Wednesday, December 12, 2012

We are young

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Jordan Trabue’s folk-rock quartet, Beady, was approached by sonaBLAST Records boss Gill Holland about a year and a half ago. The band has been playing together for three years, and half of the band (Jesse Weber-Owens, 17, who plays cello, banjo and percussion, and violinist Sarah Trabue, 16) is still in high school.

Jordan Trabue, 21, plays guitar, mandolin and banjo, and graduated from Middle Tennessee State this year. Dylan Weber-Owens, also 21 and also a guitarist and banjo player, is at U of L. The pair of siblings seems to have simple goals: “We play a bunch of different instruments, sing some harmonies, and generally try to have a good time,” says Jordan. But there might be more ambition under that laid-back approach.

“sonaBLAST has been great to work with,” he says. “They financed our first professionally recorded album, as well as our first music video.”

The album, the aptly named Youngest Days, was released earlier this week. The first video was for their song “When I’m Twenty.” Though half of the band has already passed that point, “We kept the song, though, because it’s fun and catchy.”

With a nod to the Beatles, Trabue is asked where he might be when he’s 64. He replies, “I hope that by the time I’m 64, we’ve made more songs so I’m not still singing about being 20. It might weird some people out.”

Another song, “You Belong in Louisville,” sounds like another contender for an anthem. Trabue acknowledges that it’s been suggested that he pitch the song to the tourist board, but he downplays the possibility.

“I’m not sure if it would work to attract tourists. I think it’s certainly a good song, if I’m allowed to say that about my own songs, but it’s sort of this sweet, low, mumble of a love song rather than something bright and catchy that tourist boards might go for.”

Beady performs live on WFPK’s “Live Lunch” on Friday and at the Douglass Loop Heine Brothers on Saturday at 3 p.m.

c. 2012 LEO Weekly

Sid Griffin finds himself

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Louisville native brings bluegrass overseas



“I have made about 16 albums, so I kinda have the hang of that,” says Sid Griffin, mandolinist and singer with the London-based band The Coal Porters.

It sounds like a boast, but it’s a well-earned statement of fact. While Griffin’s success in the marketplace hasn’t always equaled the level of respect he’s earned from other musicians and serious music junkies, he’s had a long, strange trip taking him from the seedy Hollywood clubs of the 1980s to today’s London pubs. And it all started in Louisville, back in 1955.

“To me, it was a dying city growing up,” Griffin says now. “Safe, kinda fun, full of my friends, but not a very adventurous or dynamic town to me at all.”

That may have just been a child’s perspective, or a fair assessment of that somewhat dull point in history, but as he grew, Griffin found some kindred spirits.

“Years later, when I got into NRBQ and remembered seeing the Oxfords about 1970, then I realized I had it all wrong — there was local talent.” Griffin also remembers attending a Trinity dance around 1967 and seeing a band called the Alphabetical Order, whose cover of the Stones’ “Under My Thumb” received airplay on WKLO.

He also saw Motley Kru — not the hair-metal legends — at another dance. “Musically, all the local bands in bars that I saw either played covers or were not very imaginative.”

Today, Griffin says, “parts of Louisville seem so vibrant.” He attributes this to the influence of hippies, punk rockers and gays. “You got a legitimate scene happening from the very people society doesn’t really like or respect.”

Even with a family and solid career, Griffin remains an outsider. He moved to England 15 years or so ago for love. The author of two books on Bob Dylan, Griffin has also seen his identity shift throughout his life in music. With his first popular band, The Long Ryders, Griffin was a pivotal figure in the early ’80s development of what is now often called “alt-country.”

Perhaps some of his eighth-generation Kentuckian roots were coming through — he has written a book on bluegrass, as well — but on the surface, at least, Griffin was merely continuing the legacy of Gram Parsons, another subject of a Griffin book.

His current band has been around for most of those 15 years. Time has seen The Coal Porters evolve from a rock band to what Griffin calls “the world’s first alt-bluegrass band.”

“There is a small scene for American roots music in England, but not nearly as big as Americans think. Not nearly,” he says. “All these folks come over to tour here or live here three months and think they can break it like Hendrix did by coming over in September ’66 … but that so rarely works.”

Griffin has seen other Yanks draw a crowd in London and think they’re on the way up. “Then they do a tour, and in Glasgow they draw 35, in Birmingham they draw 20, and in Newcastle upon Tyne they draw 15. I mean, it is tough out there.” Even Dolly Parton has trouble playing in England outside London, he notes.

“I think The Coal Porters stand out here as we have never thrown in the towel, and hence have a good reputation building up under us,” Griffin says. They were featured recently on NPR’s “Morning Edition” and on BBC Radio 2. “Certainly we are known for having an American in the band … I reckon we are about the only British ‘Americana’ act with an actual American in the ensemble. Which makes me laugh.”

It’s a relatively good time to be in a British Americana band, as Mumford & Sons have experienced, but Griffin has seen too much to expect a repeat of that story for his band. Find the One, their eighth album, was released in September, featuring production by John Wood and an appearance by guitar god Richard Thompson. It’s another chapter in the book of Griffin’s musical life, and it won’t be the last. About his current bandmates, he says wryly, “Some of the guys were making their first or second album when they made Find the One, the newest smash by The Coal Porters.”

c. 2012 LEO Weekly

Father Figures’ zombie jazz

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There aren’t a lot of jazz musicians who are also good at marketing their music, but Father Figures’ leader Adam Schatz has found a hook. The band explains that “Zombie Jazz” is a name “… we made up to describe the music we made up: instinct driven. Wild when it wants to be, other times deliberate.” It certainly gets more attention than simply stating, “We’re another jazz band,” which they definitely aren’t.

Father Figures are five musicians with training and interest in jazz, rock and other forms of musical expression. Now based in Brooklyn, they came together in 2006 having met in music school at NYU, intending to form a mostly improvised group who sounded so in sync with each other that the audience would assume they were performing already completed material. “And all the while, we move toward the collective goal of listenability, fun and spontaneity.”

When they’re not having fun together, the members have also sat in with a diverse group of newer artists in the indie rock and electronic scenes, such as Matthew Dear, Buke & Gase, Hospitality, Those Darlins and Adam Green. When LEO spoke with Schatz recently, he had just been in the studio with cult favorites Man Man working on their upcoming album.

They come through Louisville on a brief tour heading from New York to New Orleans, hitting bars, art galleries and colleges in lieu of traditional jazz clubs. At Oberlin College, they’ll also be leading a workshop.

“One of the cool things about this tour is that we can do a lot of sides of the equation,” Schatz says. “We were sort of having a crisis in rehearsal, saying, ‘What are we going to be able to teach college kids?’”

They’ve led workshops before, teaching improv to high schoolers, but this will be their oldest group so far. They show students how they use physical cues to communicate with each other while improvising, then let students try before the band joins in with the kids. “It should be great, I don’t have any sincere fears about it,” Schatz continues, “but it’s funny when we’re in the basement, making each other laugh and being ridiculous, and then thinking about how we’re going to be teaching people.”

It’s their chemistry, in the basement and onstage, that keeps them going, says Schatz, despite the financial difficulties involved with such music. Having met in college, Father Figures has given them an excuse to stay friends, and a home base to return to with new tricks learned playing with others.

“I think audiences really connect with that, and I think it’s super-apparent that we want people to have as much fun listening to us as we do playing the music.”

Their latest release is an EP called Bad Bad Birds, and it’s available through their Bandcamp page, as is their self-titled debut album. They know they’re selling themselves to a younger audience, one infrequently attentive to jazz music. For this tour, they’ve also handmade unique beak creatures, akin to sock puppets, which contain copies of the EP in a USB port stored on the beak’s tongue. It’s music with a history, file-shared in a brand new way.

Father Figures with Mindhorn and Camera Lucida
Thursday, Dec. 13
Haymarket Whiskey Bar
331 E. Market St.
haymarketwhiskeybar.com
$5; 9 p.m.

c. 2012 LEO Weekly