Tag Archives: Chris Strachwitz

Easy Ed’s Broadside Outtakes #8

Richard (R.L.) and Tammy

Easy Ed’s Broadside column has been a fixture for over ten years at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website. These are odds and ends, random thoughts and fragments never published.

New Music Rising: Ana Egge & The Sentimentals Collaborate-A-Go-Go

AnaEgge_SayThatNow_albumcover copy Last year when I wrote a story about Ana Egge, I pulled this quote from Steve Earle, who had produced her Bad Blood album several years earlier: ‘Ana Egge’s songs are low and lonesome, big square-state noir ballads which she plays on a guitar she built with her own two hands and sings like she’s telling us her deepest, darkest secrets’. I also called my friend Mark Miller, frontman of New York roots music band Spuyten Duyvil and a concert promoter, who offered this thought: ‘An artist’s ability to connect with an audience is frequently and disingenuously misrepresented in their marketing copy. Ana is a rare exception. She captivates a room and draws all eyes and ears with a combination of thoughtful and heartfelt lyrics, a heartbroken voice, and serious instrumental chops.”

While her last album Bright Shadow was a sweet collaboration with The Stray Birds…one of the finest string bands on the road today…on June 10th she’ll be releasing her ninth album Say That Now, which finds her playing with The Sentimentals, a Danish band who rock a little harder.

The Sentimentals are MC Hansen (vocals, harmonica,guitars), Nikolaj Wolf (bass), and Jacob Chano (drums), and they’re old friends of Ana. In addition to previously going out on the road together, the band has also played behind other touring musicians from the US such as Gurf Morlix, Jonathan Byrd, and Sam Baker. This album was recorded over two days in Denmark, and I reached out to Ana to share about the experience.

It is a different road from my last record Bright Shadow, for sure.. In a strange way though, I was drawn to working with The Sentimentals on Say That Now for the same reasons that I was drawn to working with The Stray Birds on ‘Bright Shadow’. Because each band had developed a psychic groove together as a group from playing so much together. The remarkable thing about both bands is that they’re all fantastic players and all amazing harmony singers. That’s the magic dust.

I realized the depth of feel that The Sentimentals had to offer by touring with them in Europe as my back up band over the years. They can be so supportive and quiet on some songs and then they can totally rock. Which gives me, as a vocalist, more ways to push my voice. It was so fun to work with them in the studio in Copenhagen and do so much focused, down to the wire co-writing as well. That’s what makes this album unique to the rest of my catalogue. We wrote most of the songs together and all of them were written in Denmark.

Go over to Ana’s website to check out her entire catalog and get this summer’s dates with the Sentimentals. They’ll be touring Denmark from June 23 through July 2, and then heading to the USA for at least another month. Ana lives in Brooklyn, so I’m particularly looking forward to the homecoming on July 19th at the Rockwood Music Hall.

I’d like to leave you with a little encouragement to take a listen to the video I’m posting below, which was put up on You Tube back in May 2015, just in time for Mother’s Day. The song takes my breath away, and inspired me to title my previous column Why I Cry at 2:35, which you can and should read here. Ana wrote this with Gary Nicholson and it features the Stray Birds. While it’s not very often that a song will come along that can repeatedly turn me into an emotional bowl of jelly at every listen, this is the one. 2:35.

Every Picture Tells A Story.

Sandy 2 The image at the top of this page was shot by my long-time-we’ve-only-met-online friend Sandy Dyas, who is a visual artist based in Iowa City that I’ve written about often. You can visit her website here and check out her work, books (buy them…really) and blog. And more of her images can be found on this site….like this one.

On Smithsonian Folkways and Arhoolie Records…The Grand Acquisition.

sifolkwaysbwlogo

Those of us who’ve been pleased with the great job that the Smithsonian Folkways people have done with the preservation of Moe Asch’s record label, are over the top with news that they’ve now acquired Arhoolie Records as well. I’ve posted one of my Broadside columns about the news over at No Depression…and click here to read it. Back in April 2015 I profiled Chris Strachwitz and the great Arhoolie label he built, and you can read that here on this site.

Ben Sisario of the New York Times wrote a detailed story of how this deal came down, and I’m going to cut and paste the first paragraphs, but encourage you to follow the link to read the whole enchilada.

For more than 50 years, Chris Strachwitz has been one of the music world’s great pack rats and champions of American folk styles, as a record collector and the founder of Arhoolie Records. Since 1960, Arhoolie has released hundreds of albums of blues, gospel, Cajun and Mexican folk music that have caught the ear of musicians like Bob Dylan and Ry Cooder.

Now 84, Mr. Strachwitz has found a new home for the label: Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, which has acquired the Arhoolie catalog and will be adding more than 350 Arhoolie albums to its collection, the labels announced on Tuesday. In keeping with the longstanding policy at Smithsonian Folkways, the nonprofit label associated with the Smithsonian Institution, the catalog is to be kept accessible in a variety of formats. Click here to continue.

The Other Jack Johnson

Another Broadside column I published on the No Depression site recently, and it began like this:

jack_johnson If I was a baseball player you might say I’m in a slump. I feel as though, when I’m up to bat, I swing at air. If a ball speeds toward me, I reach up to catch but it just sails through my glove. I could grow a beard, shave it off, lower my right shoulder, raise my left, shuffle my feet, or tug at my ears. No change. And that’s probably the best analogy I can come up with, as to my current relationship with new music.

This affliction is hardly new, and I’ve been struck by it several times in the past few years. One cure that seems to work has been for me to take a break from the new stuff and get back to the tried and true — simply immerse myself in old favorites. I might spend a month listening to only the Carter Family Border Radio set, or something completely off the wall. Last year, it was 60 days of the complete Elvis Costello discography. To continue, click here.

Father John Misty Mocks Corporate Americana.

I picked this story up over at the NME site:

Josh Tillman – aka the indomitable Father John Misty – has just sneaked out a typically dry lampooning of new folk commercialism via his SoundCloud. Happy Wednesday. The just-over-two-minutes-long track brims with the heavy weight of capitalist ennui before you’ve ever heard it. The title, ‘Prius Commercial Demo 1’, gives you a pretty solid measure of the thing – this is FJM’s take on the shameless corporatisation of a seemingly salt of the earth sound, and effortlessly manages to make a mockery of the earnest linen-clad likes of the Lumineers and their big bucks pastiches of the work of Bruce Springsteen and The Band.

With it’s talk of riding traincars where the mountains reach the sky, drinking whiskey, never learning how to say goodbye and growing soya beans on a tinning farm, Father John Misty mercilessly lampoons the current vogue for Americana by numbers – even throwing in a meaningless “hey! ho!” over jaunty, jangly acoustic guitar. Give it a spin below, brothers.

Without Jazz and Blues, There’s No Americana.

And coming right behind Misty’s parody, is an interesting article published by The Atlantic by David A. Graham. A story about a new album titled Americana by sax player J.D. Allen ‘makes the case that any genre that pretends to represent the full scope of U.S. culture can’t ignore black music’.

Back in 2013 Giovanni Russonello wrote another Atlantic essay tracing the roots of the Americana genre and the ‘weather-beaten, rural-sounding music that bands like Whiskeytown and Uncle Tupelo were making. It was warm, twangy stuff, full of finger-plucked guitars and gnarled voices like tires on a dirt road.’ Graham writes:

Russonello pointed out that the artists grouped under the banner tended to be overwhelmingly white, male, and older—or at least obsessed with music from the 1950s to 1970. “Can a genre that offers itself up as a kind of fantasy soundtrack for this country afford to be so homogeneous and so staunchly archaic?” he asked.

The blame for this impoverished definition of Americana falls on the tastemakers of the genre. Since the Grammys established an Americana award in 2009, only three black artists have been nominated (one of them, Mavis Staples, twice). But musicians working in jazz and blues don’t necessarily see themselves as part of Americana, either, as Allen’s own story demonstrates.

Most of this article focuses on Allen and the new album, and it’s a great read that seemed to really piss off the ‘twang nation’ Americana-ists when I posted it on my Twitter feed. Read it here.

Americana

Videos You Wouldn’t Know Existed, Unless You Found Them By Mistake.

On Smithsonian Folkways and Arhoolie Records

920x920 Last week I was thrilled to hear that Smithsonian Folkways — the nonprofit record label associated with America’s national museum — has acquired Arhoolie Recordsfrom Chris Strachwitz and his business partner, Tom Diamant. In keeping with Folkways’ policy, the catalog will be kept accessible to the public in the same way that they’ve been managing Moe Asch’s Folkways catalog.

The Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage purchased Folkways back in 1987, and one of the conditions of the sale was that all 2,168 titles would remain in print forever. Using a combination of modern digital distribution and their custom order service, every single title remains available for purchase. Over the years, the Smithsonian has added content from other labels and collections, and the addition of Arhoolie’s 350 titles of blues, gospel, Cajun, and Mexican folk music is a perfect fit.

The New York Times covered the story on May 10th with an article by Ben Sisario, who wrote:

Chris Strachwitz, born in Germany to an aristocratic family, came to the United States after World War II. In the 1950s, he joined the loose network of collectors and sleuths who tracked down and recorded folk and blues musicians who had made their first recordings decades before. Arhoolie’s first release was by Mance Lipscomb, a blues singer and guitarist, whom Mr. Strachwitz and his fellow researcher Mack McCormick located in Texas.

Partly inspired by Folkways, the label run by Moses Asch that released records by Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie and the landmark 1952 “Anthology of American Folk Music,” Mr. Strachwitz took a scholarly approach to releasing records. The Smithsonian acquired Folkways in 1987, a year after Asch’s death, and in an interview this week Mr. Strachwitz said that it was Mr. Asch who once gave him advice about setting up his legacy.

“It was the late Moe Asch of Folkways Records who told me, ‘Chris, when you kick the bucket you’ve got to think about what you’re going to with all your stuff,’” Mr. Strachwitz recalled.

I’ve always been curious about how the Smithsonian operates, as I assumed it was a branch of some government entity. So I did a little research.

The Smithsonian was established in 1846 from the estate of a British scientist named James Smithson, and although two thirds of its employees are federal workers, funding comes from the Institution’s endowment, private and corporate contributions, membership dues, government support ($800 million in 2011), and retail, concession, and licensing revenues.

In the case of Arhoolie, the Times article states that the acquisition was made as a result of a donation from Laura and Ed Littlefield of the Sage Foundation. Strachwitz said that the Littlefields essentially bought the label and donated it to Smithsonian Folkways.

Imagining there must be a lot more music-related collections throughout the 138 million items that the 19 museums in Washington, DC, make available to the public, I came across a new building opening this year on the last available space on the National Mall, next to the Washington monument.

According to its website, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture “will be a place where all Americans can learn about the richness and diversity of the African American experience, what it means to their lives, and how it helped us shape this nation.”

When that museum opens its doors in September, there will be an exhibition called Musical Crossroads that will showcase contemporary items along with those of the past. There will be rare recordings from Mahalia Jackson alongside George Clinton’s wigs, outfits worn on Soul Train, a pair of Curtis Mayfield’s glasses, and Cab Calloway’s suits. An Amtrak field trip seems like a pretty good plan.

This post was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside on the No Depression website.

Chris Strachwitz and Arhoolie Records … This Ain’t No Mouse Music!

The last night of SXSW found me longing for the opportunity of discovery. Toss the official schedule, walk off the beaten path, and let the smell of Texas barbecue and the sound of new music guide me to euphoria. Problem with that was I was about two thousand miles away from Austin, the only path I could find was along the tracks of the Harlem Line of Metro North, and it was too cold and too early in the season for even the birds to sing their sweet songs. After a day on my feet and with no live music in the neighborhood, I opted for my default audio-visual excursion into the wilds of on-demand cable and Netflix streaming.

Options seemed slim at first, as I’ve caught up on most of my guilty pleasures. The HBO show Vice has been my latest vice, but there’s only so much international death and despair I can take in one sitting. Sonic Highways, which documents the Foo Fighters’ continental traverse of eight cities to record the album of the same name, looked like a good possibility. One of the producers is an old friend of mine, and I really liked the episode in DC featuring Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and Fugazi. But it just didn’t speak to my mood.

Lacking any new content from any of the various Kardashian clan members, and with no interest in Larry King’s infomercial on fish oil, I swapped remotes and decided to scan the Netflix menu. I’m not sure if they offer the same library of films and television shows internationally, but in America, they actually have a decent selection of music documentaries. (Ed’s Pick: If you haven’t watched The Punk Singer about Bikini Kill and specifically Kathleen Hanna, do check it out.)

Whatever algorithm Netflix uses for recommendations, they hit it out of the park when on my list I found This Ain’t No Mouse Music!, the story of song catcher Chris Strachwitz. And while the music takes center stage, the leading man is this most extraordinary German-born folklorist, archivist, fanatical record collector and founder of Arhoolie Records who has spent over 50 years preserving American roots music. Produced and directed by Chris Simon and Maureen Gosling, who each previously worked with the world-renowned documentarian Les Blank, the film uses both archival and new footage for a look into Chris’ world.

The stories come alive when you hear them straight from the man who traveled to Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana in the early ’60s to record blues musicians such as Mance Lipscomb, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Big Mama Thornton, and Fred McDowell. Hopkins introduced Strachwitz to his wife’s cousin Clifton Chenier, and in 1965 Strachwitz recorded Chenier in Houston. This led Strachwitz to make dozens of Cajun and Creole recordings from New Orleans with musicians such as Beausoleil, Autin Pitre, Amede Ardoin, Canray Fontenot, and others.

Over the years, Strachwitz loaded the car with his tape recorder and microphones to cruise throughout the countryside, and he’d set up on porches, in the fields, at beer joints, and local festivals. In addition to the blues, he added country, bluegrass, old-time, Mexican regional, Tejano, world, jazz, gospel, folk, and polka to the Arhoolie catalog. He recorded and released Country Joe and The Fish’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag” in exchange for the publishing rights, which earned him quite a bit of money after Joe got thrown on the stage at Woodstock a few years later and the moment was preserved on film and soundtrack. The cash infusion helped finance Strachwitz’s field recordings and fueled his record consumer passion. (He gave the publishing back to Joe after 20 years.)

Along with Strachwitz’s recollections and stories, interviews in This Ain’t No Mouse Music! are woven together to present an oral history of this man and his work. Some of the people you’ll see and hear are Ry Cooder, Bonnie Raitt, Taj Mahal, Flaco Jimenez, Michael Doucet, Richard Thompson, Santiago Jimenez Jr., The Pine Leaf Boys, the Treme Brass Band, No Speed Limit, and various friends, colleagues, folklorists, and the staff from the label and store.

Another aspect of Strachwitz’s story is that he is a fanatical collector of 78s, many of which he has released on compilations. In 1995 he founded the Arhoolie Foundation to document, preserve, present, and disseminate authentic traditional and regional music. So far he has donated over 17,000 78s, 23,000 45s, and 4,000 albums of Mexican-American and Mexican vernacular music that are being digitized. The foundation also has financed films and educational programs.

This film has been kicking around the festival circuit off and on for almost two years, and it’s now available on DVD as well as being screened at select theaters and universities. There’s also a companion soundtrack available, and you can find it and the entire amazing music catalog on the Arhoolie Records website. Here are a few more tunes to get you in the mood …

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com