Ending the year on a positive note....

"Some people are afraid of new ideas, but I'm afraid of old ideas. Because them old ideas are set up to make you suffer." - Jamaican singer Jesse Royal.

2014 seemed to contain more than a few well thought out discussions about how the confusing state of the so-called "music business." I'm sure many of you have been clicking on quite a few arguments about how music will be made and distributed in our newly disrupted society, most of which are based entirely on failed premises to begin with if you ask me. I've read nearly everyone of them, finding the obvious in each. As anyone who's been in a recovery program will tell you; it's pretty easy to talk about what the problem, the conversation really should be centered around what to do to make it better. 

To that point, may I direct you to my old pal Danny Barnes' model for music production and distribution. I should report that I personally released a title on his Minner Bucket label and to date it is the most return I've ever received on an investment producing music. This business model is as simple as it is effective, every deal a win-win. 

So as we reflect on the last year, please take time out to recall what is hopeful and optimistic about the future, which is in fact just a bright as you care to make it.

Texas Folklife Presents : Festival of Texas Fiddling.

Yes, not "Texas Fiddle" but "Texas Fiddling." Doesn't seem much more than semantics, but there is a real change in the wind afoot and from my perspective that's a very good thing.

I see folks other than Anglo-Texan here, do you?

The term "Texas Fiddle" has for far too long been restricted to the very narrowest band of the contemporary "contest" culture of Anglo-Texan music. To be clear here, we're talking about music played primarily to impress a judge at a contest, so as to win a cash prize. It may have started out as something quite different, but like so many American institutions, the people who started it would be hard pressed to recognize, much less enjoy, what it has become. 

In my youth, not THAT long ago, the Fiddle Contest was held at the Country Fair where there would be prizes for champion Hog Breeding, Best Apple Pie and a display of Steam Engines and Tractors. There'd be a dance band, sometimes a polka band if it was held in a Bohemian or Moravian populated county. And coincidentally, there was a Fiddle Contest; all in good fun, with age slots for everyone from the rank beginner to actual Pros.

But things changed, gradually at first but now quite completely. The "hey let's get all the neighbors together for some family fun" element has receded, replaced with atmosphere of oft-acrimonious combat, where the weak were vanquished and humiliated in public by decidedly un-neighborly out-of-towners who made a side business of snatching prize purses wherever they could. As the context changed, so too did the music. In many way it became the perfect "kudzu" of fiddling style, and testosterone boosted version of Scots-Irish traditional tunes that appealed to the listener and in many ways washed over and drowned all the many regional styles of fiddling around the whole US, much less here in Texas. It was, and is, a "white" washing of Texas culture.

But there's always been so much more to the story and it has been one of the great joys of my life to seek out and promote these other "flavors" of Texas fiddle music. This festival marks what I hope is a sea-change in how the public see "Texas" fiddling, in all it's many shades, ethnicities and communities.

(I will relate however that this festival feels really familiar. I guess maybe its because I've been actively working with, in some cases actually discovering, 80% of the participants at this event. I guess it really is true that a "prophet has no honor in his hometown;" in my 25 years in Texas hardly any of these folks got any attention at home, but I leave for good and this happens. Not sure how to feel about that, other than to be validated in my contention that these voices are worth listening to all along. Dad always said: "Pass on the credit, but take the cash!")

I first encountered border fiderelo Jose Moreno, at a Panchanga in San Benito TX while on tour with Santiago Jimenz, Jr. and Don Walser 1995. Eventually and with much prodding got Arhoolie to cut a CD with him, which lead to an invitation teaching staff of the The Festival of American Fiddle Tunes in Pt. Townsend, (and there was that time at the Blackpot Festival his drummer didn't show up and was my first and last time as a conjunto drummer!!) His music is a genuine mixture of Native American "matachine" music, Orquestra Tipica and even classic border Tex-Mex. He's a fine accordionist and mandolinist as well and not to be missed.

A very proud Polish Papa

Union Organizer/Independent Radio DJ Frank Motley introduced me to Brian Marshall's community of familial music making over 20 years ago and in that time we've been up in Pt. Townsend twice and have appeared on many stages around the US including the Lincoln Center for the Arts,  Lowell Folk Festival and the American Folk Festival on the Bangor Waterfront. We've been playing music log enough for Brian to raise up a whole second generation of Marshall Musicians, Jakub and Mika, clarinet and fiddle respectively.

Mr. Poullard

And it was through Brian I met the amazing Ed Poullard, equally deft on fiddle or one of his very sought after hand built accordions, and his Creole community as well. Ed's one of the nicest people I have ever met and his smile shines through in his fiddle playing especially.

Seanorr.com

Though he will have his "Celtic" fiddler hat pull on tight at this event Sean Orr, one of the longest collaborators I have in the music business, and I just released a CD of our collective Texas/Oklahoma traditions called "Texas Fiddle - Okie Guitar." 

KITHFOLK said "Texas fiddler Sean Orr and Texas-based, Okie guitarist Mark Rubin say there's no "right" way to play Texas fiddle, but they're wrong. THIS is the right way to play Texas fiddle. Full of heart, brimming over with camaraderie, rough-hewn and rowdy, dusty as hell, and beholden to no man. There's a freedom in this music and a powerful sense of love. All the things that make Texas great." 

I'll let Howard Rains tell you himself how he came to his calling. 

Howard Rains

I will say it involved my apartment, his artwork, a really nice Tonk Bros. Guitar, a few glasses of Portuguese Absenthe and quite a bit of yelling and screaming. It did however lead to a controversy involving the New York Times and a series of delusional and public tirades by a very well known one-time Contest winning violinist. Really, its a great story. Ask him when you see him. Seriously.

These are just the guys I've been working with for many year however and there are plenty of mighty fine fiddlers to be heard there as well. Follow this link for more info.

In Yiddish we call the feeling I have about this event as "kvelling."

Please thing about coming out and seeing what all the hub bub is about!

Sign up for my Email List!

The "Blataphone"

Or as a local instrument repair man calls them, "Fartaphones." 

New Orleans may rightly claim to the be Sousaphone Capital of the Western World but, if truth be told, it's actually the Fiberglass Sousaphone Capital of the World. They're cheaper, lighter and seemingly all stolen from a school band in Mississippi (ok, not true but true enough to be funny.) Most seem to be held together with duct tape and good intensions and I've never seen one ever even close to a hard case, much less a gig bag. The cats who play them in the street bands don their best to pump as much air through them as they can, producing, well, a great blatting roar. 

I've played them, but they're never my first choice. I was loaned a lovely older King, like the one pictured in the William Bell ad here, when I was teaching at Klez Fest UK in London. And the NCTA provided me one for my appearances with Frank London's Klezmer Brass

W/ Susan Watts @ Richmond Folk Festival

All Stars. Which was a good thing too because at the American Folk Festival in Bangor, a coastal storm came up out of nowhere during our main stage performance, making the band scatter but for reasons I'm still not sure about I just kept playing in the driving rain. I guess I subconsciously realized that wrapped in plastic, I'd be safe from a lightning strike.

I don't own one of these, but I wouldn't turn one down if you have one sitting in you garage or attic. Seriously.

Sign up for my Email List!

Ross Daly on Modal Music and much, much more.

Rubinchik's Orkestyr (z"ll)

In 1996 I had the pleasure of taking my little Yiddish music band from Austin TX all the way to the south of France for a short tour and a series of performances at Le Nuits Atypiques de Langon. It's an amazing festival, curated not just musically but socially, and the musicians I interacted with there have informed much of what I know about music as a living culture. I had been there before, in 1993 as bassist for Santiago Jimenez, Jr., and was primed for this festivals tradition of purposeful admixture and cultural dialog. One of the featured artists in '96 was Ross Daly. 

I was really struck with him and his approach to music and collaboration. There was a young cellist from NYC who had been hired by Daly to come and perform with him, yet he had never met him before in person. The cellist, the very talented Rufus Cappadocia confessed to me how spooked he was to show up to a major event unrehearsed and just play with the featured act. But I saw the initial duet set between him and Daly that was frankly incredible, natural and real; some of the best music making I had ever encountered to that date. 

Daly showed up at the festival with a group of musicians from varied back rounds, including among others a Persian Zarb player who had at one time played for the Shah of Iran and then Khomeni after the revolution, and presented what was to all the world a very cohesive and musical presentation. A very deep cat, who I enjoyed hanging and conversing with quite a bit the week we were there.

I was just reminded of him today when a pal forwarded me his TED talk, in which he hits many of the notes that I personally have had a hard time expressing. I'm including this lecture as core material to my music students and recommend you take the short bit of time to check him out. Ross is kinda droll in his approach, but hang in there as he makes some observations that really ring true to my experience in music making and cultural connections.



Ross Daly on Modal Music:

Sign up for my Email List!

Steve James' Chord Inversion Chart

Very handy bit of tablature from Roots Guitar maestro Steve James:

Sign up for my Email List!

From the Rubin Archives : Gil Baca Band Postcard

I had the honor of playing with Gil Baca and Vernon Drozd one time at Baca's Confectionary on the old square in downtown Fayetteville. Gil came from a long line of band leaders and the Bacova's Ceska Kapela was the first Czech-Bohemian dance band recorded in the US. Gil eventually went on to play drums for Hank Thompson among others. And sax-reed man Vernon was roundly understood to be the best "honky-tonk" player in Texas. (His son Steven is now a famous rock star bringing the Flaming Lips it's sole musical heft.)

The big octagon looking thing in the center of the picture is his dad Ray's mammoth hammered dulcimer, once the cornerstone of Czech music in Texas but now utterly disappeared in favor of the accordion in the 50's and now the pre-recorded computer track today. Vernon stands to the right of Ray, holding up the box. Kermit is on one end with his trumpet and little Gil is at the other.

Strangely, they are pictured in front of the only brick building on the square as Fayetteville features one of Texas' last remaining all wooden downtowns. This band made a big splash playing the Smithsonian Institution's American Folklife Festival, a short tour of  Czechoslovakia in 1972 and also performed at the United States Bicentennial Celebration in Washington, D.C., in 1976. 

Sign up for my Email List!

Bad Livers "Ghost Train" Sheet Music from Sing OUT! Magazine, Jan. 1995

In hindsight, we gave mighty snarky responses to the venerable old folkie magazine. Didn't stop them from publishing our music, giving us consistently positive reviews (up until Blood and Mood which stopped everybody in its tracks,) and eventually hiring me to write not one but two major pieces for them. (The Klezkamp Mitzvah and Charlie Poole: the Man at America's Country Roots.) They did get back at us by outing Danny and myself as members of Dallas' Killbilly, which we hadn't been in for nearly 6 years by this point, but that's about the speed of light travels in folk land it seems.

The "you look good in a Bad Liver T-shirt" was our constant mantra, BTW. Shows up frequently in our interviews. We sold so many t-shirts, really crazy amounts that people today can't imagine. It was for many years our largest source of income and allowed us the creative freedom to do whatever we liked. 

On to the original article:

Sign up for my Email List!

Interview as a Bad Liver for a Macedonian Punk rock fanzine, 1996

Bad Livers Interview for "Factory Smog is a Sign of Progress," most likely the very first emailed interview for print media I had done. There's a few laugh riots to be found. Enjoy!

(PS: the three quotes at the end of this article were lifted from my email signature.)

Sign up for my Email List!

Excerpts from an upcoming Radio Documentary for WDR (Germany)

I'll be sharing more details as they emerge, but my pal and Other Europeans bandmate Paul Brody decided to expand our many long conversations into and actual radio program. He's well know in Germany, where he lives and works, and has even done a piece for NPR on Berlin's Avant Guard arts community. Paul visited me during my painful re-location from my once beloved Texas to a hopeful but uncertain future in my adopted home of New Orleans. ("NOLA for Life" as the transplants like to say. I'm sticking around for my funeral, if you get my drift.) 

Paul at my home in New Orleans

It was a great/lousy time to be talking to me. I had just been diagnosed with a serious mental disorder (BiPolar 2) and through intensive counseling and drug therapy had been grappling with a long series of recovered memories from my dynamic and oft confusing upbringing. If you've a friend of mine for any amount of time, I sure the diagnosis will come as little surprise as I was for the last few years as one good pal noted "a slow moving train wreck." I left quite a few casualties in my wake of wild ranging manias and depressions. And as we approach the Jewish Days of Awe, I have quite a few folks I need to atone to before I enter the new year and my new life here in Southern Louisiana. 

But at the Breslover Rebbe admonished: "if you believe something can be broken, then by definition it can be fixed." I hope the process of laying bare of every aspect of my personality, even the dark and unpleasant parts, that I encountered in the making of this little radio show for German public radio will finally allow myself a little rachmones for myself and by extension those around me.

But enough about me, here's me talking about me:

Swing, in it's Okla-Tex and NOLA forms.

Having made my musical life for so long in Texas/Oklahoma and now living in New Orleans, I'm confronted regularly with so called "jazz" music. Seems that having played Texas Swing for so long, I've been exposed to a great big chunk of the core material that makes up the standard repertoire of the Non-African American dance music "scene," here. But unlike just about every musician I encounter here, I don't have a college degree and I didn't study music formally. I don't read music, well enough that is to sight read on a gig at any rate. And no one ever taught me any of these tunes, I had to learn them on the bandstand. It's been a STEEP learning curve, I tell ya. And the keys that they play in here are mostly in Eb, Bb and Ab, which is good natural keys for trumpets and clarinets. Bet they're HELL on the tenor banjo or fiddle which play best in keys without flats, and having to re-learn all the classics in a new key has been a real challenge. A fun one, but still. I have a LOT to learn here and it's been very humbling and affirming as I make the changes to become a working New Orleans musician.

This is what a Texas Swing band looks like.

One of the aspects that I really loved about the "Texas Swing" approach was that it was founded by dance band trained folk musicians, "breakdown" fiddlers and such, who were exposed to African-America music styles who then clumsily, but honestly, reconfigured the music to suit themselves and their audience. Milton Brown, Cliff Bruner and Pre-War Bob Wills recordings always sparkled with this new concoction of melding the established traditions of Anglo-American dance music and the aspirational sounds of the Black "hot music" bands that they would run into. It's not for no reason Milton Browns' sides were cut in here in New Orleans. Steel man Bob Dunn was a hot jazz Trombonist before he pioneered the brand new instrument that came to dominate Texas Swing to this day. It's was "swinging," but it wasn't "Jazz." It was something all its own.

Nice hat, but he's not from Texas.
Actually a Jew from Rhode Island.

It wasn't until WW2 and just after did the "hillbilly" guys start playing with the instrumental and arranging sophistication of not only the great Black dance bands (Ellington, Basie) but also the White City-boy bands like Woody Herman and Stan Kenton. Here and then the "Texas" sound start to fade replaced with the now California based "Western Swing," essentially "jazz" played with cowboys boots. It's not my favorite development, but listening to the best examples of it show just how far the Texas boys had strayed from "Boil Them Cabbage Down." (Tex Williams' amazing note for note rendering of Stan Kenton's "Artistry in Swing" as "Artistry in Western Swing" is as fine as an example as you will find.) This is where guys like Ray Benson and his Asleep at the Wheel start listening and take from there. Seriously. He told me so in person, "that old hokum stuff from before, it's just not cool." Which explains his personal version of the music which for good or ill has become the de facto standard of the form in it's present and entirely de-contextualized version.

How refreshing it was to find this video of just some band leaping into a fun tune, no different really from any the groups I saw growing up as a kid in Oklahoma on say, the Jude and Judy show on WKY-TV or playing the weekly square dance where my folks club "the Norman Thunderbirds" would dance. A hot NOLA standard too. 

Enjoy:

 

Submitted humbly is my personal version of Texas Swing music:

From the Rubin Archives: Original Artwork from Mary Mae Forsyth

Cost me $2.00

From the Rubin Archives: Flyer for Rubinchik's Yiddish Ensemble, March 2002

With Barbara that evening, the events promoter.

Please sign up for my Email List

It's my birthday and all I really want from you is your email address.

No really, that's it. Just scroll down to bottom and plug it in. Thanks!

By Dan Piarro, Ironically a Facebook "friend"

I'm turning 48 today and very soon will be shuttering my Facebook account. It will stay up, and my Twitter and Blogger accounts will be linked to it. But I won't be looking at it and surely not responding to any of its many stimulus's, much less checking its email. Call me a 
fuddy-duddy or a moldy fig, but I've come to realize that I've grown uncomfortable with the false sense of intimacy that social media tends to create and really don't need the extra souris. As a dear friend just noted to me just today "I have to really work on keeping a very mellow scene between my ears." Me too!

I realize there's people who use Facebook as an aspect of, if not the basis of, their "business" model, But frankly I haven't seen it raise my fortunes any. The only thing I have to sell is my music presented in digital files, and even old fashioned CDs too, to a public increasingly uninterested in owning any of it, much less pay for it. And for some folks, more and more it seems, it has become the basis of their "actual" social lives. In the words of my pal Danny Barnes, who left Facebook for good himself recently, "Yikes!" It's like a lot of things: some folks have the discipline to make this tool work out for them. I just have to acknowledge I don't and that's OK.

Tell you a story:

When I was about 14 or so, right about the time my father passed away, I recall how my mother's custom was to be glued to the telephone from the moment she got home from work until late at night, chatting with all manner of girlfriends, hours at a time. Not once did it occur to her to get out of bed and go less than a mile a way to actually visit any of the people she was calling. This was a smallish college town that I biked across daily, BTW, you could walk literally anywhere. It seemed strange to me, even in a very strange household. It was about that time as well, I started noticing girls. Amazingly there was even a neighborhood girl who would actually call me at home and talk to me, sometime for hours about all manner of important 14 year old stuff. But every time I saw her at school, or even out in the neighborhood, she barely acknowledged my presence. It was hurtful and confusing that someone would share so much over a telephone line and then be so cold and distant in person. When I left my home for my own apartment at 17, a didn't get a phone line. In fact, my friends from Norman will attest, I never had a phone. 

Yeah, in WW2 it was a Naval Air Training Center. weird?

My reasoning was simple: its a small town, come visit. And it worked, my true friends found me or at least left notes saying that they'd stopped in. (This was infuriating however for the many punk rock bands who ended up crashing at my place over the years. They had to trek down to the nearest laundromat and use the old pay phone there. Ask Boche from Billions. He booked an entire tour for Das Damen there one weekend, poor guy.) 

Didn't get one until I had moved to Dallas years later and then only grudgingly. Strangely, I am an early user of smart devices (Remember the Sharp Wizard? I had the 2400 baud modem and checked my AOL account on the road,) the cell phone (Sprint customer since '96) and even webpages, where www.badlivers.com was recognized as amongst the first 500 links ever collected by Google. Hmmm. Burned out? Not sure. But even one of the inventors of the Internet thinks it eventually destroyed the Middle Class and makes us all idiots. Oh well, I digress...

In all this thought and consideration, it occurs to me that there's a great many folks who follow me in social media that would actually like to hear from me and keep up from time time, to stop in and "visit" as it were. So I established an email list with Mail Chimp and every 3 months or so I plan on composing a little note about whatever it is I am up to. That's it, I won't sell it or give it away, it's just for us, promise. And this doesn't mean I'm dropping off the face of the Earth either, I fully expect to hear from you too! Just not on a public forum anymore, I hope you understand. I have a Twitter account, a Blog that I contribute to regularly and an informative Homepage, so I should be able to find, right?

When I made the painful move from Austin to NOLA, I was pleased to note that 3 sets of folks stopped by to say howdy and welcome me here all within being here just a few days. Happy to report we do accept visitors here quite frequently, so you'd be welcome to stop in.

Sign up for my Email List!