Diary of a Mad Folkie 170708

excerpts...from a couple of recent letters....

i had thought of going to volunteer at the south country fair, but in the end decided to have a 'festival free summer" - my first in 30 years! it's also the first summer i won't be working through since i was 15 (almost 40 years...).

The phone doesn’t ring too much… but these days, if I’m by the phone and it rings, I answer it. It’s probably a friend, not someone with a hidden agenda on me, hiding behind a buddy/community/helpless hustle rap.

There are still dark moments on some days. Beyond the emotional and financial stress of instant mid-life unemployment, there have been too many deaths over the last few months in our life, and with Oli’s passing coming very soon, it’s been as close as I ever want to come to “brutal”.

There has also been a lot of drama, in the high school sense of the word, and also some hard times and some bruising in the heart region… but one by one these rivers get crossed and life feels like an adventure again.

I have teaching myself to notice things again, taking these four and five hour hikes around the city and taking pictures everywhere. After today’s walkabout, I downloaded 521 shots. I’m making short films and getting back into graphic designing too – mostly I design "Der Book", and rewrite and rewrite. Now that I can finally focus on it, I feel like it’s finally coming together.

We’re starting to get ready to move (again). The Landlord has decided it’s time to cash in and sell this place. Next up for us is looking like a house on a hill on the Island, near Sydney. It’s a long story, with a happy ending.

It feels like we’ve been through a lot of lousy things in the last six months, and I never felt better. One by one, we cross them off the list and move on, and the moving is more like a glide these days. All the creativity I used to put into programming the festival and all of it etceteras is going into living.

It’s going to an interesting summer without any festivals. I’m expecting a couple of spazzy moments from myself this month – when the cold turkey kicks in hard, but it’s the right thing to do this year. It’s our 15^th anniversary this month, and we’ve worked festivals together every one so far- so I know Jules would love one away. By next summer, there will be new people to talk about and I can just be who I am, not whatever I was.

Doing creative work is suddenly fun again – no meetings, no grant-writing, no reports…I’m enjoying it a lot, partly because it involves spending some time with myself again… something that’s been in short supply over the last decade or so.

I’m not worried.
I actually feel strangely blessed.

vayas con dios,
d



170708

Does Humour Have a Place in Music?

welll... actually... yes, I think it does...
later,
d


150708

The Wedding Dance of the Widow Bride

The Wedding Dance

of the Widow Bride

words & music
by Geoff Berner

The Wedding Dance is not pretty - it’s beautiful… beautiful, angry, sweaty, sexy and all the way up in your face. Mr. Berner aka “the lucky goddamn jew”set out several years ago with Diona Davies and Wayne Adams for the hills and villages of Hungary and beyond, searching for klezmer artists who survived The Holocaust .

What they found during these encounters was more than tough old men and melodies – and you can hear it on The Wedding Song.

Klezmer, like blues, rembetika and other great traditional styles, came from hard lives in tough times. Out of those years of love, lust, liquor, knives… and the occasional pogrom… came a music burning with passion, pain and a yearning that can strip paint. The Wedding Dance honours that tradition by taking klezmer out of the Volvo and back to the street.

Mr. Berner sings his ass off, whispers to screams and everywhere between . Diona’s fiddle wails with mad joy, scratches like a boney finger at the window and leaps into the darkness with Wayne’s tribal primal percussion.

From zen subtle and tasty to manic thunder, this is the work of a committed ensemble playing for their lives. It kicks ass - a sharp reminder that kicking ass was an acoustic tradition. On a good day, it still does no matter how many Folk moderns might get the vapors just thinking about the very questionable lifestyle choices that forged these sounds.

Fair enough - decaf lattes do go better with the gelded incarnations of traditional music so often heard these days.

Geoff Berner doesn’t just play klezmer, he is klezmer incarnate - what John Zorn was to jazz or Billy Bragg to punk in the 80s – making great music that’s true to its’ roots.

'nuff said,
d



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