Music Interview - Maria Muldaur

Maria Muldaur More Sultry Than Ever: I Finally Got the Voice I'd Always Wanted

By M.D. Spenser

Few singers have built such a varied career as Maria Muldaur.

She was part of the Greenwich Village folk scene in the early ’60s, and later sang and played fiddle in jug bands. In the early ’70s, she was half of an eclectic duo with her then-husband, Geoff Muldaur. Then, divorced and solo, she scored a massive pop hit in 1973 with ‘Midnight At The Oasis’.

More recently, her voice has become much richer and over the last several years she’s done the deepest Blues of her carer.

Her latest album, “Yes, We Can” explores the black social consciousness music of the early ’70s. She’s backed by a group she calls “The Women’s Voices For Peace Choir”, which includes Joan Baez, Bonnie Raitt, Phoebe Snow and, of all people, the actress Jane Fonda.

In a recent interview, sounding enthusiastic and girlish at 66, Muldaur seemed to talk with no full stops, one thought running into the next. Some excerpts from that conversation:

MD: Before we get to the new album, I want to ask in general about your recent work. It seems that you’re singing now better than ever. How would you say your singing has evolved over the years?

Maria: From when I was a teenager, I’ve always really loved the Blues, and rhythm and blues. And when I was 17, I discovered and fell in love with Bessie Smith. And a little bit after that I fell in love with Memphis Minnie and a lot of these early Blues women, and have always loved Mavis Staples and all of the black gospel singers.

So, even though I was given a very nice little light lilting soprano voice, in my soul of souls I’ve always wanted to be a Blues and gospel singer. And just as the years make everything on a person go south, so to speak, the good part of it was that it also made my voice go south. If you hear what I’m doing now and then you put on ‘Midnight At The Oasis’, you wouldn’t even think it’s the same person.

I find it a very gratifying and nice little unexpected gift, having matured over the years, that I finally got the voice I’d always wanted to have.

Your albums over the last decade have been quite distinct from each other. There’s the Blues-rock of “Southland Of The Heart”, piano Blues in “Meet Me Where They Play The Blues”, vintage Blues in “Richland Woman Blues”, pop in “Heart Of Mine: Love Songs of Bob Dylan”, and now a social justice album. Did there come a point when you felt released from the constraints of Top 40 and free to take on whatever projects you wanted?

I was never in the constraints of Top 40.

I grew up in Greenwich Village, which is where what I always laughingly call the folk scare of the early ’60s started. I got exposed to Appalachian mountain music, Delta Blues. They were rediscovering and bringing up north people like Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, and black gospel music and bluegrass.

I was in a band with—you know who (bluegrass artist) David Grisman is? We were in a band together in 1962 called Maria And The Washington Square Ramblers. It was a bluegrass band and I was the lead singer.

And then, of course, for many years I was in a jug band, first the Even Dozen, which I was in with David Grisman and John Sebastian (later of The Lovin’ Spoonful), and with the Kweskin Jug Band for about eight or nine years. And then I did two albums with Geoff Muldaur as a duo, and those were pretty eclectic.

So when we broke up, both musically and personally, I got the unexpected opportunity to go out to California and do my own solo album. I made what really, if you look back at it, was a very eclectic album. The first song is a Jimmie Rogers song. I did ‘Don’t You Feel My Leg,’ which was an old New Orleans Blues. I did ‘Walkin’ One And Only’, which was a Dan Hicks song, which is a very hip, kind of early swing kind of thing.

So really, the fact that there was this song that I did as a favour to my young guitar player, ‘Midnight At The Oasis’, just was another gift from above that everybody just fell in love with that song. And it was on the charts for almost a year, it was nominated for a Grammy in several categories, it went gold and eventually platinum, etc. And that was when I became known to a larger audience maybe as a pop artist.

But really, if you go and look at my next album, it starts with a Skip James song, and has some swing tunes on it that I did with (saxophonist/trumpet player/clarinetist) Benny Carter and a big band.

So what I’m saying is I’ve always been about exploring different kinds of American roots music. And that little foray into the Top 10 was a happy accident that I’m very grateful for, but that’s never been what I was about.

How was it making “Sisters & Brothers” with Eric Bibb and Rory Block?

It was like falling off a log. We did it in a town called Unity, New Hampshire. Rory Block’s been my soul sister for years, and we both absolutely drink out of the same musical fountains of the early Delta Blues and so forth. And Eric Bibb was a much more recent discovery of mine, and I love his voice and his whole kind of very soulful, preacher-like way of writing songs and singing and playing the guitar—I just adore him.

We got up there and sat around in the living room of this little bed & breakfast for a couple of days and thought of different songs, and ended up cutting the whole album in a couple of days. It was just a wonderful experience.

You mentioned Bessie Smith—I can’t imagine anyone else doing such a wonderful job of singing ‘Bessie’s Advice’. How did you happen to record that?

I’m glad you asked this, because this is just indicative of what a serendipitous little meeting of the minds and hearts and souls we had up there in Unity, New Hampshire.

Eric, almost as an afterthought, said, “Maria, you know, when I heard I was going to work with you, I wrote this song. It’s called ‘Bessie’s Advice’.” And he played it for us in the living room.

And I said, “I really like the song, I love what it has to say, but it needs a bridge, and it also needs to have—you know, because the whole song’s about if your man does this or that or yells at you or punches you—it’s all negative”. I said, “You have to have the other side where it talks about what if he’s just what you want, you tell him ‘Come on in’”.

And I sat down at the piano with (keyboardist) Chris (Burns) and—this is almost like a scene out of one of those Tin Pan Alley movies—you know, I’m trying to sing it to him, and he’s going, “This chord?” And I’m going, ‘No, no, no, more minor’.

I’m sitting at a stool at the edge of this grand piano, and Eric Bibb has a pencil and a piece of paper, and we get to the bridge, and he’s scribbled out the bridge and put it in front of me. And then as we were sort of shaping the music of the song, he was finishing the last two verses. I was throwing in my two cents with, “No, no, no, it should say something more like this”.

And it just kind of flowed from his pen onto the paper. And what you hear on the record, we recorded it about five minutes after that happened.

It’s wonderfully atmospheric.

I mean, talk about hot off the press or fresh out of the oven. The song was finished and the producer said, “Now, go in the sound booth”, and I thought he was getting sound. I, of course, wanted to rehearse it and rehearse it. And he said, “No, no, just do it. It sounds great.” Ba-da-boom, ba-da-bing.

The new album, “Yes, We Can,” is a departure, isn’t it? Were you worried that a protest album would come off as preachy?

I don’t give a damn. I mean, A), I don’t worry about anything. B), I mean in terms of what I’m presenting to the world, I pray about it.

I don’t write, so I have to reach deep inside and figure out what’s resonating with me at any particular time. And what was on my heart and mind was the very dismaying and deplorable condition of the world right now.

So I said, Oh, I’ll make a protest album. But then I quickly decided, no, I don’t want to look back with derision. I want to look forward with vision and present a positive outlook, something to give people hope.

Back in ’60s, when I was living in the village as part of the whole folk scene, there was one faction of people that were trying to discover authentic American roots music of various sorts. And then another faction of the folk scene was people who were into protest songs. And even though I totally espoused the causes they were singing about, the words were humourless and kind of jingoistic, and the music was a little too simplistic. It just didn’t captivate my ear.

So the whole notion was—aww, but wait a minute, I don’t like protest music.

But then I suddenly thought of all the wonderful songs of social relevance that a lot of the black soul artists in the late ’60s, early ’70s were singing. They were certainly very aware of all the social ills that needed to be addressed. And they wrote and recorded wonderful songs that addressed those issues very eloquently but yet with a total groove. It was like protest music you could dance to.

So that’s when I thought of Marvin Gaye, and I did ‘Inner City Blues’, and I thought of ‘War (What Is It Good For)’, and ‘Why Can’t We Live Together’.

One of the secrets seems to be in having the music funky enough that it doesn’t seem in any way preachy.

Because that early stuff, they were just sort of strumming relentlessly on acoustic guitars. To me, it has to be artful. The first, quotes, protest music I ever liked was Bob Dylan, because he raised the bar a thousandfold. ‘Masters Of War’ and ‘John Brown,’ both of which are on this album, he wrote when he was 21. Can you imagine that? I mean, it’s just amazing.

One of the most moving songs on the album is ‘John Brown’—a mother sends her son off to war hoping for glory and he comes back maimed.

He wrote it probably because he was facing being drafted himself. I knew him way back in those days. And that was the Vietnam era. But how much more poignant the song is now, because back in those days, if someone was wounded badly enough, mercifully they usually died.

Now, they can bionically sew them back up, patch them up, you know, give them bionic limbs, and then in some cases they’re even sending them back off to battle. And yet there’s a lot of people in this country that think that’s heroic.

The way I do it, I took that version—which is, I think, really funky—from a version that the Staples Singers did. And Bonnie Raitt says that’s her favorite, too.

Was making the record fun?

Oh, my god, it was the most overwhelming project I’ve ever—because just to ask all these women of great stature, and who were heroes of mine, I had to screw up all my courage to call up and ask all these people, including Jane Fonda. But not a person said no.

And then they just so naturally took to the music. I mean, the version of “Masters Of War” I sing gives me chills. I said, “How are we going to do this?” because Dylan’s way just drones on and on, only a couple of chords.

And the drummer just started playing these ominous, war-like sounding, thunderous rolls on the drums, and then the keyboard player and the guitar player, they just came in with these really dark, moody, ominous chords. It wasn’t like it was all written down and we had a big grand plan. It just organically emerged out of the players because we were all of one heart, mind and spirit on this project.

I have to ask—can Jane Fonda sing?

I’m here to tell you she can sing. What gave me the idea was that I had done a benefit with her the year before for a wonderful film called “Sir, No Sir” (a documentary about soldiers opposing the Vietnam War).

So they had a big benefit to raise money to distribute it. At the end, Holly Near and Jane Fonda did ‘Down By The Riverside’, which has kind of been the anthem for peace-seekers over the years, an old black gospel song. And I’m standing right next to Jane, and I noticed how clearly she sang.

So as I’m sort of trying to plan this whole thing, she came into my mind.

First she was a little intimidated because Joan Baez was there. And she’s like, “Oh, God, what am I doing here? I’m not a real singer.”

And I said, “Now, Jane, just sing it like we were singing it at that benefit”. And she went out there, put on her little headphones and sang her heart out.

It’s really funny. When she starts singing—the lead part was already on, so—(sings) “I’m gonna lay down my sword and shield”—and we hear “ba bum ba bum”—“Down by the riverside”—“ba bum ba bum”.

And she’s doing the “ba bum ba bums,” and my main engineer turned around and said, “Well, do you want her to do that? Should I stop the take?” I said, “Are you kidding?”

She just reminded me of a girl in the eleventh grade choral group, just singing her little heart out.

Where did you get the idea to slow the song ‘War’ down, take out Edwin Starr’s grunts, and give it such a delicate, mournful reading?

Mournful—that’s it. I have to say credit goes to Joan Osborne and her band. I had never heard Edwin Starr’s version. But I had heard her version, and I kind of thought that’s how the song went.

And actually it’s funny, because the people at the record company didn’t like my version of ‘War’. And even my guitar player said, “Well, I miss that whole angry thing.”

I said, “But this isn’t about that”. I said, “These are women mourning. Their husbands, lovers and children are being killed for no good reason. The is the feminine take, the people who bring life into the world and nurture and nourish it for eighteen years till your child is grown. And then your child is snatched up and sent off for no good reason to be killed and maimed.”

And that’s my take on the song, and I had to fight to keep it on the album.

Overall, how would you like people to respond to hearing the album?

Well, my music has been the soundtrack—I mean, I could really write a little book, which would have to be X-rated, if I had written down all the little stories that people have told me.

People come up to me and tell me these stories about what they were doing or what they were inspired to do when they heard various songs of mine. So it’s clear to me that my songs have been the soundtrack to various love and lust affairs. People come show me photos of children they conceived to ‘Don’t You Feel My Leg’ or one song or another.

And the thought occurred to me that, if things continue as they are, pretty soon there won’t be any people to make love and make romance and babies, and no place to do so, either, and so it’s our hope that these songs will just give people the idea that instead of feeling utterly hopeless about what’s going on in this world, that they say, yes we can change things.

It’s just like, you know when you have to clean the whole house and you put on some really bumpin’ music to kind of motivate you? Well, I want this music to motivate people to do whatever they can on a local level to effect a change in this world.

Do you know what is next for you?

I would like to make a jug band album and an Appalachian old-timey album. And then I will feel like I will have gone completely full circle. I just follow my heart, and so far in all these years I’ve not run out of things to do or to sing about.

Music Interview - Lizz Wright

Singer knows: Home Is Where the Heart Is

By M.D. Spenser

For Lizz Wright, the truest things begin and end at home.

Before she thought of any songs for her most recent album, “The Orchard,” she held in her mind an image—a picture of home. The first work on the album involved no microphones or backup singers, only a camera crew.

She took the crew to Hahira, Georgia, where the earth is fertile and the history rich. Wright didn’t grow up in Hahira, but she was born there, her grandmother lived there, and Wright went there often.

“I always felt that grandma’s house and her land were home,” she says. “She was a very, very tangible maternal figure for me. Grandma was everybody’s mom.”

With 1,800 residents, Hahira (pronounced Hay-HIGH-rah), is just what you’d expect of a southern American town. People still harvest cotton and tobacco. The rusted hulks of old cars lie about, their wheels removed. There’s a swamp, of course; the dirt is moist and pungent.

It’s a sleepy town, Wright says. When you arrive, nothing pops out at you: You have to quiet yourself to feel Hahira’s warmth and richness. There are orchards everywhere, filled with ancient trees bearing peaches or pecans. Sometimes after church, Wright’s family would pile in the car and drive to an orchard to pick peaches together.

One orchard in particular sticks in Wright’s mind—a pecan orchard beside her grandmother’s house. It belonged to the neighbours and, as a child, Wright didn’t dare go into the orchard; that was someone else’s land.

But she used to peek through the fence. The old pecan trees were bigger than any she’d ever seen; they stood arrayed in perfect rows just as they had been planted all those years ago, and the rows went on forever.

Even today, she says, orchards make her think of her family, her people.

It was to the edge of that orchard (but not inside) that she took the camera crew as she thought about her new album.

“I’m grown now, and I still don’t dare go there,” she says. “But I did use pictures of that orchard to go to Verve and say, ‘I have no words but I have a picture, and this is what I want’.”

She wanted, she says, to capture some of the feeling of home. As an interpreter, she felt she could do anything, as long as she held onto her roots, her story.

Wright, who turns 28 in this month, sang her first solo when she was 6 years old, in church. She grew up on Robins Air Force Base, two hours up Interstate-75 from Hahira: Her father was a minister on the base. Wright knew she would always sing—that singing would be her offering, as she puts it, her way of serving.

But she never expected to sing professionally. The Wright family ran the church the way a farming family handles the land, and she expected to follow her father’s path.

She went to Georgia State University in Atlanta, where she studied voice. As she matured, she felt compelled to explore music other than gospel. She wanted to see if music could be a way of sharing, a means of healing, and whether she could create a concert experience in which there was a bond between audience and performer. She asked people around her for advice.

“Don’t you ever say that kind of stuff again,” one person snapped. “Nobody wants to hear that. That doesn’t make any sense. You keep that kind of stuff to yourself.”

That hurt, but Wright ventured into other kinds of music anyway—primarily jazz but also Blues. She kept her day job, though, until music just wouldn’t allow it anymore. She got involved in a Billie Holiday tribute, had to miss a day at the cafe in New Jersey where she worked, and was fired.

“So I was like, OK, you know what? I’ll try this music thing for a while, because it’s getting in the way of all this other stuff anyway,” she recalls.

She signed a recording deal with Verve in 2002. The following year, her debut, “Salt,” was released. It included a number of jazz standards; Wright’s singing, subtle, textured and true, heralded the arrival of a significant new talent.

In 2005, she released “Dreaming Wide Awake”, a rich and quiet album on which Wright showed herself to be an interpreter of the highest order: She breathed freshness into The Youngbloods’ ‘Get together’ and Neil Young’s ‘Old Man’—making them original and exciting in the way a wonderful new book excites an avid reader.

Even so, Wright’s 2008 album, “The Orchard”—the one that began with photographs of Hahira—was a revelation. “Dreaming Wide Awake” was some collectors’ favourite album of the year, but “The Orchard” is one for the decades.

Wright had become pigeonholed as a jazz artist. The new album would include rip-roaring R&B, shimmering folk and full-throated Blues. She knew going into the project that she would disappoint many people who would think she was leaving her true self behind.

“There’s a certain kind of dignified and poised persona that began to develop very quickly around me,” she says. “And I knew I was, in essence, puttin’ on a pair of boots—which is, ironically, more of going home to me than anything. But it didn’t matter to people; the first thing they saw was what they chose to love.”

In a coffeehouse confession, she told her producer, Craig Street, what she wanted to do next. She was so fearful that, when she recounts the conversation, she mimics herself talking in a crying voice:

“Man, I really want to do this,” she told Street, her voice quavering. “I like jazz, I love it, but …”

… But she wanted to go home.

Many labels balk when their artists want to change a successful formula. But Wright had begun her association with Verve with an ultimatum to the president.

“I walked into Ron Goldstein’s office when I first got signed, and I said, ‘Listen, man, I don’t know what I’m doing. And I don’t want this business to change me. I don’t have to have this. If this freaks me out, I’m not going to do it’,” she recalls.

So there was no question of trying to tell her what to do.

The album that resulted transcends genre. It has elements of Blues, gospel, R&B, jazz and folk; and it’s grounded in an honesty both gentle and brave.

The first words the listener hears are these: “Coming home to your shelter/Coming home where I stay…”

More than ever, Wright’s voice has become a deep and vibrant instrument, richly expressive. But what makes this an album for all time are the songs—originals, collaborations and covers—and Wright’s interpretation of them.

The emotional peaks are ‘I Idolize You’, a scorching Ike Turner Blues about infatuation, and ‘Leave Me Standing Alone’, a sizzling, gospel-inflected original in which the lover is sent packing.

From those two opposite poles of love, as if from the towers of a bridge, the other songs are suspended in graceful arcs, beautifully detailing the nuances of love.

We meet the girl who loses the battle to protect her heart, and is “quite well pleased.” We see love’s risk: “And what if the water's cold when I fall?” Wright asks, as she feels herself falling in love.

We watch her heal the pain of lost love in the waves of the ocean. We understand when the lover leaves but the love remains.

“Love and nature are never all of one thing,” Wright says. “And what I enjoy is the challenge of allowing the nuances around those subtle things to speak at once, the way they do in life.”

There’s little nuance, though, in ‘I Idolize You’, a powerful Blues infused with lust: “If you want some loving, Baby/That I’ll give to you/If you want some hugging, Baby/Oh, I can hug some, too.”

It seems a departure from the delicate textures of Wright’s previous work. But she views it as a return.

Her decision to include the song began with watching “Soul To Soul”, a documentary about a 1971 concert in Ghana by American soul artists. Wilson Pickett performed, as did The Staples Singers, Roberta Flack, and Ike and Tina Turner.

“It was wild,” she says. “It was also very sacred to me.”

Two or three weeks later, Street played her the original Ike and Tina version of ‘Idolize’.

“My first impression was, I’ve heard this voice before,” Wright recalls. “This is what the women sing like in the small churches where I’m from—that fight for freedom and that fight for a place and that fight for acceptance and that fight to take care of the family. And I totally heard that in her voice. So it was because that voice was familiar, I was like—well, there’s a piece of home.”

The album’s musicianship is superb, the production flawless, the song selection sterling, the singing in a class by itself. But something else—something intangible—also contributes to the album’s power. It results from Street’s decision to have Wright and her friend and collaborator, Toshi Reagon, first play the songs live in several sets at a small club in New York.

There is in the best of times a transaction that takes place between audience and performer, one revealed not in applause alone but also in rapt attention, the expression on a face, the energy in the air.

“The audiences really let me know a lot,” Wright says. “For me to start performing them right away made the songs more real for me. It wasn’t about making a record, it was about me and these songs. You know, can I go inside of them or am I letting them inside of me? I always think songs really evolve in a performance experience. Sometimes I love what happens to a song after I’ve been playing it in concert for a while, because I always think that the audience creates the experience along with me.”

Wright enjoys the studio: She speaks with joy of the experience of recording “The Orchard”. There were no hired session players, no drummers you’d never met before. All the players were friends. It was a gathering of her favourite people on an estate in the Catskill Mountains, in upstate New York, looking out the windows at a reservoir, and working together. The creative conversation, Wright says, was amazing.

But if she had to choose between recording and performing, Wright would choose the latter, the effort to create the bond that someone years ago had told her made no sense: the magical exchange between audience and performer where each gives the other something deep and true.

To do that, Wright gets very quiet before each performance.

“I gather myself so actually I have something to release,” she says. “I sit down and think about the stories that I’m inside of at the time. I think about the roads that are crossing in my life. I borrow information from my life or from my imagination. And I get really still and just try to put all that stuff in a big bowl before I come out.

“I ask the band to do the same thing. I don’t like people checking e-mails. I don’t like guests backstage. I like it quiet. If the green room’s dirty, I bring my own cloths and candles and incense. I will go get flowers or send someone to get them. It’s really important, this gathering.”

At a performance last year in London, Wright walked on stage slowly, regally, eyes downcast, hugging herself. Then, from deep within, she sang with eyes closed, caressing herself, sometimes wrapping herself inside a shawl.

Some might wish for a more extroverted performance. But looking inside herself is the essence of Wright’s art. Not a word falls from her lips without having been first filtered through her soul. Those in the audience understood full well that participating in that most private of journeys was a privilege: They returned the favour in ways unspoken.

For her next project, Wright has only a notion in her mind, maybe a picture, a photograph, or a destination deep within.

“I have some feelings, but not towards an exact idea,” she says. “In a way, I’m thinking more about how to move my career experience closer to my heart.”

Because she doesn’t need fame or fortune, or even the music business at all. She says she could walk away, any time, find something else and be fine. What she needs is to keep in touch with Hahira and the pecan orchard and who she really is.

“I haven’t changed a lot,” she says. “I know I could lose this and find a simpler way. I know what I’ve got to do to feel alive and to wake up in the morning and feel good. I know what I’ve got to do, and I can handle that.”

The Fried Okra Band – From Denmark To Mississippi And Back

By M.D. Spenser

It’s a mighty long way from Denmark to the Mississippi hill country. But if you think that’s far, consider the distance between Whitney Houston and Robert Belfour.

But Morten Lunn, the lead singer of The Fried Okra Band, has covered both.

A native Dane, like the other three members of the band, he came of age listening to what everybody else was listening to: Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Dire Straits, a bit of heavy metal, a lot of Bruce Springsteen.

Now he and his band mates play music that is so far out of the mainstream as to be unheard of by most of his countrymen. Not to mention most Americans, as well.

Fried Okra plays primarily Mississippi hill country Blues. On its most recent release, “This Is Your Chance France Baby!”, the band covers unvarnished, gritty hill country artists like Robert Belfour, R. L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough, as well as people like Corey Harris, Tom Waits and Robert Johnson.

An acquired taste

Hill country Blues is an acquired taste. Either you get it or you don’t. The melody is almost irrelevant. Don’t wait for the killer chord changes, because they won’t come. Many of these are one-chord songs. What’s important is the beat, the drone, the trance, the hypnosis.

This music is as rough as an old board that’s fallen off a weather-beaten shack with the nails sticking out.

For some people, it’s monotonous – literally, monotone. But for others, the lack of polish lays bare the raw emotions of the heart. And, even in Denmark, this music is finding an audience.

“I think the fact that the hill country style is different attracts some Blues lovers to it,” Lunn said, “because, in my view, it might help cut away the clichés that some people among the rock and mainstream audience associate with the Blues.”

Different backgrounds

The members of the band are Lunn on vocals and guitar, Thomas Foldberg on guitar and harp, Kare Joensen on bass, and Thomas Crawfurd on drums. They came to this music through different routes.

Lunn started out in a children’s band, playing rock ’n’ roll, Beatles and even 'Hoochie Coochie Man', though Lunn didn’t have the vaguest idea at the time who Muddy Waters was. Later, after his Whitney Houston period, he got into The Rolling Stones and Chuck Berry; an interest in Bluesmen naturally followed.

Foldberg is the band’s co-leader, second to Lunn. (The bass player, Joensen, calls him the vice sheriff.) He grew up on British invasion music: The Animals, The Stones, The Beatles, and so on, along with a bit of Jimi Hendrix.

But the Blues?

“My first encounter with the Blues was Elvis Presley’s ‘Blue Christmas,” Foldberg said. “Not exactly a Blues song, but almost. I was blown away and thought the piano work and the groove was amazing.”

But it’s still a long way from Presley to Kimbrough. For both Lunn and Foldberg, the journey had a couple of significant turning points.

Trip to U.S.

Most important, perhaps, was a trip they and two other friends made to the United States in 2000. They visited New Orleans, Memphis and Clarksville, Mississippi. Clarksville bills itself as “Birthplace and World Capital of the Blues” – not to mention the location of the Crossroads of Highway 61 and 49 where Robert Johnson is said to have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for musical genius.

In New Orleans, Lunn went to hear R.L. Burnside live.

Talk about raw. Burnside farmed most of his life, had slept-in hair, a hung-over look, and titled one of his albums “A Ass Pocket Of Whiskey” – likely in honour of what he carried around in his own ass pocket.

Burnside claimed to have been convicted of murder once and sentenced to six months in prison. His boss, it is said, used connections to keep the sentence short because he needed Burnside to drive a tractor.

“I didn’t mean to kill nobody,” Burnside said later. “I just meant to shoot the sonofabitch in the head. Him dying was between him and the Lord.”

After a heart attack, Burnside’s doctor told him to him to stop drinking. Burnside complied but said the change left him unable to play. He died in 2005.

In Memphis, on the same trip, Lunn met a guy who showed him the remains of Junior Kimbrough’s famed juke joint, which had burned to the ground earlier in 2000. And the guy drove him around the North Mississippi hill country, where this hypnotic, one-chord trance Blues originated.

A star does hill country

That trip piqued the interest of Lunn and Foldberg in hill country Blues. But, just as it took Elvis to open the ears of many listeners to black music in general, it took a relatively famous artist to bring prominence to the obscure hill country style.

That artist was Buddy Guy. In 2001, the year after Lunn and Foldberg’s trip to the United States, Guy released “Sweet Tea,” his hill country album, on which he covered two of Kimbrough’s songs.

And Lunn and Foldberg’s interest grew more intense.

“I think it took some time before the music really got to me because it in some respects differs from other Blues styles”, Lunn recalled. “I have always liked the first recordings Burnside made in 1968. Listening to the live CD, ‘Burnside On Burnside’ (also released in 2001), made me think that it was the sound I wanted.”

He hauled out a Junior Kimbrough album he had bought on the trip, listened some more, and was hooked.

Foldberg, too, acquired the taste slowly rather than overnight.

“Morten started to talk about these guys,” Foldberg said. “I didn’t really understand the stuff at the time. But a few years later, I couldn’t avoid these great artists. And suddenly it seemed so obvious to me. Hearing those guys gave me the same feeling as hearing Muddy for the first time.”

Lunn and Foldberg formed The Fried Okra Band around 2004. The other two band members had backgrounds in different styles. The bassist, Kare Joensen, had played with a variety of Danish rock bands. The drummer, Thomas Crawfurd, has experience in Balkan, Gypsy, jazz and ethno pop.

Unique covers

Fried Okra does not attempt to replicate the hill country originals exactly as performed by the original artists. So the diverse backgrounds of the band members – including those with no background in hill country Blues – adds to the flavour of Fried Okra’s covers.

Finding their own version of the song usually starts with just a riff or a beat. Then the band jams, each member adding something, until the final version emerges.

“It sometimes takes a while,” Lunn said.

“Regarding this band, I see the hill country style as a starting point and a base,” Foldberg said. “Me and Morten had this idea of how we wanted the band to sound, but the influences from Crawfurd and Kare have obviously made it different. I mean the hill country style is still there, but mixed with other sounds and influences.

“And important to note is that, since we’re not from Mississippi, we’re not playing the hill country style right as it should be”, he said. “It’s our interpretation, and we don’t have the roots to do it like Mississippians, no matter how hard we try. I try to see this band as a band rooted deep in the Blues, but it should develop its own sound.”

Most recent album

The opening of the album “This Is Your Chance France Baby!” sounds like something wild coming at you from inside a cave. There’s a throbbing drum, a feral guitar, then an explosion of hill country Blues.

Through the individual contributions and the jamming, the band has come up with a sound that is noisier and more electric than on the hill country originals. But the slide stings, the drums clatter, Lunn’s vocals are gruff – and the gritty feeling is exactly the same.

The tracks were recorded live, but have some overdubs. The result is the best of both worlds – the immediacy of live performance combined with the discipline of the studio. It’s a fine album – and about as far from Whitney Houston as one can imagine.

“I really like music raw,” Foldberg said. “I think that too clean and flawless music is uninteresting. For me, Burnside plays flawlessly. It goes straight to the heart. I get so mad when people think Steve Vai is god – and he is very skilful – and a guy like John Lee Hooker can’t play. I know it’s a cliché, but for me the Blues is about a lot more than only technique.”

Interest growing

Gradually, the audience is catching on. But music like this not the route to stardom, in Denmark or anywhere else.

“The audience for hill country Blues is not very big and it is not like we sell a lot of records,” Lunn said. “No Blues albums do in Denmark. But still, in Mojo Blues Bar in the centre of Copenhagen there is a crowd all week listening to the Blues.”

“They’re getting used to us slowly,” Foldberg said. “But for a lot of Blues puritans, I guess were just four people making noise.”

The band plans to release a new album next year – recorded, band members hope, in the United States. They’ve already begun talking to different producers. And the new album, in contrast to the last, will include a lot of originals and perhaps only one or two covers.

In the meantime, the band plays gigs in Denmark. On good nights, people in the audience listen in silent concentration, showing that they’re into the music. Sometimes, even better, they dance and yell.

“To quote Mr Burnside,” Foldberg said, “Blues ain’t nothing but dance music.”

And little by little, the word is spreading. People are starting to understand.

“The ones we talk to, most are also Blues fans, so they know about the music,” Lunn said. “But I don’t think the audience in general, on any given Saturday night, is familiar with Kimbrough or Belfour. But that doesn’t matter if the music makes them feel good.”

And with that good feeling comes an appreciation of this obscure but hypnotic musical style.

“Even though it gets zero attention from the mass media,” Foldberg said, “I guess a lot of youngsters have discovered that it’s so much more than guys with pony tails, beer bellies and 30-minute-long guitar solos.”

Music Interview - Solomon Burke

Soul Great Looking Toward The Future at Age 67

By M.D. Spenser

The phrases roll off his tongue like songs, no less heartfelt for having been polished over the years. Solomon Burke is one of the greatest soul singers in history; he knows how to communicate from the heart.

“The wonderful thing about being in England and being in Great Britain,” he says by telephone from his home in California, “is that you feel the royalty, the magic. You know that there’s something special happening there. The people are who they are. Everybody’s real.”

Burke has returned from the Led Zeppelin gig in London, a tribute to Ahmet Ertegun, the founder Atlantic Records, for whom Burke recorded decades ago. At a private party after the show, Burke performed with other soul greats, including Ben E. King, Percy Sledge and Sam Moore, who was half of Sam and Dave.

Burke’s hit-making heyday was 40 years ago. His place in the pantheon of soul artists is assured. He’s had himself crowned in innumerable concerts “The King of Rock and Soul.” One could be forgiven for thinking he might be a tad pompous, a bit blasé, a man living on the glories of the past.

Nothing could be further from the truth. He will not begin an interview without asking about your family and responding warmly to a question about his own. (“Wonderful!” he exclaims. “Blessed, blessed, blessed.”) You feel that he wants to make friends.

At 67, he still lives for the future, for the record he is about to record, for the songs yet to be sung. And he is nothing if not enthusiastic – about life, about this conversation, about the channel tunnel – “To be able to do that in my lifetime!” – and about the Zeppelin gig.

“It was one of the most exciting moments of my career to be part of that,” he says.

Soul was founded in part by shouters like Wilson Pickett and Joe Tex. Burke, blessed with a powerful voice, could shout with the best of them. But he brought a sweetness to the genre as well. One of his early hits was ‘Just Out Of Reach,’ a wonderfully lush ballad that had been recorded earlier as a country song.

What made his contribution to the creation of soul different? No words could be better than his own:

I think the idea of me born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and coming from a very religious family, and locking into all phases of music – enjoying country music and pop music and rock and Blues and jazz and opera. My mind was open to every ounce of music. I wanted to know and wanted to hear – and I’m still learning – about music.

And knowing that music is a healer, and that there’s a magic that music has that can cross nations and language barriers, oceans and seas, and calm wild beasts. And this is the magic of music – if it’s right, if it’s the right chord and the right tone, and if it’s the right sound, the right words.

You know, there’s something so special about just that word, music – I believe it’s heavenly. I know that this is something that God has given many of us a chance to be part of. Because it’s such a heavenly thing; it’s something that the angels endure and are part of. Music!

Although Burke was a sensation in his teens, he was at one point blacklisted by an influential DJ, and unable to get his songs on the air. He quit music and worked in the family funeral home.

At length, he was lured back into the business – a producer blockaded the funeral home with a Cadillac and would not move it until Burke agreed to record again. He was revered by fellow artists but he never crossed over into the white audience, the way singers like Aretha Franklin and Wilson Picket did.

But his career was given a boost when the Rolling Stones recorded two of his songs, ‘Cry To Me’ and ‘Everybody Needs Somebody To Love’ on their early albums.

Some soul singers – notably Irma Thomas, from whom the Stones took ‘Time Is On My Side’ – were bitter. Audiences wanted black songs, it seemed – but only if they were sung by white folks.

But bitter is not what Solomon Burke is about. Just ask him whether his career was helped or hurt by what Americans call the British Invasion of the 1960s:

Mine was helped! (He laughs heartily.) Yes, please – you know, one more time! Do it every month, if you can! It was wonderful for me. My music was widened to a greater audience by so many great artists, taking our music around the world and opening doors that I could never open, and giving me the opportunity to walk into those same doors: Being an artist that says I performed at the Royal Albert Hall over five times in my career – that’s a triumph!

Burke first toured Britain in 1964. The travel opened the world to him to such an extent that he now believes all kids, before they go to university, should spend a year touring the world – a radical thought for the United States, where, for much of the population, the rest of the world remains a mystery.

The memories are still fresh:

I came over with Doris Troy. We were with Atlantic records and she had a great record called ‘Just One Look.’ And I was so thrilled and excited to meet people like The Undertakers (a ’60s Liverpool-area band). I did get a chance to meet a lot of great people – Tom Jones. And being in the great country was just so overwhelming, so magical to me, where the queen was! It was as royal as it should be.”

When the radio play waned, Burke toiled on in relative obscurity. Video from his middle years shows him to be an enormous man, but still an agile dancer and extraordinarily vigorous.

The 1986 album, “A Change Is Gonna Come,” recorded when Burke was in his 40s, may have gone largely unnoticed. But it reveals a soul singer in peak form, the vocal power undiminished, the sweetness more poignant than ever.

Like many soul singers, Burke dabbled in Blues. And just what does he see as the relationship between soul and the Blues?

“The feeling,” he replies. “The experience. The moment. The time. The pain. The hurt. The joy. The expression that releases the confidence or the sadness.”

Film soundtracks helped return his name to wider attention. His rendition of ‘Cry to Me’ was used in “Dirty Dancing.” The Blues Brothers covered ‘Everybody Needs Somebody to Love.’

Then one day in the airport in Portland, Oregon, in 2001, Burke found himself being pestered by a funny-looking guy. It was the beginning of an extraordinary career renaissance:

I was blessed by a gift from God that a man came along in Portland, Andy Kaulkin, and said to me, “Hey, man, I want to talk to you.” And I thought he was some guy from a football team or something. He didn’t look like a record president. He looked like a young teenager, you know – hippie.

“Hey, man, I got an idea!”

And I said, “Oh, my God. Is this the same guy again?”

When he finally caught up with us, we were on the same plane together. And when he told me he was with Fat Possum, I said, “Oh, my God. Another football team wants me to be a mascot. Prior to that, somebody wanted me to be a mascot of the Big Bears. Now here’s some guy wanting me to be a possum. This is my week for animals, I guess. And when he told me it was a record company, I almost turned around and kissed him.

“Record company! That’s the name of your company? Great!”

The resulting album was titled, appropriately, “Don’t Give Up On Me.”

Produced by Joe Henry, it included songs written for Burke by Dan Penn, Van Morrison, Tom Waits, Brian Wilson, Elvis Costello, and Bob Dylan. Almost 50 years after his career began, Burke won his first Grammy, for best contemporary Blues album. And he won a new generation of fans, as well, thanks to Kaulkin pestering him on the plane.

It was one of the greatest things in the world. We have become great friends. I talk to him all the time. We talk to one another, and we share – and he’s such a warm person.

Because, he’ll call me and say, “Solomon, just heard your record, I love it.” You know, and it’s not even on their label.

It was the first label that ever gave me my royalty checks, my first real royalty checks. Fat Possum.

C’mon, man, would you believe that? You know, you say here’s a guy that’s been on all the labels in the world, and his first real royalty check is with Fat Possum? But how wonderful! How usual life can be if you live it.

His most recent album is called “Nashville” – a country album recorded in Buddy Miller’s living room, featuring duets with Dolly Parton, Gillian Welch, Patty Griffin, Emmylou Harris and Patty Loveless. It brings Burke full circle – “Just Out Of Reach” having been a country song – and he ranks it among the best of his career.

As a kid, I used to listen to the country music of Gene Autrey and Roy Rogers, Hank Williams and all those great people, and, oh, just on and on and on.

And later on, I loved so much Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson. To me these are just legends. Patsy Cline. Incredible.

And to have the opportunity to go to Nashville and actually record with Buddy Miller and some of the great musicians, and to meet the queens of country, to perform with me, and to sing with me?

I’ll tell you, the honour was mine.

Country music is so special, because it tells a message immediately, within the three-minute period. You know what happened, from beginning to end.

The Blues tells you, “Hey, I’m hurt. I’m in pain. I’m suffering. You mistreated me. You misused me.”

But sometimes the Blues leaves us hanging. You don’t know if the person’s ever going to get well. You don’t know if the person ever came back: “Baby, you’ve gone, you’ve gone, you’ve gone.”

Well, did she ever come back? Did she ever call you? Did she ever write you? Did you ever see her again?

At least with a country song, the guy says (he starts to sing into the phone): “Baby, you’re gone, and I saw you had a richer one. And y’all had two babies and that’s OK, because the baby looks just like me.” You know? Boom! It leaves you with a thought.

The last few years, Burke said, have been immensely satisfying, bringing renewed acclaim, new fans, more record contracts and performing opportunities. Great artists wait in line to record with him.

Brand new day. Brand new way. New way to step. New way to move. New way to breathe. New places to go and new people to meet. New hands to shake. And what a gift! After 50-some years it’s been – I started recording in 1954. How many people today can say that? That are still recording? That still have a record deal. This is amazing! A gift from God! And I’m still waiting to do more. And to do better. And I’m still learning.

The word is to move, and to keep moving, to keep going forward, never backwards, and always believe that there’s a greater way and a better way. There’s no yesterdays. Everything is tomorrow. Because today is almost over.

Burke uses a wheelchair now. He performs seated, but he dances up a storm on his special concert throne.

He says his health is fine. But he has severe arthritis and needs hip replacement and knee replacement. He must lose 140 more pounds before the surgery can be done. He has spent most of his life very large but very vigorous – his 21 children attest to that – but he has at last decided to do something about his weight.

He is working out in a pool under medical supervision. “I’m loving it,” he says. “Oh, you should see me in that pool. I’m dangerous. I could be in a dance marathon in that pool!”

And when he says “Nashville” is among his best albums ever, he means, of course, until the next one, which he is about to start recording. Talking about it, he sounds like a kid opening a Christmas present.

“I have a great producer, Steve Jordan, which I’m very excited about,” he says.
He pauses to ask his manger, “Can I mention somebody?” But he doesn’t wait for the answer, and plunges ahead.

“I have great songs that are just so incredible,” he continues. “And I just – I can’t help it. I got a song from Eric Clapton that I can’t keep still about, that he wrote for me. Oh, my God, I’m telling you. If this song is not a hit, I’m going to just walk around with a baseball bat.”

He laughs a great belly laugh.

Some soul singers have been at the mercy of their labels, and willing to record any song put before them. Not Burke, who rejects some songs and demands the lyrics on others be changed.

Every song that I record must have meaning and a story. And I must be able to feel that story and be able to relate to that story.

Because there’s no other way for me to sing it, if I can’t relate to it to tell the story to someone else.

Because knowing that every hurt that I’ve had, someone else has had 20 times more the hurts. For every tear that I’ve cried, a million tears have been shed. To be able to say, "I understand."

Before you can say you understand, you have to go through the paces. You have to go through the hurt, you have to go through the pain. You have to know what love is about. You have to live it, to understand it, to feel it, to sing about it.

That’s why so many of the young people today are stuck on songs that only have one line. Because that one line is all they know. "No, no, no, no, I don’t want to go to rehab." That’s it!

Burke hopes to return to Britain soon. He’s great friends with Jools Holland, on whose New Year’s Eve Hootenanny he appeared two years ago. He remains friends with Tom Jones, whom he met on that long-ago tour in 1964.

And even if not so many people know his name, he’s excited that his songs have become part of the popular culture, not only in America but over here, as well.

I’m thrilled to come on the television in England and hear ‘Everybody needs somebody’ being sung for a candy commercial. C’mon! It’s incredible! I wanted to go out and buy the candy! Celebrate! C’mon, gimme some of that candy! How wonderful that is.

As the interview ends, Burke thanks you for having spent so much time with him. During the conversation, he has asked about your family and your travels. He has laughed, cracked jokes and told stories. He has sung. Before ringing off, he asks you to keep in touch with him.

He has done everything he could to make a connection. You feel you have a friend, one who has opened himself to you, one to whom you, likewise, could open yourself.

With skills like that, it’s no wonder the man know how to put a song across.

Music Interview - Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir

Canadian Band Combines Blues, Bluegrass for Raw, Honest Sound

By M.D. Spenser

Out of Canada, howling like wind through the chinks of a cabin, comes a sound so traditional it evokes something primal and yet so new you’ve never heard it before.

It is the Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir, a four-piece band from Calgary that combines Blues, bluegrass, Appalachian folk and attitude into a rough, raw sound all its own. At its best, this music creates a hypnotic effect in which players and instruments and audience all become one, where nothing else matters but everything is included and you don’t wake up until the music stops.

The band was formed early in 2001 and played its first gig on only a week’s preparation – three rehearsals. Members had in mind playing small clubs in the area, nothing more.

“We accepted from the start that our music is, well, odd – by which I mean it’s not ever going to be popular, exactly,” said Judd Palmer, one of the founders.

But after that first impromptu gig, people kept asking them to play more. And more. So, three or four gigs down the road, the members started to talk seriously about what direction the band should take.

Nearly seven years later, AMGC’s music is still odd. It’s never going to outsell Britney Spears, nor even, for that matter, Keb’ Mo’. But the band has moved far beyond the local club scene. Based in part on its 2005 release, “Fighting And Onions,” and in part on the intensity of its live performances, AMGC has won an international following – not least in the U.K., which it toured in September.

“The U.K. folks seem to like us,” said Bob Keelaghan, another of the band’s founders. “We get a lot of interest. We haven’t had a stinker of a gig over there yet.”

The band’s origins lie in a near-hallucinatory experience Palmer had one day as he staggered around the mountains, perhaps in the grip of altitude dementia.

“I found myself bellowing oaths at the crags that there were Gods in the rocks, and that they deserved a gospel music of their own, a mountain gospel, in fact,” he said.

But this wouldn’t be the same as the traditional gospels, he told himself. This would be an agnostic gospel. As the dementia really took over, he imagined he could form an agnostic mountain choir, good people who would join in loud and raucous hallelujahs – not exaltation of religion but enthusiasm for mystical feelings, the kind that can grip us all, religious or not.

“I clambered down from the mountaintops,” he said, “with this big plan for a huge band of people who would stomp and holler and bang and clang and shout and therefore be overwhelmingly entertaining.”

In the end, only four people showed up for rehearsals. The huge choir remains more an aspiration than a reality.

But bang and clang they do. The first drummer, Jason Woolley, who plays on “Fighting And Onions,” had a drum kit that included pots, pans and, said Keelaghan, “a big piece of metal that looked like an Italian car’s muffler.” Woolley left, having felt the need for a more stable job. But his replacement, Pete Balkwill, is no more conventional. On one of his cymbal stands hangs a Belgian army helmet.

And the band stomps and hollers, too. Palmer and Keelaghan handle the lead vocals; neither will ever be mistaken for Sinatra. With voices that sound like five miles of gravel road, their singing can evoke wind howling at the mouth of a cave, or maybe someone in therapy giving a primal scream.

Keelaghan, a guitarist, never sang until he got into Delta Blues, songs that didn’t work without vocals.

“Since it was the Blues that got me going, I wanted to get a throaty resonance,” he said. “Many stores don’t sell throaty resonance, so I had to find it on my own.”

But he found inspiration in the singing of Don Van Vliet, otherwise known as Captain Beefheart, and that of the renaissance Bluesman Alvin Youngblood Hart. And both of them, Keelaghan believes, were influenced in turn by the great Delta country Blues singer Charley Patton.

Keelaghan describes his own style as “Delta Blues yowling laced with high lonesome wailing.”

Patton was active in the 1920s and ‘30s. And, for all its volume, clatter, Italian mufflers and Belgian helmets, AMGC’s music has the feel of that era. Palmer plays banjo, harmonica and fiddle; Keelaghan contributes his Delta Blues guitar; Vladimir Sobolewski anchors the mix with his upright bass; and all of this is played, of course, over the clang and bang of the current drummer.

Four of the 18 cuts on “Fighting And Onions” are covers. One, “Look Up Look Down That Lonesome Road,” is traditional. The others were written by Son House, the Rev. Gary Davis, and Skip James – all Bluesmen whose careers date to the ‘30s.

But these covers are not musicologists’ cerebral revivals, faithful note-for-note to the originals. Far from it. These are old Blues songs warped through the unique sensibilities of this band.

For Keelaghan, the process of making someone else’s song his own starts with mistakes. He doesn’t sit with the CD and try to get every note perfect. Sometimes he learns the song from memory, as it has been filtered through his mind, then revises it later when he learns the lyrics. He’ll turn a major chord into a minor, or change the tuning, using a drop-D, for example, instead of an open tuning. But he does want to keep the feeling of the original intact.

The sound of these covers, traditional yet original, can best be described as Delta Blues meets old-time Appalachian folk.

“Those types of music have a lot of crossover,” Keelaghan said. “Both are intense forms of music. Many of the songs are modal, in that they mess with major and minor while hanging on one or two chords. Our theory is that, at some point in the evolution of those musics, they mingled and interbred, but for political and social reasons, America split them apart. I guess we’re reconciling that.”

The originals are in the same style. The album “Fighting And Onions” opens with a violin slowly sawing out of tune, as it might sound on the front porch of a tumble-down shack. The song, with no words until it is reprised to close the album, is “Stay Here For Awhile – fittingly, an invitation.

Some cuts are frenetic, bluegrassy, rough and noisy, like “Buried Them In Water.” The music to that song is original but the lyrics are from the late Howard Finster, a minister and acclaimed folk artist who lived in north Georgia, in the American South. Finster lived in the grip of life-long obsession – or inspiration, if you prefer – creating art like a madman and painting pictures, his own words and biblical verses over anything in his path – bicycles, automobiles, buildings and what have you.

Finster and AMGC make a good fit – inspired, artistic, crazy perhaps but eclectic and utterly unconcerned with fashion.

Other originals – “Oh Sorrow,” for example – are slower and more haunting, Bluesy but still twangy.

There’s no template here. Five of the cuts on “Fighting And Onions” are under a minute long; a sixth is only 1:04. The longest is 5:25. This band does whatever the hell it wants, whatever feels right – a lot like Finster. There’s freedom in knowing you’ll never outsell Britney.

The music is so rough and genuine that almost every note, intentionally or not, carries with it implied criticism of the glossiness and shallowness of contemporary culture.

“I’m not a fan of consumer culture,” Keelaghan said. “The masses get hung up on the product and not the ingredients. Sugar and fat are no good for you? No kidding! And it’s in nearly every damn pre-packaged food product! Do they realize that many celebrities are retards and what they do in their personal lives means not a stitch more than what regular folks do in theirs?”

And so it is with popular music, too, he said. People who listen to what’s on the charts give no thought to how the music is made, what the ingredients are. They don’t know that some bands don’t play their own music, that some singers have their voices altered with pitch correction, or that the musicians aren’t even in the same room at the same time.

But the ingredients affect the music. “To me, most of it sounds devoid of feeling,” Keelaghan said.

The album title “Fighting And Onions” comes from “Under Milkwood,” the radio play by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (from whom Bob Dylan took his adopted name). In the play, a sea captain is haunted by the spirits of drowned sailors. They come to him in the night and ask if life is still as they remember it, if their favourite things are still around.

“How’s it above?” one asks.

“Is there rum and lavabread?” asks another.

“Bosoms and robins?” asks a third.

Yet another, thinking of what he misses most, asks, “Fighting and onions?”

These are symbols of life. This is a music that is pungent, flavourful, full of life and full of fight.

But what is AMGC’s music, sometimes cacophonous, always off the beaten track, about? It’s not dance music; it’s not meant to soothe the savage breast; these are not love songs or serenades.

What, to these players, is the purpose of music?

It’s a hard question to answer directly. Keelaghan and Palmer have talked about boogie hypnosis, the trance that rhythmic, one-chord songs bring on. And the music is about communication, too – union, a form of oneness.

As Keelaghan studied pre-World War II Blues, he was struck that no one sang or played half-heartedly. AMGC wants to communicate that same intensity – whether the emotion is sorrow, fear or joy – without relying too much on amplification. When audience members sing along, or stamp their feet, or roar with approval, then that has been achieved.

“For the last few years, I’ve been big on the idea of transcendence through music,” Keelaghan said. “Those are the moments when we play, or I play, that are so good nothing else is noticeable until the song ends. The fingers and the strings are one. You don’t make mistakes. You take musical chances in the moment and they succeed. Everyone is on the same page and you know it. The audience knows it, too. That’s pure communication through music. It doesn’t happen very often, but I’ve had that more with this band than any other.”

Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir will record over the winter and hopes to release a new CD next spring or summer. They hope, also, to visit the U.K. in 2008, this time for a longer tour.

The band’s success has surprised its members, given that their ambition was just to play local clubs. But they know they’ve got something going.

“We’re in it for the long haul,” Palmer said. “I think there’s plenty more to explore about the forms of music that inspire this band.”