Mandolin Orange Jam : "Steam-Powered Aereoplane" by John Hartford
Reports are still
arriving, and they will continue to do so throughout the convoluted consequences,
but consensus places the 25th Folk Alliance Conference / Festival /
Flash Jam at the zenith of recent life-magnifying musical events.
Stella, Greta and Sunniva of Baskery
Greta from Baskery, in one of her bemused between-song
mockologues, boiled it all down: “You don’t want to get involved with it, and
you really don’t like it, then you find out some things, and you start to like
it and it becomes the Overlook Hotel and you never want to leave.” From behind
her doghouse, her sister Stella commented, “That’s too much talking”.
The Hot Club Of Cowtown
Talking created the
landscape upon which the music gestured and posed and walked its walk. Much of
it was peremptory. DJ Bob Weiser’s
lanyard button was to the point: “I Don’t Remember Your Name Either”. But
unlikely flashpoints of hot discussion broke through the schmooze: nostalgic
reveries at the photo retrospective, political analysis in the equipment secure
room, effects pedal gossip while standing on black spaghetti tangles backstage
at the Churchill showcase. As the conversationalists listened and loosened, platitudes
and attitudes dissolved and hilarity became a priority, with artists
deconstructing MC introductions, and random hallway encounters turning into
boffo hey-rubes.
Star & Micey
“Serendipity” as CKCU’s loosey-goosey MC Chris White divined, was the operating system. You were as likely to walk in upon the stark
, dramatic blues of The Harpoonist &
The Axe Murderer, as the riotous dance party staged by the back-flipping,
chair-climbing Star & Micey, the
hallowed hush of The Stray Birds
or the satirically lyrical logic of Gurf Morlix, Dry Bones or JIM <Effin'> KWESKIN.
Chic Gamine in the Manitoba Room
For five days, the Delta Chelsea featured room upon room
adorned with immaculate degrees of talent, character, costume, camaraderie,
extravagance, affection, and community, revealed in chance tableaux. Bedrooms
at midnight could contain a quartet serenading a single listener, or a jammed throng spilling out into the pulsating corridor. Saturday
night’s three-storey stairwell jam evolved as naturally as a crystal.
And just as naturally, it all got in taxis, vaporized, disappeared; in the Sunday
silence, flyer-strewn hallways were once again clear, and hundreds of folks were rekindling the fires through pictures and fresh cyber-cortex
connections, sorting through 4-inch stacks of CD's, trying to play a new song on a well-worn guitar, and prepping for the next gig, all the while astounding
themselves with impossible memories.
