[BOTMC_announcements] SF Chronicle article on the BOTMC

[BOTMC_announcments at berkeleyoldtimemusic.org]

The East Bay Life section of Friday's SF Chronicle has a full page article 
about the festival.

Here's the URL (no photo though):

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/09/09/EBGIBEG0R01.DTL


Berkeley: Old-time music convention plays to community's progressive spirit

- Andrew Gilbert, Special to The Chronicle
    Friday, September 9, 2005

    Bashing Berkeley is a finely honed reflex in the national media, with just 
about any story offering lazy journalists a chance to dust off tired cliches 
about a People's Republic far outside the American mainstream.

    A closer look at the singular city reveals a community where a passion for 
progressive causes is matched by a reverence for the rural past. Rather than 
rejecting American ideals, Berkeley has long celebrated an idealized America, 
particularly when it comes to music.

    It's no coincidence that for half a century Berkeley has played a central 
role in the preservation and promotion of old-time music, that broad, 
argument-starting category that encompasses string bands and vocalists 
performing country blues, rags, spirituals, bluegrass and high lonesome 
ballads.

    Running from Thursday through Sept. 18, the Berkeley Old Time Music 
Convention showcases some of the region's best old-time musicians, while also 
honoring folk music legends Mike Seeger and Kenny Hall, who have carried the 
old-time music banner for decades.

    Featuring concerts at Freight & Salvage on Thursday and Sept. 16 , a string 
band contest at the Berkeley Farmers' Market at Center Street on Sept. 17, a 
square dance at Ashkenaz that night, led by the great caller Bill Martin, and 
an old-time cabaret/open mike at Jupiter on Sept. 18, the convention is a 
community event in which young and old musicians and music lovers can exchange 
age-old sounds and practices. (There are also music and dance workshops at 
private homes throughout the area on Sept. 18.)

    Many of the participating musicians not only live within Berkeley, they are 
clustered around the Elmwood neighborhood, and often can be seen riding their 
bikes to nearby houses for sessions, with a banjo, guitar or fiddle on their 
back.

    "I think it reflects what I consider to be true family and community 
values," said fiddler and convention organizer Suzy Thompson from the Elmwood 
house she shares with her husband, veteran guitarist Eric Thompson. "That's one 
reason that music brings together people with different political views. 
There's been a nationwide explosion of this kind of music among people under 
30, and that hasn't happened since the 1960s."

    The convention opens on Thursday at the Freight with an exciting triple 
bill.

    Elmwood resident Larry Hanks, a force in old-time music for some 40 years, 
displays his prowess on Jew's harp. The show continues with the Marin-based 
Roadoilers, whose repertoire includes a wealth of Midwestern blues and rags, 
and the all-women Stairwell Sisters, a powerhouse ensemble whose vocal 
harmonies and stomping rhythms are often abetted by Evie Laden's dexterous 
clogging.

    Suzy and Eric Thompson open Friday's concert, which also features the 
California roots music legend Kenny Hall, a master fiddler and mandolinist who 
has championed old-time music in the Central Valley since the 1940s.

    In a true meeting of giants, Mike Seeger joins the fray. The younger 
brother of Pete Seeger and the man whom Bob Dylan cited in his recent memoir as 
his inspiration to start writing his own songs, Seeger made his own musical 
mark with the New Lost City Ramblers, a pioneering force in the old-time music 
revival of the 1960s.

    For many of the old-time musicians who came of age in Berkeley around that 
time, Seeger provided the intellectual underpinnings of their music through his 
scholarship, found on classic albums such as "Mountain Music Bluegrass Style" 
(Folkways).

    "Somehow Berkeley has always been a place that's receptive to diversity," 
says Seeger from his home in Rockbridge County, Va. "There was quite a string 
band movement there in the late 1960s, with players like Hank Bradley, Larry 
Hanks, Mac Benford and Walt Koken. There was a fair amount of contact between 
those groups and the early rock groups, the Dead, and Jefferson Airplane, 
especially through Eric Thompson, and we stayed in touch over the years."

    The Old Time Music Convention traces its roots back to those glory days 
when jug and string bands morphed into acid rock groups.

    In the late 1960s, the Berkeley Farmers' Market hosted a series of 
legendary festivals that effortlessly combined the sublime with the ridiculous. 
Covered in a new publication called Rolling Stone, the initial 1968 festival 
featured fiddle and banjo contests where the first-place winner was awarded one 
bag of rutabagas, while second place took home two bags, and so on.

    In 2003, Suzy Thompson was asked to host a string-band contest at the 
Farmers' Market and it went so well that last year she produced a three-day 
event with backing by Berkeley's Civic Arts Commission.

    With next week's four-day event, the convention seems to have taken root as 
an annual tradition that is building on the irreverent spirit of the original 
festivals.

    The timing seems conditioned on the convergence of several factors. Ever 
since the runaway success of the "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" soundtrack, which 
featured a melange of pre-World War II gospel, folk blues and string band 
music, old-time American music has emerged as a commercial force for the first 
time in 40 years.

    Today's old-time music scene might be obsessed with the sounds of the past, 
but it's powered by energy from the punk music scene, with its grassroots DIY 
(do it yourself) ethos.

    There are many highly skilled musicians involved in the festival, but the 
old-time music world is welcoming, with workshops and events geared toward 
enthusiastic amateurs. While it might seem like there's an aesthetic gulf 
between the Gilman scene and the Berkeley Farmers' Market, there's a shared 
contempt for the numbing spectacle corporations offer as entertainment.

    "There's been a real crossover of young people from punk," says Suzy 
Thompson. "There's been a migration of people from that music into old-time 
music, and what's great is these kids get very serious about it. They study it 
and play it with the intensity and drive that you would find in rock music. One 
thing that happened this time around that didn't happen in previous revivals is 
that there's more of a dance scene that has developed, so the context where 
they're playing is totally right."

    While the community created by old-time music is real, the world evoked by 
the songs is almost timeless, a bucolic past that was being mourned even when 
it still existed.

    In a nation built by people on the move, music designed to celebrate the 
notion of home, or lamenting exile from its warmth, continues to reverberate 
today. As Thompson notes, "The actual phrase 'old-time music' was a marketing 
device in the early 20th century where they were having songs that looked back 
to the good old days of mom and dad and a log cabin home on the hill," she 
says. "You know what, it's 100 years later and we're still mourning that on 
some level."
    Live

    -- Berkeley Old Time Music Convention, 8 p.m. Sept. 15-16, Freight & 
Salvage, 1111 Addison St., $15.50-$16.50, 510-548-1761; www.thefreight.org.

    -- The 74th Annual String Band Contest, 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Sept. 17, Berkeley 
Farmers' Market, Center St. (between Milvia and Martin Luther King). Free. 
www.berkeleyoldtimemusic.org.

    -- Square Dance, 8 p.m. Sept. 17, Ashkenaz, 1317 San Pablo Ave., $15, (510) 
525-5054; www.ashkenaz.com.

    -- Old Time Cabaret, 4-8 p.m. Sept. 18, Jupiter, 2181 Shattuck Ave. Free. 
www.berkeleyoldtimemusic.org.

    E-mail comments to eastbaylife at sfchronicle.com.

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    URL: 
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