BACKSTAGE PASS

A less than full house provided over-flow of appreciation for the sister band Rising Appalachia Sunday evening at the Door Community Auditorium. Joined by an able guitarist/string bassist and a flashy percussionist, Leah and Chloe Smith brought their original brand of Southern folk music to the Peninsula.

Leah, who offered much of the good-natured patter of the evening, joked about their hybrid music, saying that store clerks don’t know where to stock their CDs. “After considering folk and blues and jazz and blue grass and world, they finally settle on other!” she laughed.

While growing up in the “urban jungle” of Atlanta, Leah said, the girls traveled with their parents in parts of Appalachia, and later, New Orleans, the experiences influencing their music, as have their tours in this country and abroad.

The duo sings with heads-back full-throated voices, often in close harmony, occasionally a cappella, sometimes accompanied only by percussion. The show was fast paced and performed without intermission. Performing in a minimally lighted hall and wearing ethnic-inspired outfits while the percussionist provided a relentless beat that added a “world” flavor to most of their sets, the sisters immediately captured the attention of the audience.

The lead singer Leah plays banjo and occasionally percussion; Chloe is primarily the fiddler, although she sometimes picks up a guitar or banjo. The show began with an a cappella “Mississippi Song” and book-ended with an unaccompanied version of “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.” Especially enjoyable were the traditional Appalachian pieces, such as “Oh, Death.” The classic “St. James Infirmary Blues,” the original “Downtown” (a poem to New Orleans), and the haunting a cappella Bulgarian “Harvest Song” followed by a rousing “Freedom,” collectively demonstrated the impressive versatility of the sisters.

The repertoire of Rising Appalachia includes a number of original pieces, often with an activist bent: one, for example, dealt with over-crowded prisons; another with traditional medicines; and the popular title song of their 2012 album, “Filthy Dirty South,” protested the corruption of the environment as a consequence of hydraulic fracturing and inadvertent oil spills.

Perhaps because the Smith sisters as children were nurtured by folk music in its original setting, they have emerged as authentic representatives of that tradition. The audience that rose to its feet at the concert’s end seemed to intuitively recognize this element of American culture.

Visit risingappalchia.com to learn more about the band, their tours, and their discography.

As soon as I received my ticket to see the Preservation Hall Jazz Band at Fish Creek’s Auditorium, I hopped online to do some investigating. Within minutes, I had heard enough of their music to convince me I was in for a treat. I had also stumbled across a very short documentary. It sketched the progress of Preservation Hall – how an old art gallery became the most popular musical venue in New Orleans during the 1960s, and how dedicated musicians have maintained its status over the years. It was just a couple years after the Hall’s founding that the band began touring and raising recognition about the traditional jazz they played.
Allan Jaffe was one of the Hall’s principal founders and father to Ben Jaffe, the band’s current creative director. In the video, he says, “I’m happy to be able to see so many people get to hear a New Orleans band live – I think that’s the way it should be.” After attending this concert, I wholeheartedly agree with him.

Those men had hands down the best energy of any group of musicians I’ve ever seen. The trumpeter initiated every piece with a few, rhythmic stomps of his foot; the man on trombone was always the first to start clapping; and I don’t think the sousaphone player ever stopped moving: he was constantly twisting from side to side and frequently meandered across the stage. They were hot, they were cool; they were sassy, they were smooth.

I was dancing in my seat the whole night, and out of it at a couple points. Near the end of the song “Rattling Bones,” which teases about the dead coming alive on St. Joseph’s day, the whole audience was urged, “Come on, you’ve been sittin’ all night—Rattle them bones!”

Though most of the songs were cheerful, they did a slow rendition of “St. James Infirmary” that was so mournful it gave me the chills:

I was down to St. James infirmary, I saw my baby there
She was stretched out on a long white table,
So sweet, cool and so fair.

But the mood didn’t last long. I described their other songs as cheerful, but that doesn’t really cover it – they seemed to surge with a gut-busting joy, a jubilant delight just to be alive in a world with music. And they brought that to their audience too.

One of the most impressive pieces, in my opinion, was when all the musicians, except pianist Rickie Monie, put down their instruments and walked off-stage. Monie turned around, stared at us through his white-rimmed glasses, and shrugged; then he started playing: his fingers flew, his hands pounded, his head bobbed. A piano student myself, I was blown away. Then all the others began resuming their places and chiming in, and the jazzy piano concerto reached its peak.

Their encore song – because how could we not beg for an encore from these guys – was “When the Saints Go Marching In,” a tune which my friends and I have belted out on pilgrimages through the city streets of Rome and the countryside of New York State. It reminded me of jazz’s ties to Southern spirituality. In that song at least, you knew it was not simply a joy in this life which the players were expressing; it was the joy of those looking ahead to heaven – and it was so infectious that I found myself looking ahead too.

When Preservation Hall comes to Door Community Auditorium it’s as if you’ve stepped right out of Door County and fallen smack dab into the heart of New Orleans.

Two years ago, my husband and I were thrown head first into the essence of NOLA and our local friends there made sure we left with an experience that could never be replicated. We ate the local cuisine, fished the bayou, and soaked up the culture that one could not even begin to explain and do it justice. Just a few years before, we had been to the area after hurricane Katrina trying to pick up the pieces of a city that really shouldn’t be there. The city sits in a bowl and although natural disaster is inevitable, it’s people choose to stand by her no matter what scars she may bare.

Just one of the places that shows the soul and the strength of the New Orleans culture is found under a tiny sign and iron gate, practically hidden, on St. Peters Street in the French Quarter. It’s called Preservation Hall and although the name may make you think it’s a place with a big stage and lots of tiered seating it is anything but; its draw is not the setting but the musicians in it. You enter the gate and walk up to a weathered desk where only cash will grant you access. From there you enter a room that can’t be more than forty by forty and you instantly feel a vibe that makes your heart smile. A vibe that makes you understand why people stay and why this sometimes imperfect city will never go away.

I play a short snippet I caught on my phone from that day every once in a while just to take me back to that sense of clarity. It’s grainy and foggy from the humidity, but even a bad recording makes my arms tingle a bit and pulls me right back into that question I just can’t answer…what is it about New Orleans and how does this colorful group capture it all in a few songs? The second time I saw Preservation Hall was at Door Community Auditorium and it was a bit of a culture shock when you step out onto the streets of Fish Creek instead of the slate walkways of the French Quarter. It’s the closest I’ve been to New Orleans since that night on St Peters Street, and we’ll be right back there again this Thursday, June 26th when Preservation Hall brings their signature sound and all those great memories of NOLA back to Door County.

A sold-out crowd was treated to a wonderful double-header concert at Door County Auditorium last Friday night. Judy Collins and Don McLean arrived on jet planes in buckets of rain to sing the songs of almost half a century ago. It felt like a celebration! Judy swept onstage with her long blonde hair flowing, dressed in black. After a funny lament about her lost luggage and guitar, and a tango with a too-tall microphone, she immediately started telling her stories. Judy did a great job of seducing us into our own memories with her deeper, but still crystalline voice. Her tribute to Pete Seeger was very touching; her slam of Bob Dylan’s treatment of Joan Baez in “Diamonds and Rust” used up every hanky in the hall. We didn’t get an encore although we were happy to give our elegant American icon a standing ovation.

Then Don McLean and his band arrived. After shoving the piano around and rearranging the stage, McLean yelled out to the guys at the light table to bring up the house lights, immediately erasing Judy’s moody, atmospheric setting. McLean stepped up to the mike and told us to pull up our diapers and get ready to work hard. “If you work hard for us, we’ll work hard for you,” he said. “Turn on your cameras and iPhones and get clickin’. Then, after a couple of songs, he stopped and told us we were a terrible audience. He said he was older than any of us (not true) but that he had more energy than all of us put together. We looked at each other. Did we just get verbally spanked by Don McLean? And then he sang “Crying”. That did it. We stopped acting like nice senior citizens and got rockin’. People clapped and swayed and sang their lungs out. “Now you got it!” shouted Mclean, finally serving up about 25 minutes of sweet “American Pie”.

It’s not every day that we get to revisit our teenaged selves with the music we loved from so long ago. But, diapers? Really? Still, we were be-boppin’ and singing our way through the wet parking lots, maybe wishing we’d find a turquoise Thunderbird waiting instead of a silver Prius. Maybe we’d turn on the radio and get our encore from Judy, a sweet rendition of “Who Knows Where The Time Goes”. Indeed.