listener, asks the music itself, to "teach me to sing." Like writing itself, that will never be a fixed goal, not if you want, like Lewis, nothing less than "to light the dark quiet sky."

Firefly

"All Is Forgiven" at Bandcamp

"All Is Forgiven" at Righteous Babe