pt at large

Concert for Rebecca

September 19, 2020

Al fresco concert for Rebecca...

No matter from whence it comes, music lifts the spirits.The right music at the right time sprinkles ethereal fairy dust that for brief sparkling moments ever so softly and subtly temporarily neutralizes  pain and the shadows of mortality. It can happen in churches, temples, dive bars, back yards and warm kitchens. It happened here today. Erin Harpe, an RW fave, provided the musical groove that called down the spirit.

That spirit came down and sat beside us as soon as it heard Harpe's robust, Piedmont blues dexterous finger picking, a perfect match for the songs in her repertoire. Obvious in the videos below. And her stage (lawn?) patter that introduced songs that often had a distinct ragtime rhythm with a bluesy twist. The style was sourced in African American songs that gained popularity from the mid 1920s to the the 1940s. If you've ever heard a Josh  White song you feel it.

Contemporary artists like Keb Mo, Ry Cooder and David Bromberg carry on the tradition. And this afternoon, Erin Harpe gives us a front row seat and treat with her deeply felt Piedmont picking and stylings. Once you listen to the style, you can hear traces of it in other regional styles that veer into the style with string  bands and ragtime.

https://www.erinharpe.com

Erin Harpe and Jim Countryman, aka the Country Blues Duo. Jim Countryman provides the bassline the way a cement foundation  supports the frame house above it,  not flashy,  certainly essential and occasionally playful.

 

 

 

 

 

The Kazoo is an  unexpected surprise in Erin's musical grab bag...what a hoot!

More KAZOO on this jaunty swing gem.

A terrific cover of John Prine's "Angel From Montgomery."

We need angels today. This is more than a lawn concert. It is a wish of a woman to fill her heart and ears with sounds that make her happy, stir neurons that palliate and cast rays of sunshine down roads with vanishing points that we as her invited friends cannot imagine staring into.

A dark undertow runs under the rich melodies, vocalizing. and presentation. Reflexively I am loving the music. And can't shake the reason I am siting here with a woman I have shared so much with. Her days are numbered.

She has invited a handful of us because she knows we are kindred spirits, transfixed with the same kinds of music that lifts, cradles, sends us into corners in our psyches and onto dance floors real and imagined in which we dance with passion, effervescent energy in the immediacy of now.

She wants us here to share this now with her. It is all we have. 

Videos and photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Dancing at Chez CVS

August 25, 2020

6:00 PM, dusk fading to evening

LIVE MUSIC!   I haven’t heard live music since the Ides of March, 2020. No matter that it’s coming from a masked bearded guy in a white cowboy hat playing an electric keyboard powered by a cable he runs from his car to his outpost on a slab of concrete at the end of a row of parking meters. The music is a merry mix of American Songbook, Blues, and Rock ‘n Roll. And it’s good!

I haven’t danced anywhere but my kitchen for months. I’m Fred Astaire wishing a masked-up Ginger Rogers would detour from heading for CVS or the  Bank ATM machine across the parking lot and join me in a Covid inspired lead and follow from six feet away.

Show time. I chivalrously extend my hand. In a virtual twinkling, there she is, in heels, a glorious smile of approval on her face as I lead her through a series of swing, fox trot and a rumba routine, brilliant and spontaneous. Just the kind she likes. She’s missed a live connection too.

Phil, “Dutch Phil” he says, Is bringing the joy to the quiet parking lot behind CVS on Main Street in Watertown. He got his affinity for music by listening to his mother playing piano and singing when he was a kid. After learning music theory at the Berklee College of Music, he joined a bunch of rock ‘n’ roll music bands.

“Early on, we got a gig to open for Ray Charles. After we finished, they put us in the wings at the side of the stage. I’ll never forget watching him and the Raylettes perform.” The word starstruck comes to mind,

Situated across from the back door of CVS on Main Street, there’s always lots of foot traffic.

Street musicians go through stretches of time where people pay more attention to the parking meters than to them and their music. Guys like Phil need to perform in parking lots because Covid has dried up all their gigs. A few bucks in the tip jar is good, might pay for their dinner but won’t satisfy their jones to perform.

When they perform solo, they’re playing for their muse and to feed their psyches with the creative process that, like a songbird from its cage, needs the freedom to stretch its wings and explore the world before returning.

 

There is a lotta magic that Phil coaxes from his Yamaha electric keyboard. All the more incongruous that it’s powered by a cord attached to the battery of his car a few spaces away from his makeshift bandstand.

Musicians like Phil have a vast library of standards tucked away in their memory banks. It amazes me that he can switch from blues to the American songbook to swing to rock ‘n’ roll at his own whim or a request from a passerby.

His sense of phrasing and tempo is elegant. His spontaneous riffs and quotes from other songs appear then disappear back into the main frame of the song like the beams of the headlights that disappear after passing his bandstand.

An improbable sight, his bushy gray hair poking out from under a white cowboy hat, slouched in a faded saggy camp chair, he is in his own universe, playing for an unseen audience he clearly feels. The gray concrete parking lot is Phil’s proscenium.  This man is on stage with the improvisational spirit of a Keith Jarrett. The audience is a bunch of empty cars and the occasional shopper at CVS or visitor to the ATM machine at the bank next-door. If that bothers him, he doesn’t show it.

As for me, this is the most fun I’ve had on a dance floor since March 15, 2020.

"Don't Be Cruel" - Billy Swann's Beautiful Cover

Whooeeeee, never thought someone could, or would, take this song by you know who, turn it upside down, let the sound of the coins falling from its trousers produce a song track utterly its own, groove heavy, emotionally convincing, reeking of the 1950s ... voice, phrasing, backup singers, tight band that makes every note count and a bass line running through it like a freight train with a metronome in the firebox.

The organ coda weaving through the song is a tonal match for Billy Swann's light sweet phrasing with just enough emotional urgency that made me play it a few more times after I found it.

I don't remember dancing to the original but this version begs you push the chairs back in the kitchen.

First version

https://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2020/09/song-of-the-day-dont-be-cruel-reinvented.html

Country Funk, Vol. II (1967 - 1974)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-STFyfsdoVA

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Be_Cruel

 

BONUS

"I Can Help"

Billy Swan and the Band "The Spirits" by Austrian Singer Andy Lee Lang at the Donauinselfest 2003 live with his Hit Song "I Can Help".