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By
Glenn Weiser
Old Songs Festival
Altamont
Fairgrounds, June 22-24
‘Green
Grow the Rushes, O,” a love song by the 19th-century Scottish
poet Robert Burns, was once so popular that Mexican troops
fighting the U.S. Army in the Mexican War of 1848 corrupted
the title of the song, which they often heard American troops
singing, to gave us the nickname “gringo.” But where could
you hear this Burns gem performed locally today? Well, Enoch
Kent, a Scottish-Canadian octogenarian, sang a heartfelt rendition
of it at the 27th Old Songs Festival in Altamont last weekend,
underscoring the importance of the Voorheesville-based organization’s
mission to preserve folk-music traditions through its annual
three-day event at the end of June. This year’s slate of acoustic
blues, British ballads, Celtic, Cajun, old-time string-band
music and more drew around 3,000 or so fans, and musically
was as good as ever.
Having been on the bill last year as half of the Celtic duo
Byrnse and Barrett, I returned this time to review Saturday
and Sunday’s music, which consisted of workshops and smaller
performances at more than a half-dozen locations within the
fairgrounds, and a closing concert on the main stage at the
end of each day (there was also a Friday evening concert,
which I didn’t attend). While I couldn’t take in everything,
I did manage to hear a representative sampling of performers.
At 11:15 AM Saturday on the Main Stage was Bodega, an energetic
band of young Scots on harp, guitar, fiddle, bagpipes, and
a djembe added for an African flavor. That worked well enough,
but when the band jammed a reel (a 4/4-time dance tune) into
a 6/8 work song as an instrumental it seemed contrived.
In the Sheep Barn at 12:30, three duos—Magpie, Paul Rishell
and Annie Raines, and Ellie Ellis and Ron Gordon—served up
some tasty blues. The technically brilliant harmonica player
Annie Raines, however, repeatedly committed musical plagiarism
by taking entire solos note-for-note from both Sonny Boy Williamson
II and Little Walter and inserting them into other songs without
attribution (ironically, one song she borrowed from later
was Little Walter’s “You Know It Ain’t Right”). Later, mandolinist
Ron Gordon contributed a rippling solo to his and Ellis’ version
of “Texas Easy Street.”
Next was a concertina consortium at Area 3 in which a half-dozen
squeeze box players, including British bards John Roberts
and the incomparable Louis Killen, recounted the history of
the instrument, reminisced about collecting them in the early
days of the English folk revival (guitars and banjos were
at the time rejected as inauthentic by many folkies there),
and performed tunes and songs, including Killen’s reflective
arrangement of the Aussie anthem “Waltzing Matilda.”
The following act, the Magnolia Sisters, was a fine, all-woman
Cajun band from Louisiana consisting of a fiddler, button
accordionist, guitarist, and triangle player. They performed
waltzes including the standout “Blue Eyes,” two-steps, and
songs in French with excellent close-harmony duet singing
by the guitarist and accordionist.
Back at the Main Stage at 4:15, it was Malinese musician Mamadou
Diabate and his ensemble, consisting of sidemen on a marimba-like
instrument called a balaphon, a cajón (or Spanish percussion
box), and a bass guitar. Diabate himself pays the kora, a
harp-like instrument capable of producing fast, cascading
melodic runs. The band delivered a hypnotically atmospheric
set in which the kora and balaphon wafted over the cajón and
the bass’ simple harmonic lines.
Among the highlights of the evening concert, emceed by folkmeister
Michael Cooney, was the singing trio of Herdman, Hills and
Mangsen, who harmonized superbly on a musical setting of James
Whitcomb Riley’s famous 1885 poem, “Little Orphant Annie.”
Finest Kind, another vocal trio, sang a three-part cappella
arrangement of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’,”
in which the harmonies were a-changin’ in each well-crafted
verse. Lastly, local pickers the Whippersnappers shined on
a heart-melting double-fiddle-and- guitar rendition of the
Shetland slow air, “The Old Resting Chair.”
Sunday saw the performers regrouped in various workshops—Fiddle
Styles, which ranged from Klezmer to Celtic to jazz, and the
Far Flung Colonials session, an Anglo-Saxon hootenanny, were
memorable—before the seven-act finale at 3:30 PM, featuring
among others slide-guitarist/songwriter Pat Wictor, zesty
New Zealand traditional singer Danny Spooner, and our local
old-time outfit, the Stillhouse Rounders, led by Mark Schmidt,
a former student of North Carolina fiddle legend Tommy Jarrell.
Fans of folk and acoustic music who missed Old Songs this
time will want to be there next year.
A
Spectacular Spectacular
Cirque de Soleil’s Delirium
Times
Union Center, June 19
“Who
are all these people?” asked the Guide (Guy Laiberte) as he
peered at the audience from the stage. Nearly blinded by the
starburst footlights, a fellow cast member answered: “I don’t
know; it’s your dream.” And so commenced Delirium,
Cirque Du Soleil’s aptly tagged “delirious sensual folly.”
At the Times Union Center, the gigundo production (one of
Cirque’s two touring arena shows) incorporated dozens of circus
performers, dancers, musicians, and gymnasts (some of them
former Olympians) to create a fantasy travelogue through unfettered
physical realities.
Flanked by two giant video monitors that alternated between
capturing the onstage action and augmenting it with images,
the dream began, apparently, in a tenement building (video
tenants opened and closed their doors), before soaring and
sailing to parts unknown. Early on, a large dome seemed to
represent a space module; later, when it was surrounded by
African dancers, it appeared to be a sand dune, but when the
dancers began to beat on it, it revealed itself as a mammoth
drum.
A greatest-hits show of sorts, Delirium is composed
of 20 of Cirque’s most popular “musical tableaux,” remixed
and pumped up with tribal and urban beats. It’s also the first
production to add lyrics (by Robbie Dillon) and singers to
its original music. The songs were conventional-style pop
songs sung with throaty ardor by three dramatic vocalists,
with “Birimbau,” an Afro-Cuban number, being the most infectious.
But the vocal turns were probably the least amazing element
of Delirium, simply because everything else was so
astonishing. The costuming was inexhaustibly brilliant; at
one point, what looked to be giant seedpods dangling from
the rafters opened up like flower buds to release upside-down
aerialists whose headdresses wriggled like electrified tendrils.
As the show subtly morphed to different regions of the imagination,
some of the musicians were given the spotlight—atop barges
that sailed across the stage through the air, seemingly powered
by nothing beside the coaxing motions of their legs. One barge
flipped over—with the horn player still affixed to the deck.
Whatever wire-work or hydraulic engineering made these surrealist
feats possible, it sure wasn’t visible to the untrained eye.
The mischievous guide was sometimes bedeviled by a dandyish
stilt-walker who spoke in “Cirqese,” the troupe’s made-up
dialect, which sounds like a cross between a barking Pekinese
and the exclamation of stubbing a toe (“ow ow ow”). The other
circus acts included a phalanx of gymnasts who melted into
kaleidoscopic formations, and balletic trapeze artists. Cirque
productions include not only a supremely gifted choreographer,
but also a researcher-designer of “acrobatic language,” and
it was this language that elevated the show into the realm
of the uniquely fantastical. Yet the evening’s brightest star
was (arguably) a solo hoop dancer (Karen Bernal from Mexico)
whose skill was mind-blowing. While spinning hoops from her
foot, with leg at full extension, and simultaneously spinning
several more hoops from her upraised arms, and then undulating
them at high speed to other parts of her body, she still managed
to radiate a joyful aura that outshone even the lit-neon colors
of the hot-air balloons that would rise and set like Martian
moons.
“Whew,
I’m glad this is just a dream, it’s really weird,” said the
guide as a conclusion. His words inspired the cast to spill
out into the audience and send balloons wafting above about
the seats, as if to prove that the dream-like production was,
in fact, real. And what a wonderful weirdness it was.
—Ann
Morrow
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PHOTO: Martin Benjamin |
Jazzin’
The
one and only Reverend Al Green headlined the Sunday lineup
at last weekend’s Freihofer’s Jazz Festival at the Saratoga
Performing Arts Center. To celebrate the festival’s 30th year,
two alumni from the 1978 debut—George Benson and Jean-Luc
Ponty—were on hand to perform at the annual, two-day celebration.
Other acts paid tribute to ’78 performers who have since passed,
including Trio Beyond, who saluted the late Tony Williams,
and the Dizzy Gillespie All-Stars (self-explanatory). Reports
on Green’s set were mixed—some complained that he let the
crowd do more singing than he did—but we here at Metroland
are of the mind that any Al is good Al.
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