Popular but esoteric, brand new but historically long in tooth — your grandfather’s music. Academic but rule-breaking, individualistic but collaborative. Creative. These are the diverse, almost contrary aspects of jazz music itself, and Siegel seems to do a particularly good job at reconciling them. In this interview, the Grove Project asks Marc to describe what jazz is, how he came to it, how it goes in this area.

I’ve heard you use the term “art music” as a way to describe or define jazz. Is jazz hard to define? Is the phrase a way to distinguish jazz from “jazz” genres like “smooth jazz”? Or hybrids like fusion, “acid jazz”, etc.?

Art Music is a way of talking about music that has an aesthetic goal. Music for music’s sake — music to be listened to and to encourage the higher faculties of our nature. Art music might be contrasted with functional music or music that serves a purpose (like dance music, for example). Jazz did not start out as an erudite pursuit and doesn’t have to categorized as such either. Jazz was in its beginnings functional music as well; music that was the soundtrack for all the pleasures and excitement one would encounter in the New Orleans red light district of the early 1900’s — that era’s version of Sodom and Gomorrah. Like all great art, jazz has shown that it has the power to remain relevant and can successfully speak to the wide array of thoughts and emotions essential to the human profession. Louis Armstrong put it simply (and I’ll paraphrase): “If it’s good [music] don’t mess with it”.

What is the relationship of modern jazz as a kind of art music to historical art music and periods, such as baroque?

Jazz is the American 20th century version of art music. The two have a very close relationship. Without the preceding 100’s of years of Western European art music and its advances in the understanding of theory, musicianship, instrumentation etc… there would not be the opportunity for Jazz to emerge. Jazz like the people who inhabited New Orleans at the turn of the century was a confluence of disparate styles and influences some from the European heritage and some from the West African heritage. The Creole musician trained in the conservatory tradition of Europe and raised in the African American traditions of the new world embodies this often times troubled cross cultural symbiosis. It is telling then that it was the Creole who created jazz.

I believe you’re classically trained as a guitarist – What was that transition like for you to mainly jazz?

What do you mean? You couldn’t tell from my impeccable chops that I was educated in the exacting and pristine art of true guitarmanship?

…Did the highfalutin’ mock indignation come through there?

You are correct, my dear friend, and thank you for the question. The transition as far as technique goes was easier because I had the tools that classical training gave me to modify to this new idiom. I accomplished technical goals much faster than I would have without them. The theory, ear training and the feel was a bit more of a challenge though. Luckily I have a lot of good friends who were already professional jazz musicians at the time and they let me play with them as I “learned on the bandstand”. I am still working out all of these concepts. Ultimately I feel as though I am continuing to transition and learn as a musician.

What got you started on jazz and who were you listening to?

I started to really listen to jazz when I was in school and I was playing in the jazz combos. My first revelation was when I purchased a compilation CD of Miles Davis’ music. It immediately became the most listened to CD in my rotation. Although I was learning to play classical guitar I knew I always wanted to play jazz as well. Later when I had the time to invest to follow my muse it was the great Joe Pass and his Hot Licks videos that helped me the most as a guitarist. Unfortunately Joe had already passed when I started to focus on jazz guitar so I never got a chance to meet him or have a lesson with him. Not only have there been guitarists who have helped me; there have been quite a few other musicians as well. A list could get too long and would probably come off as pretentious (just look at any myspace page!). Will it be sufficient to say that I am the head of Jazz Music at CFCC and I have been teaching Jazz History for over a decade? If not ask me in lesson or out socially and I’ll wax poetic about many great musicians in the jazz tradition.

Grove Project reader Bill L. sends along this notice about Wilmington’s first Twestival, to be held downtown at Port City Pub on Grace, and featuring lots of musicians and other artists performing in a benefit for charity:water.

Update: Here’s our friend Bruce Brown on the Twestival and its object, charity:water:

Find more videos like this on 3rd Street Plaza

UPDATE: TICKETS HAVE ALL BEEN DISTRIBUTED

James Taylor Wilmington Concert
Greenfield Lake Ampitheater
Third Street & Park Street
Doors Open 5:00 PM

Ticket Information
In Government Center Plaza- Patio of Sombrero Azul
127 S College Street
Friday, Octover 17th and Monday October 20th
2pm-5pm

Admission is free, but space is extremely limited, making the event an up-close experience with local musicians. Capacity in the Gallery is 80 and only 60 actual seats will be available for the concert. WHQR’s front desk will start taking reservations for seats on July 14.

The performers for this first show will be none other than Wilmington’s favorite folk-grass trio, the Barnraisers. You can check them out at www.barnraisersmusic.com, and listen to an older interview with them right here on The Grove Project.

The Barnraisers are:

• Adam Forsythe, guitar and vocals
• Tiffany Reece, banjo and lead vocals
• Benji Smith, upright bass and vocals

After several emails, a couple of phone calls, and a weekend spent listening to their new self-titled demo, I had the chance to sit down with Adam Forsythe and Tiffany Reece of Wilmington’s own Barnraisers.

It was a good evening, and though you won’t hear this question in the sound-file, or read it in the transcription of our conversation below, Adam and Tiffany asked me at the conclusion of our chat why I wanted to interview them. I said, quite simply, that it was because they were more than a local band. They are, in no less certain terms, a local entity.

In the sound-file of our conversation, the listener will hear that some minor anomalies on the recording persist, and see that the copy has been edited for conciseness.
Last but not least, on the sound files attached, you will also find an extra half-hour of conversation with The Barnraisers, including conversations about country/bluegrass stereotypes, performance, attitudes and intellect in the Wilmington music scene, and, finally, two takes of a new song, “Wake up Shirley Bell.” Enjoy!

Artistically, Wilmington is a sort of a microcosm of sub-cultures. There’s “hip”, “tattoo-sheik” “heroin-sheik”, “metal”, “punk,” “pop”, “frat-pop,” “hip-hop,” you name it—all subcultures that fall under a “progressive” cultural banner. Among the various performance and visual arts, however, the artistic minorities seem to be jam-bands and folk musicians. That is, Wilmington seems a bit short on Folk Art. Do you think this is an accurate depiction of Wilmington’s music scene?

TR: I think when people think of “folk music” in Wilmington they automatically think of jam-bands. There are other bands out there that are doing something different, but I think being so close to the beach you get a lot of jam bands, you know.

AF: But they’re not straight-ahead bluegrass

TR: They aren’t. And we’re not either. I guess I prefer the “get in get out” kind of songs, you know? I don’t particularly want a six-minute long song, but I think do we have a lot of jam bands—I guess that’s the best way to describe it.

Is that who you find yourself playing out with?

TR: We get lumped into that category a lot because, first, we’re good friends with people that play that kind of music. And I think, too, that bands we’re meant fit in with all the time…are bands we open up for.

Take Larry Keel for example. I don’t think we necessarily match. I’m not sure it’s a good pairing…

What would you say is the difference?

TR: That’s a hard one…(chuckles)

AF: I think we’re more country and honky-tonk and they’re more “hippied,” or more hippies listen to them, or that genre of listener. And they do jam out. I think Larry Keel’s an awesome guitar player. I like to listen to him. But it’s not really what we do at all.

TR: Yeah, I think if people are looking for something like that…like a Larry Keel kind of band to open up a show, they’re going to be disappointed when they hear us… because our songs are two and half minutes…

AF: And the other band will have at least one extraordinary player…

TR: Yeah, we’re just two and half minute songs…

AF: And I think what we play is more like the Rose Maddux and Wanda Jackson type stuff we listen to. It’s more our speed… I mean, we just have a banjo in the band so…

TR: People assume that because there’s a banjo…

AF: It’s always bluegrass… and that’s not always the case.

So what would you say is the reason why the band has done so well here? …because you have.

TR: Well I think we’re older than most band members here, and so we practice a lot because we feel like we were having to play catch-up… and Adam is really a workhorse when it comes to the guitar. He plays everyday, hours a day… and so he has been the engine to keep us going…

AF: I think another thing too is that we didn’t start playing shows until I was 29… I think she was 27, so we’ve been audience members for the longest time. We know what we like to see in bands, and—I’m not knocking anybody—but we’ve seen a lot of bands that seem a little lazy when they get on stage and they’re not performing. I think that’s what a lot of local bands miss… the performing aspect. It’s not about just strumming a guitar and singing. But, you know, if it’s a correct venue, in a strict music venue, they’re there to entertain. And it’s just right up there with the musicianship to me.

And that’s what is so good about Tiff… she is so animated up there. She does the lead role very well… I couldn’t do it…

TR:I think too that’s me compensating for what I might lack when it comes to instrumentation, because I’ve been playing for just now four years… so I guess maybe I’m trying to distract people from what kind of banjo player I really am… (laughs)

AF: But the strong-suit is also vocals and voice.

AF/TR: (laughing) Was that answered?

Yeah that was fine… I think Wilmington often gets compared to places like Asheville and Charlotte. Do you feel like Wilmington as a community is as open to new forms of entertainment as these other NC cities? Perhaps more so even?

AF: I’ve been here since 1997, and I never performed live—I played guitar 13 years before I finally did play live. But for some reason I was always afraid to play out in Wilmington. Wilmington seems to have this fickle opinion about performance… I mean they like you for a bit and then they don’t like you. But from what I’ve seen now, it’s not really that way. I thought Wilmington would not treat us this good…I just didn’t know. But they have, and that’s been pretty surprising now. It was like “Wow! I should have been doing this five years before we did!”

TR: But I think too that everything goes in cycles. You have a scene for awhile, and it seems right now that Wilmington has a pretty strong folk/Americana thing—which is kind of a blanket-term I guess. There are lots of bands that are playing this kind of music, and seems like you’ll get a couple of bands that will play it… then all of a sudden more will pop up playing that sort of music. Or you might get a rockabilly feel for a little while where you’ll get a couple local bands, then suddenly you’ve got half a dozen bands playing rockabilly. So I think it goes in phases. But I also think Wilmington audiences can be starved for something new… So, when something new does come along they’re excited and receptive.

AF: It does have a big heavy metal scene… though I think they call it Rock n’ Roll (laughter…), and those bands have done really well.

I know that you guys (Adam particularly) come from a familial background steeped in traditional music. Few of questions on this… Tiff, you’re front and center in this group (which is the way many most likely guess should be…) what female vocalists do you model yourself after?

TR: Wanda Jackson, I really love. Rose Maddux. Those are probably the two that I listen to the most… and I’m not going to lie… the two I emulate—the way they sing and the way they growl. They don’t sound like, you know, Alison Krauss, and that kind of whispy sound. I just don’t have that kind of voice, so I really couldn’t sound pretty if I tried. But there’s something really ballsy about them, and so I kind of attach myself to that.

Where do you think “traditional music” fits into a community as artistically “progressive” as Wilmington?

TR: I don’t know… maybe I’m skeptical. But I don’t think there are many completely original artists anymore. I think they all draw from somewhere, and it almost seems like the further you go back the more original it seems—

AF: But Old Crow Medicine Show is “new,” and they play stuff from the 20s.

TR: Yeah, if you go back to the 20’s and 30’s… or, if a musician were to get up and do something like that now, they would seem like the most original thing in local music right now, I think. So the further you go back, the more edgy it seems.

AF: I think, with this type of music especially, you can go really far back. I would call what Old Crow Medicine Show does “old time.” They probably play songs as old as the 1700’s that carried all the way up to the twentieth century… these songs are from before our time…

Where in songwriting does “traditional” influence collide with contemporary subject matter?

TR: In our music or in any music?

Either, Or…

AF: I think I try simply to write about what I know, but in a way that I think is timeless as I can get it. I don’t really listen to anything new. Everything is old—Bill Monroe or Rose Maddux… old country, old bluegrass—Dexter Romweber is probably the most modern music I listen to right now… So my style does mimic their style. Tiff tries to sing like that. I try to write like that, and I think I gain a lot of ideas. But, things like love and lost love and cheating are going to be around forever, so that stuff does crop up a lot.

Do you think other folk musicians feel that same collision in their songwriting?

AF: Well, first, I think songwriting’s just hard. It’s something you have to do every single day. I write every single day just like I practice guitar every day. It’s like exercise, which you have to do to get better at, and come up with analogies and rhymes and stuff like that… and, I don’t know… To come up with any kind of subject matter that hasn’t already been done, or to try to put a different spin on it, or do it a better way, or just a different way… that’s really rough. So songs aren’t just coming out every week or nothing, but they’ll go in spurts.

TR: He’ll write some real crappy ones… (chuckles…) I mean, he knows they’re not up to par but he’ll just finish it to finish and move on to the next one.

AF: The last song I wrote that I’m proud of is “Wake Up Shirley Bell.” It’s about my grandma, and she died of lung cancer, and the song is basically a call…

TR: But it’s written in a way that’s not…and I don’t know how he does this exactly… but it’s a song about death that’s written in a spunky, sassy, fiery way where you’re not listening to it and thinking ‘Oh… doom and gloom and dustbowl poverty’ and, you know… It’s real fast, and if you weren’t really listening, you’d want to go out and take a shot and have fun with your friends and dance a little bit. He does that a lot with songs…

AF: It’s also the type of music we play. We only have three instruments so I have to write more up-beat songs… and it’s kind of hard for us to slow it down at times, and the crowd is always ready to just go. They don’t want it slowed down… they just want it faster and faster.

A lot of people lump bluegrass, gospel, and folk music into the same genre. Which would you say best represents your sound from an influential standpoint?

TR: I would say bluegrass…

AF: …me too…

TR: …if it came down to those three…and a lot of times I think we find ourselves in a bit of a trap when people book us as a bluegrass band. What they really want is bluegrass-gospel, which is totally different. That’s not what we are, though we appreciate it. We don’t do it justice. We know a few gospel tunes…

AF: In my opinion, I don’t think we’re folk at all. When I think of folk I think of Woodie Guthrie and Pete Seger… but I don’t listen to them…

TR: Yeah, I don’t know anything about them… I don’t study them. So if we are influenced it’s accidental.

AF: Yeah… and as far as gospel… We’re not that either.

TR: We appreciate it, listen to it occasionally…

AF: It’s part of bluegrass. Definitely.

How do you feel about the stereotypes commonly associated with the music you play… and I mean really, how do you feel?

TR: I think that sometimes people think we’re trying to be different and cool when we say we’re not really folk or specifically bluegrass. But I just think we’re not. I mean we have a banjo, and we have an upright bass and a guitar. If those were electric instruments, you wouldn’t say we’re bluegrass. Do I listen to it in the car? No… Adam does. Adam is probably the most influenced by bluegrass… but maybe the fact that we have different musical tastes melding together makes our music something a little bit different. I mean, I don’t even identify with female bluegrass singers or male bluegrass singers. Now if I could open my mouth and sound like Ralph Stanley… like an 80 year old man, I’d take it any day… but as far as female bluegrass singers… doesn’t really do anything for me. Rhonda Vincent. Alison Krauss. I just don’t feel inspired so much by them.

AF: Yeah… I don’t think it’s all Deliverance either. I don’t think we or anyone else who plays bluegrass are rednecks. I think if people would actually learn about it, they would see its very hard music to play.

TR: I think if we went to the mountains and tried to sell ourselves as a bluegrass band we’d probably just get run out of town. You have to respect it.

In an article on you guys (this is before Benji joined you) from October of ‘06, there’s a comment saying that your voice is as “delectable as a glass of iced tea on a hot day or a piece of sweet potato pie on Thanksgiving.”[1] The rest of the piece is filled with similar down-home metaphors and even uses a written dialect that’s borderline backwoods. How do you feel about this type of characterization?

AF: I think there’s Country compared to red-neck, and there’s two differences there. I think we’re country folks.

TR: I don’t mind a sort of backwoods metaphor…I don’t even mind that stereotype. I grew up in a family that is really Southern, and country, and rural, and I’m proud of it. I’m not embarrassed by the fact that I love collards, or that I’ll eat pork-rinds (laughs)… and I think it’s a culture just like anything else. Mick Jagger was actually quoted once as saying the only place in the United States where you could find interesting food was in the deep rural south. And I think it’s a really rich culture. So I’m not offended if people use those phrases.

Had you the choice, how would you want listeners to view you?

TR: I’ll let you answer I’m hogging…

AF: No… you’re the leader!

TR: Maybe it appears that way but you know…

(laughter..)

For the rest of the interview, which is at 22:14 in Part 1, listen to the sound files below.

MP3: part 1 | part 2 |

[2] Sandala, Bryan. Currents. “Barnraisers Embrace the Traditional Sounds of Bluegrass and Mountain Music”. 12/14/06.

Low Victor Echo has come a long way since many local music lovers saw their debut at the Soap Box in August 07, and the band would love nothing more than to share their honed innovations with all!

If you want to test out a couple of Low Victor Echo’s (rather unclassifiable) songs, check out www.myspace.com/lowvictorecho.

One of the great benefits of a life of leisure would be the opportunity to continuously feed my insatiable appetite for great music. But, since I don’t have a life of leisure, I rely heavily on a reasonably abundant CD collection, occasional acoustic sets from local crooners and highly coveted visits to the House Of Blues. About once every 2 years the HOB presents the Chris Isaak band which in my opinion is better than a visit from Santa Claus. The 2007 visit was more exciting and memorable than ever for a few important reasons. The first is that the band kicked ass – as always. The second is that a family of 4 payed us $100.00 for our seats (not our tickets…we still got to see the show.) The third was a free porn show in the parking lot presented by 2 pale-skinned youths in the front seat of a Nissan pickup truck – which generated as much steam on the windshield as the hot asphalt I swept in high school (after a cooling rain.) While all of this was more than enough to make the trip to Barefoot Landing more than worth while, the pinnacle of the evening was the presentation of the opening act.

Nicole Atkins (http://www.nicoleatkins.com/) (MySpace) has been spawning her musical career for many years. A native of New Jersey, she just last year released a full length album entitle “Neptune City.” A feature ballad by the same name is set on a backdrop of childhood summer memories – and longing for simple things not forgotten but only now truly appreciated. We need to sometimes be reminded that the time between boredom and bliss is filled with opportunity and there’s nothing like a great song to help put things into perspective. From the standpoint of inspiration, I hold the song “Neptune City” in the same regard as Michelle Shocked’s “Come A Long Way.”

Nicole sings with a voice as whimsical as the ethereal guitar ballads of Yngwie Malmsteen (wikipedia) and as lyrical Sharon Isbin’s “Journey to the Amazon”. It may seem unreasonable to compare an accomplished classical guitarist with a contemporary female pop vocalist, and even less reasonable to compare her music to an 90’s speed metal icon. However, there is something remarkably nostalgic in her voice which, in a peculiar way, is similar. There are a couple of songs from “Neptune City” which appeared in a more simplified and perhaps more beautiful format on Nicole”s preceding EP “Bleeding Diamonds.” If I have at all sparked your curiosity about this recording artist, I recommend that you run out and get a copy of this one first. Most of the 6 songs on the ep are completely transcendental and I have nothing but great expectations from future recordings. In a world where it is extremely difficult to innovate, Nicole Atkins and the Sea not only represent creativity at its best but have done so in a way that is accessible in a primitive but human way.