In a few short days, I'll be making the trek to the smallest of our states for the Newport Folk Festival at Fort Adams State Park in Newport, Rhode Island.
The festival, first held in 1959, has a rich history in the lexicon of American music. Amid sailboats and saltwater breezes, the seaside festival has helped introduce the roots of the country's music to generations of new players while simultaneously exposing listeners to some the nation's most influential figures, from groundbreakers Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf to new voices like Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zero's and Neko Case.
While I've seen a lot of the performers from this years lineup before, here's a couple just hitting my radar I'm looking forward to checking out.
Check out the full line up here. And, you can be part of the action too, thanks to the NPR Music webcast. Check out all the details here.
Mention that you're a fan of "jambands" in certain circles and you're wound up to get beaten to the ground and stuck with a broken bottle, left for dead while "Dark Star" quietly plays in the background for the 35 minutes it takes you to bleed to death.
There is a certain hatred of long, extended noodling, self-indulgent progressive rock, hippies, and the kind of free-form wankery that comes with the genre.
But the core ethos of the jamband is a list of really attractive qualities for a band:
Excelling at Live Performance
Improvisation
Constantly Changing Set Lists
Interplay Between Band Members
Reinterpretation of Songs
Blending One Song (or Songs) Into One Another
Off-Beat Covers
Here's a few great bands that might not chart on the UmphsPhishDeadBiscuitmoe.PanicCheeseIncident list, but harbor some latent jamband tendencies.
5. Animal Collective
Like any good jamband Animal Collective draw you into the trippy, electronic drone and just when you think receptive monotony has set in, they shift the landscape ever so slightly, the axis tilts, and suddenly the perspective is completely new.
They solidified their jam credentials with "What Would I Want? Sky", by being the first to license a sample from the godfathers themselves, the Grateful Dead's "Unbroken Chain".
4. Iron and Wine
The beard. The ambling, poetic lyricism. The humble, polite, laissez-faire demeanor.
On his tour backing Kiss Each Other Clean, with the help of a full band, Sam Beam stretched out old songs with new arrangements, which strayed from noise jazz to skank funk.
They should release a live album from this tour. Seriously. Easy money.
3. My Morning Jacket
Guitars. Hair. Beards. Head banging. Loudness.
Maybe their Kentucky upbringing makes them hospitable in any environment, but these guys are a Venn Diagram of genre overlap.
Jim James' shaggy swagger is the middle finger to jam antagonists.
2. Tame Impala
Pre-melt acid trip anticipation wrapped in a stoner, slack, fuzz exterior.
Origin type shit.
Tame Impala rock messy, but aren't afraid to stride headlong into liquid slipperiness and remix themselves into a dirty hippie dance party.
1. White Denim
White Denim is every band you love in one band.
From their own website - "White Denim is a mercurial four piece band from Austin, TX. They make forward thinking, free-wheeling rock sweetened with a psychedelic swirl".
They out duel the double lead of the Allman's, out technic the technique perfectionism of Emerson Lake and Palmer, and flat out outwit, outplay, and outlast all their contemporaries left struggling to survive in a plume of their psych exhaust.
Anything that I do know has been bastardized by United Airlines commercials, Looney Tunes, and wedding processionals, making the scant catalog of tunes I could put song titles to ostensibly embarrassing.
It's not that I have anything against classical music per se, but it was never accessible to me, and generally speaking, I could never hear it playing in any context I could picture myself in. It was elitist, and snobby, and pretentious.
Andrew Bird does not make classical music.
He does however, play a violin, and make thoughtful, layered, and unfolding music that spills around you in quick bursts and elongated passages. Which, upon first listen, might get it labeled as elitist, snobby, and pretentious.
But it's not.
It is warm and inviting, textured but not overwrought with adornment. There are strokes of classical, but also pop and indie, Americana and jazz. It's friendly and homely - more like music at a farmer's market than a concert hall.
Bird's sixth solo album, Break It Yourself, released in March of this year, gongs to a dissonant beginning with "Desperation Breeds", but plucks and chants soon give way to fingers on guitar strings and humming, with Bird breathing:
"Beekeeper sing of your frustration / In this litigious breeze
Of this accidental pollination / In the era without bees"
From this point on, Bird never looks back. There is a persistent forward motion that propels the album onward like some peaceful version of manifest destiny.
The instrumental "Polynation" segues into the stylistic polyglot of "Danse Caribe", in successive movements is folk, Caribbean, and Appalachia, the repeated lyric "here we go mistaking clouds for mountains; autonomy" hanging over the song like those mistaken clouds we'd built into obstacles all on our own. Around the 3:04 mark Bird plays the fiddle and then, metaphorically at least, switches to violin 15 seconds later, the hesitation in his phrasing at the transition allowing you just enough time to consider how your class let's you decide which instrument you think he's playing.
It's at this point that I hear in Andrew Bird someone else - Aaron Copland.
Yes, I know that's a stretch of a comparison since I already admitted my ignorance when it comes to the classical genre, but I saw enough commercials from the American beef industry as a kid to draw a comparison to "Hoedown" when I hear it.
Aaron Copland was raised in Brooklyn, the son of Russian-Jew immigrants, and came to compose some of the most iconic pieces of music that became representative of America - the rustic individualism of the people, the wide open expanses of the land, and the ideals of its democracy. "Rodeo", "Appalachian Spring", "Lincoln Portrait", "John Henry", "Billy the Kid" and "Fanfare for the Common Man" have passages that unmistakably conjure images of pioneers taming the Wild West, of outlaws and heroes, of thoughtful and reflective leaders, families around the dinner table, neighbors chatting over the white picket fence, and Normal Rockwell putting brush to canvas.
With pieces like these, as well as his work for radio, plays, and movies, Copland made a conscious effort to move away from earlier composing dedicated for a select group of urban elites to create "music for use" that appealed to the masses, but still retained the intricacies and sophistication of the European masters.
That retention of sophistication without compromise of accessibility is also the hallmark of Andrew Bird's work on Break It Yourself. But where Copland inspired and dazzled with brass fanfare, Bird suspends the listener in the music with overlapping, intertwined movement, looping, and deft lyricism. He inflects his whistling as a peoples violin, proving that you don't need the orchestra; the common man is his own instrument.
"Give It Away" laments the price of a relationship as a nation-state metaphor while the rhythm shifts behind a bouncing folk pop. "Eyeoneye" exposes the fallacy of protection gained by a hard exterior with crisp reverb and swelling harmonies, both songs blending concise strokes of instrumentation and songwriting. "Lazy Projector" allows the tempo to drag while still keeping time, as the strings rush in around Birds lyrics, culminating in a whistle clear like the memories that aren't.
"Near Death Experience" whirls with the sounds of cavitation. "Lusitania" rivals Josh Ritter's "The Last Temptation of Adam" as the best love song wrapped in an allegory about a World War. "Orpheo Looks Back" is a traveling song for a man on foot; "Fatal Shore" the hanging fog he walks through. Thirteen songs in to Break It Yourself, "Hole in the Ocean Floor" siphons you in completely, floating down ever faster into the escaping water, before being memorialized in the closing "Belles".
While stylistically Copland and Bird diverge, their connotation does not. Andrew Bird, like Aaron Copland, and that beef commercial, are all selling us the same thing: an image of America.
In Copland's, men stand tall with full chests curving out, golden beams of sunshine radiating around them, with battles to be fought and won. In Bird's, the opponent we face is ourselves, and how we choose to live in, and with, the world and relationships we create. Where Copland is the accompaniment to America's story, Bird is more the score to the film.
In each image is the dream - the dream of America and what we look like in it. But where Copland feels like thing we're all supposed to be striving for, Andrew Bird is the satisfaction with the dream that we define.
We're all dreaming for something.
In Copland we dream as a nation. In Bird we dream as a people.
