First Chattanooga gig this weekend and news!
11/03/2007
10:00 PM
J.J.'s Bohemia
231 MLK BLVD.
Chattanooga, 37402
Cost: $5.00
Playing with Christabel and the Jons (a cool swing band from Knoxville) and The New Binkley Brothers.
11/9-11/2007
Southeastern Ohio Dulcimer Fest
The Federal Valley Resource Center
Stewart, Ohio 45778
Cost: $35 advance, $40 day of.
A weekend dulcimer festival featuring long in-depth lessons with Jerry Rockwell, Steve Seifert, Steven K. Smith and myself. This is going to be small but very cool.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally I had planned to make this a longer missive, but was faced with writer's block, and really no desire to type. So instead, I thought I would just write a quick email to tell you about the upcoming shows. Now I'm looking at the mess before you.
Also, I'm co-writing this email with my cat, Ellie, who has decided (like most cats do) that the most comfortable spot in the room is between you and whatever it is you're doing right now. She got into a fight with another neighborhood cat and ended up with a big festering ball of infection that needed lanced. So now she trotting around with a disgusting draining wound on her butt and one of those lampshades around her neck to keep her from ripping out her stitches, she hates it and looks ridiculous. It's Halloween today, I think I'm gonna dress her up as a daisy.
The last tour up through Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia was a really great time. I wrote a review of the week on my web site, and my Myspace page. Myspace is great; they don't accept rss feeds so I have to write everything twice. Plus it's exactly like being on AOL circa 1996. Anyway, I posted some pics and some video both at butchross.com and Myspace.com/butchross. Go check it out.
After I got back from that tour I decided to stay off the road until the end of the year. So I could play local shows and get to know the new neighbors I haven't seen since we moved here. Tho' I've played a lot of outdoors-y event-type stuff, and sat in with other folks (even playing three gigs in a single day two weeks ago), Saturday will be my first local club show here. On the bill are the Binkley Brothers (http://www.myspace.com/newbinkleybrothers), who are a local old-time band, and Christabel and the Jons (http://www.christabelmusic.com), a swing band from Knoxville. I have been telling everyone that I would recommend this show, even if I weren't on the bill, and it's true.
The weekend after that I will be back up in Ohio, at Jerry Rockwell's Southeastern Ohio dulcimer festival. This will be a technique intensive festival with longer and smaller classes from me, Jerry, Steve Seifert and Steven K. Smith. There will also be a big Saturday night concert that is going to feature a lot of collaboration and jamming. It'll be held, as usual, in the community center, which is an old school, just outside of Athens in Stewart, Ohio: A small town just up the road from (I'm not making this up) Guysville, and Coolsville. This is going to be best kept secret in dulcimerdum (is that a word?) and if you really want to learn to play well, you should make the trip.
I've also spent the better part of the last few weeks holed up in Dan Landrum's studio working on my Christmas CD. As those of you who have been on this list for a while will remember, in 2003 I released a CD of Holiday tunes that was my first true mountain dulcimer project. I recorded that in an unused apartment in my building, with a minidisk, a borrowed folkcraft dulcimer, and Pro-tools free. I got reverb by wiring my computer to my Fender amp's reverb unit. I had been looking to update it for some time, and this was the opportunity to do so. I also was able to add some new tracks, including a few played on a Hungarian Cittera, the Hungarian version of the mountain dulcimer (that thing is so cool).
In the near future I'll be posting more about it, including how you can get it for free. But I want to wait a bit before I do. Christmas seriously starts waaaaaay too early these days.
So again, to recap, Saturday at JJ's Bohemia in Chattanooga, next week at Jerry's festival in Ohio, and there'll be a Christmas CD coming that you can get for free.
I really thought that this would be a short email.
C-ya out there.
-Br
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
11/03/2007
10:00 PM
J.J.'s Bohemia
231 MLK BLVD.
Chattanooga, 37402
Cost: $5.00
Playing with Christabel and the Jons (a cool swing band from Knoxville) and The New Binkley Brothers.
11/9-11/2007
Southeastern Ohio Dulcimer Fest
The Federal Valley Resource Center
Stewart, Ohio 45778
Cost: $35 advance, $40 day of.
A weekend dulcimer festival featuring long in-depth lessons with Jerry Rockwell, Steve Seifert, Steven K. Smith and myself. This is going to be small but very cool.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
A note on "The Road"
To me the road is not measured in miles, or money, in gas, tolls, good gigs or bad ones, CD sales or opening acts. It's measured in moments, brief and sharp as a razor or slow and soft as a prayer.
In 2005, in Louisville, a drunk stumbles to the stage and asks how much my CDs are. I say fifteen, and he says he only has eleven. "Close enough,” say I, and he hands me $6 and a scratch and win lottery ticket for $5. This is the what I remember.
By all accounts, this tour was successful, Jonathan Byrd successful. If I did this kind of touring 40 or 50 weeks a year, I’d be very successful, Ellis Paul successful. But it’s not the money or the shows that we do this. At least, it’s not why I do.
The tour started out well enough, Chester Page and company up in White House put together one heck of shindig for Steve Seifert and myself. Chester built this even to be a success from the bottom up, and as a result everyone had a good time and we were able to raise nearly $500 for the White House Elementary School’s dulcimer program. Seriously Chester, this was a better-run event than a lot of the “established” venues I’ve played over the last decade or so.
In Columbus I played Special Ed kids at the Heritage Middle School and remembered this: all my accomplishments aren’t worth a tinker’s damn compared to the everyday heroes out there, unsung and vigilant.
I went on a wild goose chase with Cindy Howes through crooked Pittsburgh streets that I once knew by rote, Cindy swore that her GPS was not faulty. We had a long lunch with much talk about music, how Pittsburgh is America, and how Tom Brousseau is not at all like the movie North Fork. She’s perennially in my Myspace top 8 because she always has new content. Then there was a pasta dinner with Stu and Ash in a Shadyside flat, the Bloomsburg Bridge Tavern, where I did not have the Perogies (and am still regretting it) and a sleep-in morning that the only one I got this trip.
If Nashville is the “Athens of the south” then Athens, Ohio is the “Athens of Ohio.” Once about three years ago, I sipped a cool Guinness in a very hot tub under a star-filled sky while coyotes bayed in the distance. This time there where no coyotes, only that star filled sky, and tho’ the times weren’t as good, it made the tub and the companionship more urgent, and fulfilling.
Heidi Muller invited me to play to six people at an Elderhostel, who were learning dulcimer. It reminded me that what the dulcimer gives, is the gift of music to people who never ever thought that music was in the cards for them. How do you put price on that?? An hour later I was playing for these inner city kids, who are also all learning the dulcimer.
I met Clare, 6 years old, red hair and freckles, she drew me a picture of a palm tree, its leaves spelling out the phrase “you rule.” Things like this are the best reason for owning a refrigerator. That same gig brought a pop-quiz request for Radiohead and Peter Gabriel. Note to self: keep yr. Chops up, especially on old material. You never, ever, know.
At the Hilltop house in Harpers Ferry, where the Shenandoah meets the Potomac, the trains come out of the tunnel and blast their horns; these echo down the valley. Heading north, the Doppler effect drops their notes of the horn one semi-tone down, and southbound it comes back a perfect forth lower, creating it’s own harmony in the key of C.
And finally Christie and I discovered the town of Thomas, squashed into the side of a mountain, it’s like a model train diorama comes to life. If there’s ever a place on earth like the fictional Cecily, Alaska, this is it. Here, in a freezing cabin, I reconnected with a random old friend who had come to the same conclusion thing I did: we do this because we have to, and because of that fact, we always will.
One of the wonderful things about Chattanooga is that I look forward to coming back to it. It feels good to be back on the road, to put all those miles beneath my wheels again. But this time coming back is as good as going out. I am truly blessed in this.
In 2005, in Louisville, a drunk stumbles to the stage and asks how much my CDs are. I say fifteen, and he says he only has eleven. "Close enough,” say I, and he hands me $6 and a scratch and win lottery ticket for $5. This is the what I remember.
By all accounts, this tour was successful, Jonathan Byrd successful. If I did this kind of touring 40 or 50 weeks a year, I’d be very successful, Ellis Paul successful. But it’s not the money or the shows that we do this. At least, it’s not why I do.
The tour started out well enough, Chester Page and company up in White House put together one heck of shindig for Steve Seifert and myself. Chester built this even to be a success from the bottom up, and as a result everyone had a good time and we were able to raise nearly $500 for the White House Elementary School’s dulcimer program. Seriously Chester, this was a better-run event than a lot of the “established” venues I’ve played over the last decade or so.
In Columbus I played Special Ed kids at the Heritage Middle School and remembered this: all my accomplishments aren’t worth a tinker’s damn compared to the everyday heroes out there, unsung and vigilant.
I went on a wild goose chase with Cindy Howes through crooked Pittsburgh streets that I once knew by rote, Cindy swore that her GPS was not faulty. We had a long lunch with much talk about music, how Pittsburgh is America, and how Tom Brousseau is not at all like the movie North Fork. She’s perennially in my Myspace top 8 because she always has new content. Then there was a pasta dinner with Stu and Ash in a Shadyside flat, the Bloomsburg Bridge Tavern, where I did not have the Perogies (and am still regretting it) and a sleep-in morning that the only one I got this trip.
If Nashville is the “Athens of the south” then Athens, Ohio is the “Athens of Ohio.” Once about three years ago, I sipped a cool Guinness in a very hot tub under a star-filled sky while coyotes bayed in the distance. This time there where no coyotes, only that star filled sky, and tho’ the times weren’t as good, it made the tub and the companionship more urgent, and fulfilling.
Heidi Muller invited me to play to six people at an Elderhostel, who were learning dulcimer. It reminded me that what the dulcimer gives, is the gift of music to people who never ever thought that music was in the cards for them. How do you put price on that?? An hour later I was playing for these inner city kids, who are also all learning the dulcimer.
I met Clare, 6 years old, red hair and freckles, she drew me a picture of a palm tree, its leaves spelling out the phrase “you rule.” Things like this are the best reason for owning a refrigerator. That same gig brought a pop-quiz request for Radiohead and Peter Gabriel. Note to self: keep yr. Chops up, especially on old material. You never, ever, know.
At the Hilltop house in Harpers Ferry, where the Shenandoah meets the Potomac, the trains come out of the tunnel and blast their horns; these echo down the valley. Heading north, the Doppler effect drops their notes of the horn one semi-tone down, and southbound it comes back a perfect forth lower, creating it’s own harmony in the key of C.
And finally Christie and I discovered the town of Thomas, squashed into the side of a mountain, it’s like a model train diorama comes to life. If there’s ever a place on earth like the fictional Cecily, Alaska, this is it. Here, in a freezing cabin, I reconnected with a random old friend who had come to the same conclusion thing I did: we do this because we have to, and because of that fact, we always will.
One of the wonderful things about Chattanooga is that I look forward to coming back to it. It feels good to be back on the road, to put all those miles beneath my wheels again. But this time coming back is as good as going out. I am truly blessed in this.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)