Dirty Linen

Pete Morton
Roaring Brook Nature Center, Canton, CT
October 28, 1995

Floyd the boa constrictor probably couldn't appreciate the show, because the shroud over his on-stage cage blocked most of the view and snakes can't really hear anyway. On the other hand, the pair of mourning doves down the corridor seemed to be enjoying themselves, joining in enthusiastically on a couple of choruses. The humans in the audience seemed to agree with the doves, as Pete Morton wrapped up a three-week U.S. tour with an emotional, thoughtful, and totally enjoyable show at this wood-frame outpost in the northern Connecticut woods.

The perfect acoustics of Roaring Brook's small room made a P.A. system unnecessary, which in turn made for a showcase of the power of Morton's voice, sometimes a stage whisper, sometimes a roar. There are few performers who put as much into a song as Morton or who can so well concentrate an audience's attention with just an unamplified guitar and voice. Freed from the need to stand in front of a mike, he was able to use assured body language to back up the music, eyes closed and intense, bending forward for emphasis, tapping his foot on the fast ones and swaying with the rhythm on the slow ones.

The two 45-minute sets were about evenly divided between material from his latest album, Courage, Love and Grace, older songs, and traditional English and Scottish ballads. The most serious and challenging songs - like "Change" and "Katie" - were worked in around acoustic rockers that recalled Morton's early days in what he describes as "a Ramones cover band," songs like Mike Willoughby's cheerfully cynical look at punk, "Vim and Vitriol," or Morton's own "River of Love." There were quiet songs of romance, like "Love Me In Eden" and "On Your Side" (which he described as "a simple love song, as if a love song could be simple"), and some bits just for fun, like "It Is What It Is," with an audience (and mourning dove) chorus of ooh-ooh-oohs. There was some humanist politics too, as he introduced "Family Tree," his song about the links between all nationalities and ethnicities, by recalling that another song about connections, Buffy Sainte-Marie's "Universal Soldier," was the song that first brought him to folk music.

Among the half-dozen traditional songs were two of epic length, the murder ballad "Little Musgrave" and the fairie tale "Tam Lin," the latter something of a standard in Morton's repertoire and, given its seasonal setting, an essential on this weekend before Halloween. Over the years Morton has evolved his "Tam Lin" arrangement to the point where the 20-something verses are shouted as much as sung to a hard, percussive guitar beat, and it captures wonderfully the tension and fear that ancient listeners would have felt in its story.

He finished as usual with his anthem of hope, "Another Train," and after a perfunctory stage exit - the room wasn't big enough for him to really go anywhere - came back for two encores, a new song called "Deep Blue Sea" that managed to touch on Karl Marx, William Blake, and Desmond Tutu, and a final trad-rocker, "Daddy Fox."

Floyd the boa was stirring as we left. The humans were pretty excited, too.
- review and photo: Tom Nelligan (Waltham, MA)

Claudia Schmidt
St. John's Presbyterian Church,
Berkeley, CA, November 11, 1995

Beaver Island innkeeper Claudia Schmidt usually ushers winter into the Bay Area with her annual Thanksgiving concert. But this year's schedule got moved to accommodate an appearance on the syndicated APR radio show West Coast Live with Sedge Thomson. Racing across the bay after her San Francisco broadcast, Michigander Schmidt must've felt somewhat disoriented as temperatures lolled in the balmy mid-70s and northern California's clear sunny skies faded into a warm moonlit night.

The acclimation process clearly reversed, Schmidt opened by recounting a concert earlier that week in Fargo, North Dakota, and her need to reclaim her "winter driving chops" after the Red River country's first blizzard of the season. "Rock That Sucker," replete with snowbound technique certainly engaged the imagination of her Berkeley audience, especially since the sound of backspinning tire chains isn't often heard on the Bay Bridge.

Schmidt seems more relaxed these days, less manic and scattered than in years past. A generous portion of her show was delivered seated, pinging away at the frets of her mountain dulcimer. An enchanting Oriental scale meditation on the meanderings of bypassed country roads followed a spirited improvisation of the "Banana Moon" chant from her most recent CD. Such was the rapport with her rapt listeners that, despite musical rearrangement of this seasonal rouser, a call and response spread to the far rows of St. John's warm-toned semicircular sanctuary.

"Pretty at the End of the Day," with Schmidt's bold and bluesy gospel voicings and her bending of notes on 12-string guitar, was a revelation. She drew some smug Californian laughs explaining her inspiration for the song came from returning to her hometown of Detroit after a marathon drive. Allotting for sleep deprivation she nevertheless rhapsodized over the Ambassador Bridge approach at sunset, "when the light plays tricks on both inner and outer architecture."

Schmidt's impish earthy alchemy came through, setting up a vernal Midwestern tone poem written with Sally Rogers, and called "Spring Flowers Goin' By." Embracing their theme of beauty and the soul's evanescence, Schmidt confided that the passing of her life-loving, if mischievous, Uncle Jack might've contributed to the song's creation. Apparently Uncle Jack had just slipped into a "Shit Happens" t-shirt while on vacation in Florida when the fatal heart attack hit.- Mitch Ritter (Berkeley, CA)

Rounder 25th Anniversary Bluegrass Tour
Old Town School of Folk Music, Chicago, IL
October 21, 1995

Over the years, Chicago had gained a reputation as being a soft market for bluegrass music, but the two overflowing crowds for the Rounder Anniversary tour showed that this perception is inaccurate and/or changing. Rounder's biggest bluegrass act, Alison Krauss, sat this tour out, with the beneficial effect that none of the three world-class acts on the tour was overshadowed. Just midway through a marathon 30-day, 28-date bus tour, the review offered a generous blend of the best of today's bluegrass in a pair of fast-paced two-and-a-half-hour shows. First up was J.D. Crowe and his reactivated New South, who mix a relatively traditional repertoire with some spectacular progressive picking, particularly by Crowe and Dobro player Phil Ledbetter. Lead vocals were provided by Richard Bennett, who was frontman on Crowe's comeback 1994 album, Flashback, and was called back as a short term replacement for guitarist Greg Luck. The group's set was heavy on banjo instrumentals like "Nashville Skyline Rag" and the encore, "Train '45," intermixed with classics like "Banks of the Ohio" and "Freeborn Man," which featured a jazzy intro with some spectacular picking by Bennett.

Laurie Lewis and Grant Street have been relatively frequent visitors to the Chicago area the last few years. Their two short sets, which drew heavily on Lewis' original songs and material from the recent duet album she made with the group's mandolin player, Tom Rozum, were warmly received by the capacity crowd. The group's trademark California bluegrass seemed a bit subdued wedged between two hard driving bands, but they pulled out the stops on "Diamond Joe." Other high points included a Lewis-Rozum duet on Peter Rowan's "Dream of a Home" and a revival of "Green Fields" from Lewis' first solo album.

In his first Chicago area appearance in many years, Del McCoury and his band pretty much stole the show with their fast-paced, kinetic brand of bluegrass. The combination of McCoury's unmistakable high lonesome vocals and the hot picking provided by his sons Robbie on banjo and Ronnie on mandolin further energized the already boisterous crowd. McCoury delivered trademark older tunes like "High on a Mountain," but largely showcased material from his strong 1994 album, Deeper Shade of Blue. He also gave generous solo space to Robbie, Ronnie, and their phenomenal young fiddler, Jason Carter, who provided some of the most exciting instrumental moments of the evening on pieces like Ronnie's breakneck "Quicksburg Rondezvous." - Michael Parrish (St. Charles, IL)

Master Musicians of Jajouka
Vic Theater, Chicago, IL, October 26, 1995

The musicians of the remote Moroccan village of Jajouka have become the stuff of legend since being "discovered" by the likes of William Burroughs and Paul Bowles in the middle part of the century. A recording of the Master Musicians of Joijouka made by Rolling Stone Brian Jones in 1966 became a surprise hit two decades before world music became a fixture of popular music. The members of the group currently touring as the Master Musicians of Jajouka, a dozen instrumentalists, are all related and appear to range in age from 30-something to 60-something. This troupe, one of two sets of Jajoukan musicians laying claim to the Master Musicians title, is led by Bachir Attar, who was a preteen when Jones and his associates first came to Jajouka to record, but who has since become noted for participating in adventurous, cross-cultural musical experiments. However, his role in the Master Musicians troupe is relatively traditional.

At the start of the concert, the musicians came out and stood before a phalanx of silk pillows and launched into their first piece, on which six musicians played percussion instruments, from a tiny dumbek-like hand drum to snare drum sized instruments played with sticks. The other musicians, including Attar, played ghaitas, shrill Moroccan oboe-like instruments similar in tone and attack to a bombarde. The hypnotic, relentless music that the troupe produced was founded on a bed of polyrhythms with the ghaitas laying down both drones and weaving melody lines. The piece steadily built in intensity throughout its 20 minute length before coming to an abrupt halt. Two seconds later, the troupe ground into their second piece, equally frenetic, but with a different melody and tempo. Later, the musicians kneeled on the pillows, as the ghaita players switched to Moroccan flutes and wove a more subdued, ethereal mood with Middle Eastern overtones.

After a break, the group performed several vocal pieces, with Attar and another musician playing ouds and another instrumentalist playing the kamenjah, a fiddle bowed in a horizontal position. One of the percussionists became a dancer, moving around the stage with a slow, delicate, ambling gait. For the final piece of the evening, the non-percussionists switched back to oboes, and the mysterious Bou Jeloud, the Moroccan equivalent of the god Pan, appeared on stage, dancing frenetically around the musicians throughout the last extended sonic barrage. The Master Musicians of Jajouka create an otherworldly, pulsing soundscape that is as much felt as heard, and took the near-capacity crowd at the Vic somewhere that most of them had never been before.- Michael Parrish (St. Charles, IL)

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