Shetland Ponies.... and Fiddlers

There are tumbleweeds blowing across my blog! Sorry for the lack of activity here the past few weeks. I'm back.

I spent the past week playing at the Shetland Folk Festival with Lissa Schneckenburger and now we are starting a week of gigs all around Denmark. Once again, we are joined by Keith Murphy on Guitar and Stefan Amidon on drums.

The Shetland Folk Festival lasts 5 days and is sandwiched between twelve hour long, over night ferry rides from Aberdeen to Shetland and back. All the performers for the festival are on the ferry together, so it's a huge party from the start. Here's a typical daily itinerary at the festival:

3:00 PM - Ride bus with four other bands to a remote village
4:00 PM - Sound check for concert
7:30 PM - Concert
11:30 PM - Ride bus back to Lerwick (the biggest town in Shetland)
12:00 AM - Party at the festival club. Huge sessions, dance parties, late night concerts
4:00 AM - Festival club closes, head to house party. More sessions etc.
7:00 AM - Breakfast
8:00 AM - Head to pub. More sessions and wackiness.

Stumble home sometime between 8:30 AM and noon.

And this goes on for FIVE DAYS STRAIGHT!!!! It's insane.

Even though Americans are not cut of for this level of partying, we put in a solid showing. We really bonded with the great French Canadian band, Le Vent Du Nord, and shared the stage with them a few times. Shetlanders are known for their fiddle playing and partying stamina but the Quebecois boys gave them a run for their money and did us proud. It was a blast.

Here's a couple youtube clips of us at one of the shows:




Shetland is also insanely beautiful in a kind spare and stark way. This is the typical look of the countryside.



Tons of sheep, puffins, seals and of course, Shetland Ponies!


I really love coming to Europe to play, but I have to say the one thing that drives me up the wall is the currency. Don't get me wrong, I love that all of the bills are different colors and that these days as the American dollar continues to tank, it's like getting a pay raise over here, but the amount of change I end up with is staggering. My pockets are always loaded with fistfuls of change! And the coins here are freaking heavy. I guess they don't call them pounds for nothing!

That's all for now!

Not in Kansas...

I just received this email from some friends who are performing in a month long Irish dance show in the mid-west. To protect the innocent, I'm changing the names and details, but you'll get the idea. It sounds amazing and bizarre. Here's the recap I received:

We are part of an Irish dance show that runs for 5 weeks and goes like this:

1) Fire dance + pretty girl dancers skipping around with bright orange scarves
2) Michael-Flatley-Riverdance-knock-off moment with boy dancer
3) Band number: two trad Irish tunes, goes into reggae groove in the middle
4) Mark comes out as emcee in green velvet jacket with gold sparkles
5) More music: Mark & Sharon sing a song, there's harp moment and bouzouki feature
6) Dance challenge! Mark introduces the contestants wrestler-style...
7) Square dance (hearing Mark say "allemande left, and around you go," is priceless)
8) GOSPEL NUMBER! Sharon & Liza, dressed in white bridal-style gowns (I am not kidding...) sing a glory-hallelujah-televangelist song. This is supposed to be a slick "Irish Gospel" number, whatever that means. This is an amazing and FIERCE dodgy moment. It's definitely my favorite part of the the show.
9) Finale, complete with percussive a cappella dance line

Oh, and shows begin at 11am--and the theater is full from the first show. It might seat 2,000? Not sure there... At each show I get one or two religious pamphlets, or Books of John.

Inbox

Ok. I admit it. I have a google alert set for my name and the names of every band and project I am associated with. Lame? Perhaps. Self indulgent? Most definitely.

Anyway, this just appeared in my inbox and comes from the Sunday Times in London. I thought I'd share it with you since Crooked Still is part of it and a large chunk of the piece is about my good friend and sometimes neighbor, Sam Amidon.

Sam Amidon and the folk revival


Also, Sam's mother Mary Alice Amidon has a blog, which you should read!

Idumea

Last but not least, hip hop legend, Coolio, has a cooking show which is needless to say, amazing.



That's all for now. Happy Saturday night without a gig!

The Way Life Should Be

I just got back from a run of shows in Maine and Boston with Lissa Schneckenburger! It was a great little warmup tour getting us ready for a bunch of CD release shows next month, which will celebrate the release of her new CD entitled "Song." Here's what it looks like:




Check out her spiffy new website too!

www.lissafiddle.com

One of the shows was a house concert in Camden, ME at the home of Tess Gerritsen who is a New York Times best selling author! Traveling around as a musician, you meet a lot of relatively successful and famous musicians, but it's not everyday you meet an author whose work is consistently listed with genre fiction heavyweights such as Stephen King, Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton! She's also a pretty damn good fiddle player!

I love artist residencies at venues. Giving a musician a weekly time slot for a set period of time where they can be loose, experiment with new material or new collaboration and simply play music they would otherwise not play if it were a typical gig. I think that sometimes musicians, myself included, get too caught up in putting on a "show" and forget to be spontaneous and relaxed and play for the sake of playing. A residency allows a musician to get away from their typical thing in a format that gives the audience a glimpse into their creative process.

I've recently been a part of two fantastic residencies in Boston. I mentioned a couple of posts ago being a part of Rose Polenzani's Sub Rosa series which is a residency of sorts and last Saturday night I played a bit with fiddler Hanneke Cassel at her late night residency at Club Passim. It was a blast and great to see and hear Hanneke in some different musical settings than her usual trio!

VOTE!!

In honor of my love for the absentee ballot, which I cast here in Vermont a week ago, I have posted a video of Crooked Still rehearsing "The Absentee" in the studio! I hope you like it. Please get out and vote!

Bluegrass, Limos and Espresso

People love Bluegrass. I mean, I love bluegrass too, but some people love it so much that they'll park themselves in a hotel lobby for four days straight, in the middle of February, and play music with everyone and anyone who comes through the door.

Indoor bluegrass festivals such as Wintergrass in Tacoma, WA generate a kind of hive mentality, with musicians and fans swarming to listen to and play as much music as they possibly can before they have to go back into hiding before the summer months. I think because it is indoors and the frenetic energy can't escape outside, it creates a sort of human equivalent to sonic feedback. It's actually pretty cool.

Anyway, Wintergrass was an amazing time! It was Crooked Still's first festival appearance with the new lineup and it went great. We had Casey Driessen filling in for Brittany Haas on fiddle (she's in panama studying sloths or something). For a cool review of our set check out www.festivalpreviewblog.blogspot.com. Here's the view of Mt. Rainier from my hotel room:



I also heard some great music, the highlight of which was a late night jam session in a hotel room with Darol Anger, Mike Marshall and the Swedish band Vasen.

Before heading to Tacoma we were in Big Sky, Montana a week earlier where our ride to the airport was a SUV stretch limo! As if the SUV wasn't obnoxious enough, someone had to create this beast:



I have to say, it was pretty awesome to ride in it!

Other than all the great music at Wintergrass, the high point of the weekend was taking a trip with Aoife O'Donovan, Kimber Ludiker and Margaret Glaspy up to Seattle to an espresso place called Vivace. Seriously, there is no better espresso in the country. If you are within a hundred mile radius of Seattle, you have to go!




mmm, mmm.

I also got to visit the Fremont troll, which is very cool, if not a little creepy. That's a real VW bug it's holding on to.


This week I went into Boston to participate in Rose Polenzani's crazy monthly event at the Lizard Lounge called Sub Rosa. It is sort of a curated open mic. Well, actually, it's more of a closed mic, but I think that's a good thing. Different people get up and sing a song or two and nobody knows it and you have to learn it on the fly. It's awesome and so is Rose. Check her out at www.rosepolenzani.com.

Snorkeling and Skiing

I decided to take a couple weeks off from the old blog while I went on my honeymoon. Nothing says romance like wireless internet, but I decided it was best to spend my time enjoying the Caribbean islands of St. Croix and St. Thomas with my wife, rather than with my eyes glued to my laptop screen.

The trip was a honeymoon for a week or so which then morphed into a gig/island vacation with Wild Asparagus on St. Croix. Both events were a huge success!

I think it's a bit tacky to blog about my honeymoon so here's my thoughts on the working vacation portion of the trip!

St. Croix is a cool island with amazing beaches, outrageous snorkeling, a rain forest, and a vibrant local culture. It's also home to a very cool kind of music called Quelbe. Here's what wikipedia has to say.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quelbe

I got to hear an amazing set by a musician named Jamesie Brewster. There are varying reports, but everyone is pretty sure that he is between 80 and 90 years old. When I saw him and his band, they started playing at about 9:45 pm and Jamesie wore dark sunglasses the entire time. He's now my hero. Needless to say, he sounded amazing, as did his band. Here's a youtube video about him and Quelbe music.


A percussionist named Juni Bamba, who used to play with Jamesie, sat in with Wild Asparagus for a few nights. We ran into him one day on our way home from a beach on the west side of the island and he informed us that he had just acquired a four foot tall drum that "sounds like thunder!" Here he is with said thunder drum.




I'm now in Big Sky, Montana for the Big Sky, Big Grass festival with Crooked Still. Tim O'Brien, who recently sang a harmony part on the new Crooked Still CD, is also here, as well as our good friends the Infamous Stringdusters. It's been a blast so far!

Those of you who know me, know that skiing is my favorite thing to do, so to say that I am excited about the 40 inches of snow Big Sky has received in the past week is an understatement. The skiing has been amazing! My camera battery died on the slopes today but here is picture of me from last year at this event!



Also, my good friend and fellow blogger Sam Amidon got a mention in the current issue of the New Yorker. Way to go, Sam! He is mentioned briefly in a piece about composer Nico Muhly, who did all the orchestral arrangements for Sam's new CD, All Is Well. It's a great story and you should all read it. Sam's CD is amazing and so is his coop blog, www.speakpeppery.com. You should buy his CD and read his blog too.