Friday Night Frolic — Killjoy Rides the Current

Well, I have to be honest. I'm not up to tricks today. The damn migraine is back and and the double doses of magnesium and vitamin B-2 aren't worth the space--never mind the clamor--in which they digest. I should demand a damage deposit from them, but, as it is, they're never on time with the rent.

I'm hitting the hard stuff. And the lights will be out any moment now, so, please forgive my lazy self, but there's nothing novel here today. Nothing.

I'm just going to reroute you to this original piece (go ahead, click there or here) to give you a more, um, poetic sense of how I really feel.

And while I'm drifting along this turbid visceral stream of consciousness I might as well mention that nasal lavage is highly overrated, the new Facebook timeline profile gives me vertigo (do not attempt opening when stricken with cephalalgia), and, so I hear, creative writing is "therapy for the disaffected masses." Having taken many creative writing workshops I admit that I agree with Shivani's (who is this guy, anyway?) assessment of the workshop as a mild form of hazing. (Especially the grad school sort. Ouch.) Reading the greats might prove more instructive.

Aren't I a regular killjoy?

But wait, isn't all writing therapy in one form or another? How can anyone write, or read for that matter, anything without attaining even the smallest measure of growth, awareness and insight?

Seems I'm no longer drifting. No, I'm beating back the biting currents of this stream. (And once again resorting to alliteration to do so.)  I must be listening to...

*drumroll*

The great improvisors, straight from Beantown and better yet, a string band! (you forget, Berklee is also in Beantown), the incomparable, the virtuosic, the crazy-crazy talented...

Joy Kills Sorrow:
(and killer mandolin riffs)

Joy Kills Sorrow band members met through the folk music scene in Boston, all having lived there at one time or another. They are classically trained musicians who create intricate and beautiful arrangements.

Emma Beaton's take-charge melodious pipes seem to transcend vocal genre. Bluegrass, roots, rock, country, pop, blues, jazz--it seems the girl could sing it all brilliantly. In 2008, at the age of 18, Ms. Beaton won “Young Performer of the Year” at the Canadian Folk Music Awards. And JKS's latest release, This Unknown Science, is a testament to her vocal facilities. 

This young band's hybrid music illustrates their mastery of genre melding. Bassist and Brooklyn resident, Bridget Kearney, who double majored at The New England Conservatory of Music and Tufts University, wrote all of the eleven songs on This Unknown Science, and has garnered much acclaim, having won the John Lennon Songwriting contest in 2006 for two songs she penned. Guitarist Matt Arcara, banjoist Wesley Corebett, and mandolin player Jacob Jollif (a Berklee College of Music grad, highlighted--as first mandolinist--in this Berklee performance) have all been honored in the music world.  More in JKS's bio here. And lots more from YouTube here.

Stay with this heart-tug of a song until the end--it's worth it:

Oh, I believe the stream has slowed to a pleasant ripple. I think I might even take out my banjo.

Fair winds my friends!

"Friday Night Frolic" - Instruments of Love

Internet source unknown

Just when I thought I was making headway, covering some ground, having mastered—with the aid of Banjo Method Book I—the C, D7, G7, Em and D chords on my shiny banjo, with my now calloused and painful fingers, strumming a strained, discordant version of The Drunken Sailor, and Oh Susanna, along comes this guy with his band of string benders to remind me and my scaly finger pads that I've barely scratched the surface of the very layered, very complex world of stricken and plucked instruments.



Never mind notes. What I know about Christopher Thile is what a gentleman to whom I was serendipitously adjacently seated—in the coffee shop told me yesterday: Thile's a virtuoso who began playing the mandolin at the age of five, formed the band Nickel Creek three years later, and recorded his first album (with original compositions) when he was just thirteen years old. A year earlier he had won the national mandolin championship in Kansas.

This gentleman happened to be a singer/songwriter/ mandolinist himself, who's had his songs played by musicians like Alison  Krauss. He had seen a teen Thile making love to his mandolin at a Carolinian festival. Making love, he said. In a coffee shop. In his radio voice. In No-Place-Special, Massachusetts. We were both surrounded by our respective laptops, books, notepads and coffee. In the sort of spousal disclosure that married people do with strangers, we had both dropped the "H" and "W" words as our conversation rolled along, so there was tacit understanding that discussing the intimacies of music was proper within certain confines. And it was. Confined. And proper. I took furious notes, but I couldn't shake the image from my mind. Making love. To his mandolin.

How does one make love to his mandolin?



You still with me?

It does evoke a certain sensation doesn't it? All that pulling back and thrusting forward of flatpicked notes, the intensely expressive music, the arousal of senses, culminating in a pleasurable and satisfying climax of vibrations...

... I know, how cheap.

So much for subtlety...

But I must tell you that I now understand what the gentleman with the radio voice in the coffee shop in No-Place-Special, Massachusetts was talking about. And as I gaze at my book of chords and quarter notes and forward rolls, and attempt to strum some kind of discernible piece of music from the simplest of chords, I am highly aware of the unfortunate fact that it may be a long time before I can bounce back and forth between Bach and bluegrass. Or make any kind of clumsy love to my banjo. (As if this will ever happen at all.)

It could be a very long time.



And until then, I'm going to keep beating down the path. Callous fingers and sore shoulders. No shortcuts. Straight forward, over the hills, through the potholed valleys, comin' round the mountain... banjo clutched closely to womb... when she comes. A long, long time from now.

It'll happen.

Until then, enjoy Chris and the Punch Brothers.

"Friday Night Frolic" - It's Friday Night - Go On, Raise a Ruckus

What a girl would tweet if a girl could tweet. Rock me. 
Click HERE for more about Old Crow Medicine Show (the fab five).