EP Review: The Living Arrows - Set You Free

The three pieces (transcending the idea of “songs”) on The Living Arrows EP, Set You Free, resonate like the separate lines of a haiku: each is a world unto themselves but realizing a greater poetic dimensionality as a whole. On the first track, “Set You Free”, Alexandra Doumas’ warm voice, beauty laced with an unidentifiable melancholy, sings you into a poetic, almost mythic, narrative. There are elements of Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark and also something entirely its own. Traesti Luther comes in on the refrain, the perfect tonal counterpoint to Alexandra. The next piece, “Every Day I Wake”, features the rich sincere vocals of Traesti singing “Every day I wake, I try to lose my mind” over Christian’s Casolary’s captivating drum track and Loren Shaumberg’s engaging knife-like guitar riffs. Their shared vocal dynamics, the lyrical metaphysics, unfold and unfold the song over a sweet jazz-folk musical landscape. The last track, “King, Spring and Stone”, could have easily been born out of the Child Ballads, the vocal interplay between Alexandra and Traesti evoking comparison to Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer - the elegant and sparse instrumentation serves as a perfect frame. While there is obvious lyrical talent and accomplished musicianship, what is most engaging is a sense of the unexpected joy that emerges out of The Living Arrows’ music. Whistles, odd vocalizations, giggles, conversation and laughter are all essential elements. This music is the soundtrack for the beauty of waking up on a Summer’s morning, of not wanting the night’s dreams to fade; the prelude to a perfect day.

http://thelivingarrows.com/

This review originally appeared in What's Up! Magazine.

Ben Von Wildenhaus: Music to make the cartoon moon cry tears

Ben von Wildenhaus, formerly of Federation X and Quaalude County Country Band, looks like used car salesman from 1973 in a rumpled suit, a beat down figure from a David Mamet play. From this appearance comes entrancing atmospheric music that is a cross between Ennio Morricone and Brian Eno mixed with a little Angelo Badalamenti. On his new vinyl release, II, Wildenhaus takes the listener into a reverberated landscape where broken fragments of melody creak and moan like junkyard wind chimes (Bad Lament I, II); where a surf style guitar mixes with Esquivel like sonic elements to reverberate like the theme song to a space-age western where astronauts on horseback lasso aliens; where guitar strings map the desolate territory around a thrumming industrial heartbeat (Al Azif, An Nur); where a sad / angry woman sings Spanish to the sound of mascara running down her face (Tu); and where an organ grinder's monkey plays percussion in a boardwalk fortune teller's booth as a blind man plays violin and an emaciated elephant blows a busted saxophone while the bearded lady smiles at you and all you can see are her three missing teeth (Easy Opium). Wildenhaus's music taps into deep neural frequencies that drop the listener into an autistic fugue state where discrete notes stand on the distant horizon like a herd of wildebeests always threatening to stampede but never doing it . It is music to make the cartoon moon cry tears and every alley cat fall into respectful silence. Beautifully strange. Strangely beautiful.

Ben von Wildenhaus has a record release show on Jan 30th at the Shakedown with Prom Queen.

Whatcom Jazz Music Arts Center: Blake Angelos with Michael Glynn and Julian MacDonough - Wednesday, November 12th, 2014

Blake Angelos with Cory Weeds
Photo by Rev Meredith Ann Murray

WJMAC: Blake Angelos with Michael Glynn and Julian MacDonough

Wednesday, November 12th

This is the third performance I have seen at the new Whatcom Jazz Music Arts Center a.k.a. Downstairs at the Majestic. The common element in each performance has been drummer and founder of WJMAC, Julian MacDonough. Julian is always excellent. He is easily one of the, if not the, most talented drummers in town. He also has a great sense of humor that often comes though in performance. However, up until now, perhaps wanting to convey the importance of WJMAC, he hasn’t entirely shown it up on the new stage. Until tonight.

Blake Angelos and Julian have played together for many years, most notably as the Blake Angelos Trio at the now defunct Chuckanut Ridge Winery/Ridge (today, the Redlight). In the time since, Blake has been performing an excellent solo gig at the the Bellwether on Friday and Saturday nights. It has been a couple of years since he and Julian have played together.

What is immediately apparent is how comfortable they are with each other. Blake and Julian seem to have a sort of weird twin language constructed out of slight nods, the raising of an eyebrow, winces, smirks and smiles. Michael Glynn is so quick and talented that he apparently needs no translation. The resulting music has a certain ineffable quality of lightness, of mastered ease, of effortlessness. It flows out and back in to the trio of musicians like breathing, the most natural thing in the world for each of these beings to be doing. Like watching a great dancer dance with abandonment and unconscious grace.

I couldn’t tell you what the names of most of the songs where. I really wasn’t listening to write anything like this review. And it has been a couple of weeks since, but the performance was haunting. It was good. What music is meant for. I do remember marking in my mind the aching and poignant piano playing by Blake on Lament by J. J. Johnson and then, the entire trio on Herbie Hancock’s Drifting.

It was in the Hancock piece that I saw Julian MacDonough perform laughter and joy on the drums. Listening, you could not help but smile. Through several solo drum breaks, he evoked a world of inventive rhythm: crickets chirping, hands playing fast patty cake, children jumping rope Double Dutch, the sound of Charlie Chaplin’s dancing rolls in the Gold Rush, the warped ticking of the clocks in a Dali painting. I could see Julian smiling, glancing over at Blake, each of them trading clever musical one-liners, inside jokes, knock-knock riddles and the shared simple experience of the joy of performing with the other. Certainly a privilege and a pleasure to witness. And, in my estimation, the most convincing argument to support the truly wonderful experience that is being brought to life downstairs at the Majestic.

The Whatcom Jazz Music Arts Center: New York Saxophonist Eric Alexander and Pianist David Hazeltine with Michael Glynn and Julian MacDonough - Sunday, October 26, 2014

The Whatcom Jazz Music Arts Center: New York Saxophonist Eric Alexander and Pianist David Hazeltine with Michael Glynn and Julian MacDonough

Sunday, October 26, 2014


Downstairs at the Majestic on North Forest is the elegant new space for The Whatcom Jazz Music Arts Center (WJMAC), a project under the guidance of Bellingham drummer, Julian MacDonough. The Center is set up as an all ages, non-profit (much needed) performance space for local and national jazz acts. In addition, there will also be weekly jazz instruction and education by Bellingham jazz musicians. This is a welcome development for jazz performance and education in Bellingham and deserves the widest community support. More information about upcoming events and membership can be found at wjmac.org

Julian tells us the event today is a “soft opening”. What better way to break in the new space than with saxophonist Eric Alexander, pianist David Hazeltine, Michael Glynn on bass and Julian on drums. They start things off with “Blues for David” a lively upbeat interpretation of a tune by pianist Buddy Montgomery. The room, which seats about 100, is intimate and open. The sound is excellent. Alexander and Hazeltine, who are touring together, are well complemented by the tight rhythmic backing of Glynn and MacDonough.

Next up is the standard “Sweet and Lovely.” Alexander peels off lush rolls from his sax as Hazeltine compliments with rich counterpoint. The saxophone starts off front and center but the piano keeps commenting until it steps in. Likewise, Michael Glynn lays down the bones of the bass in subtle rearrangements as Julian marks the time in complex percussive phrases.

Alexander says the next tune will “hopefully transport you out of this rainy day”. It is “The Island” by Brazilian jazz artist Ivan Lins. Alexander’s playing on this piece reminds me of Ben Webster in the manner in which he is taking a basically upbeat melody line and infusing it with a latent ache of sorrow and longing. A beautiful piece.

Alexander steps away for the trio to perform. Hazeltine’s piano playing unfolds the melody, opening up hidden complexities and, at the same time, playfully exploring the flexibility of the music. Each musician takes obvious delight in the reaction, response, and reiteration of each other’s performance. Glynn’s playing is a thing of sweet bass beauty. Phrase and counter-phrase breaking down and restructuring the possibilities of a song, building fractal architectures in the mind.

Next up is a tune by Chicago saxophonist, Eddie Harris. Ultra-cool and smooth, Alexander’s playing is so on the beam, as controlled as Miles Davis, then spiraling out Coltrane-esque but contained in the limits of the song. Hazeltine’s playing on this piece is percussive with lightning fast runs.

The last song, Eric tells us after a quick conference with the other musicians, reflects an understanding of jazz as having an illusion of polish on the outside while the interior is completely helter-skelter. What follows is a beautiful crazy sax and drum exchange. Soaring saxophone trills and dynamic percussive breaks. Moments of balanced silence when you fear it might all fall apart - an acrobat spinning in the air with no net - and the graceful accomplished recovery of the dynamic Pulse of the song. Julian’s drum solo here is outstanding: eerily melodic and expressive.

There is a standing ovation. It is just pure joy to hear music performed at with such passion and skill. I look forward with great anticipation to the grand opening of the space with Seattle trumpeter Thomas Marriott and saxophonist Mark Taylor pianist Tony Foster bassist Michael Glynn and drummer Julian MacDonough on Wednesday November 5th. Highly recommended.

Gallowglass: Traditional Irish Music from the Marrow of their Souls

Gallowglass - Terra - December 8. 2014

Some weeks it seems that wherever there is great music happening, Jan Peters is there. He is either helping out at one of Julian MacDonough’s Jazz shows at the Majestic, performing with Peadar Macmahon at Irish Night Mondays at The Star Club, hosting a Tuesday Night Open Mic there or happily playing along with Robert Blake or Hot Damn Scandal at Boundary Bay or the Green Frog. Jan lives and breathes music and his passion is evident in how involved and supportive he is of the Bellingham Music community. Recently, he has a new band, Gallowglass, that was formed out of a passion for Irish Traditional Music.

Along with Peters, the other musicians in Gallowglass are some of the most talented in Bellingham, most also members of the other popular bands in town: Devilly Brothers, Giant’s Causeway, Snug Harbor, Robert Blake and the Put It All Down in A Letters. It is testimony to their devotion to Irish Traditional music that they gathered together to form Gallowglass.

Several years ago, Jan met Britt Keeton, a talented fiddle player, at the Subdued Stringband Jamboree and they performed a few Irish songs together. About a year later, as Jan was walking around Fairhaven, he says, “I heard a beautiful sound.  It was a gorgeous tune being played on a fiddle.  I followed the sound and there was Brit Keeton busking on her own. I was so happy to see her and was really impressed with her playing.” They each began to consider the possibilities of forming a band.

Not long after, Jan became aware of how strong the Irish music community was here in Bellingham, much to the credit of Cayley Schmid, of Polecat. Cayley also organizes the Bellingham Ceili Club, a monthly meeting of local musicians to play traditional Irish Tunes. It was through the Ceili Club and Giant’s Causeway that Jan met Zach Bauman, who plays the guitar and mandolin. Bellingham being the tightly knit community that it is, Zach and Britt were also part of the outstanding local acoustic traditional band, The Devilly Brothers. Jan says, “It wasn't long before we realized we shared something in terms of a sound we all loved and wanted more in our lives.”

The three of them began meeting about once a week to play songs. They were soon joined by David Pender Lofgren on drums and the Irish Bodhran, a traditional Irish hand drum. David also performs with Snug Harbor, Robert Blake and the Put It All Down in A Letters and the Giant’s Causeway.  When David wasn’t available, Steven Tate, another talented local percussionist, joins in.

A strong commitment to the music is evident in how well rehearsed they are and how steadily the perform around town and county. They are booked two to three times a month out at Semiahomoo in Packer’s Oyster Bar. And they also perform regularly around town at Star Club, Honey Moon, and Green Frog.

At a recent show at The Conway Muse, Gallowglass began with the beautiful sorrowful Cuckoo's Nest moving gracefully into the Flower's of Edinburgh through the Blackberry Blossom and Follow Me Up to Carlow and others to finish the set with the Hare’s Lament. Britt’s fiddle often begins a new tune, the melancholy strings singing in solo until the other musician’s steadily  join in. Zach and Jan compliment each other as if they have been playing together all of their lives. And the dual percussion from David and Steven is outstanding. There is a palpable sense of the joy that each of the musicians radiates in performing this music as an act of love.

This is aptly summed up in something Jan tells me later: “sometimes I play a tune, one tune, for hours, over and over.  Little by little, there is a language - if you know how to listen for it - wherein how to vary and express the piece reveals itself to you. I'll not likely ever be someone profoundly accomplished or knowledgable with this music. But I know how it makes me feel, what it brings out in me. I know if I can take what material I can play into my marrows, it will be part of who I am as a musician and as a human being, always.”

And that, essentially, is Gallowglass as a band: taking the music, the beautiful beast of Irish Traditional music, taking it down into the marrow of their souls and performing it as an exquisite moment risen from the depths of time and brought forth as a bright new wonder for the fortunate audience to experience.





Gallowglass at The Conway Muse 

Sunday Oct 12


There is something simultaneously joyful and beautifully sad about Traditional Irish Music. Here in the well-worn tavern interior of the Conway Muse, listening to Gallowglass perform on a rainy evening, I can feel the spirit of the music making me want either dance like a fool or drink myself under the bar like one. There is a full range of generations here from dancing children to young couples to boisterous tables of older folk. With a little imagination, you can fall back a hundred years or so. The music of Gallowglass takes you back to an earlier age where the ache of the fiddle, beat of the bodhrán, the chime of mandolin and guitar, were all the entertainment you wanted in your life.

The music begins with Britt Keeton on fiddle slightly mournful but circling around into a lively jig as Jan Peters chimes in on bouzouki, adding sweet layers of sound. This is followed by Zach Bauman echoing and elaborating on the melody with a mandolin. The music steadily gaining momentum and weight as David Pender Loftgren knocks out beats on the bodhran and Steven Tate plays grace note percussion. All of these songs seem like I have heard them all my life. The DNA of their melodies down in the roots of Western music. Gallowglass shifts effortlessly from the time signature of Morrison’s jig to The Drunken Landlady reel. Following it with Boys of Bluehill and Longford Weaver. At times, Peters accompanies with a harmonica, somehow making it sound like a button box accordion or Uilleann Bagpipes. The music circles and passes like a merry-go-round, each of the musicians moving out to the edge and then stepping back into the center.

Listening to Gallowglass perform, there is no denying the passion and dedication each of these musicians has for traditional music. Not as an archaic form but as a present and living thing. This is music to dance to, sing to, drink and think to. Go see them and may God hold you in the palm of his hand.

Bonnie Prince Billy – Tuesday, June 12th - The Business, Anacortes - June 12, 2012

Will Oldham in Bellingham
Photo by Ashley Berger

Bonnie Prince Billy - The Business, Anacortes

Tuesday, June 12^th

Tried to make it to Bonne Prince Billy at the in-store at Everyday Music here in Bellingham but could not get away from work. So I headed down to Anacortes to The Business to catch him down there. A small shop on the corner in the historic part of downtown, packed with real record albums, CDs, books. You can feel the Pulse of all things relevant to music and the arts everywhere you turn: posters of past and future shows, Vince Carmody, Scott Campbell, copies of Craphound. Vinyl records presented as rare and beautiful objects. 

Bonne Prince Billy is set up in a corner of the shop in front of an old iron door to a vault. Above him is a convex mirror straight out of a Parmigianino painting. He is wearing a green trucker hat, fussing with cables, tuning up, ambient strums, washing over the capacity crowd. Strikes me as unassuming, like a farmer who just wandered in, Wendell Berry, tired from the day’s work, picking up a guitar. 

Then the first words of the first song bring it all back to Will Oldham: “There is no God.” The voice seems weary and tired at its core, giving weight to the oblique lyricism in an almost prayer-like tone at times before rising into upper registers that quiver with a felt presence of pain. The authenticity there connects him to the crowd immediately. There is a sort of skillful unpracticed beauty that makes it seems as if he is singing the song for the first time. In the pauses and the shivers of the drawn out vowels. His playing is deceptively simple and plaintive., in the strings slow strum sounding from the interior of the song. In Willow Trees Bend, the voice breaks beautiful with quiet implorations honoring the simple presence of being: “when faced with your fire I will surrender to you.” 

He invites the audience to ask him anything, request any song. Plays Madeleine Mary. Stops mid-song to tall a story about being on a boat the night before that was headed to the Arctic, that he wanted to stay on it and see narwhals and polar bears, but had fears of being trapped on the boat at sea. There is a subtle sense of humor in his delivery. Returns to the song now resonate with water. 

Wolf Among Wolves is requested. The beauty of a simple song played slowly. The ghost of religion seems to haunt “Ease Down the Road.” He has the amazing ability to scatter the pieces of a song in the space between himself and the audience, like a shaman emptying a medicine bag of its bones, and then reassemble them mid-song into something more powerful and strange. In this manner, with “I See A Darkness” there is a sense that you are listening to a Holy Language. He closed out with “I Am A Cinematographer” showing a mastery of the silent spaces inside of songs, leaving the audience breathless and still, each of us deeply satisfied to have experienced something rich and strange. 

Will Oldham at The Business in Anacortes
Photo by Ashley Berger

Interview with Will Oldham 

The interview took place upstairs at The Business in Anacortes after an in-store performance by Bonnie Prince Billy. The interview was conducted by Scot Casey and Ashley Berger.

Scot Casey: Thanks very much for sitting down with us. That was a great set.

Will Oldham: Thank you.

SC: Listening to you, there is a sense that your music is immediately accessible but there is also of something being hidden or occluded, an idiosyncratic private language. Curiously, everybody, when they hear it, feels like it is part of their own world. You connect with people in a very individual way like this. Do you write songs with this in mind, hyper-specific to your own biography?

WO: I try to scour the world for codes that translate from an outer experience to an inner experience but that are shared. That is what I use for singing. Not things that are specific but things that already exist as shared images or phrases. Because the whole point is to have a communication with somebody else, not to express something that is specific and individual but something that is shared.

SC: I was reminded of a monk singing Psalms.

WO: Yeah, we just recorded three Psalms in Australia two months ago.

SC: Do you believe your music is religious?

WO: I don’t think my songs are religious.

SC: I wonder about the way you address the idea of God. I loved the way you started off the set earlier with “There is no god.”

WO: Yeah, it’s language and it seems our relationships are based on these looming figures and to outright deny them is to cut out such a huge part of meaning in our communication that to do so would seem a waste of time. Unless you have something very quickly to replace it that someone else can understand and share with you. But why not? An organized religion, regardless of its tyranny or whatever, still allows you to take from it, appropriate, something good.

AB: But some of your music must be personal, your own stories, like you are working through something with the song.

WO: You can’t work through something because you have to sing the song again. And if you work through it, then the song would have no value anymore – if that was the point of the song.

AB: So how much of it do you think would be a good song for others to hear and how much is something that you yearn to express, that you have to get out?

WO: Well, the reason that the song exists is, ideally, for someone else.

SC: You have the ability to take a song and break it into all of these beautiful fragments. Then you throw them out as you are singing and pick them up and rearrange them in a new formation as you are singing. Is that something you feel that you do?

WO: Yeah, especially when I am playing on my own. It is always trying to stay ready within the song, to be surprised by the next part of what the song has to deliver.

SC: What comes through on the recordings is a rawness, an authenticity. And to see you do it live, to see you reconstructing the music in the process of playing it was beautiful. The emotion that I heard didn’t seem as if it were a well-practiced thing, even though it is well-practiced, so it came across as with a rare honesty. That has always been one of the aspects of your music that has impressed me, that honesty.

WO: Yeah, it is what is happening. It could be a song that I have performed any number of times and spent a long time writing in preparation for it to be accessible in that way. It is a manner of discovering the song.

AB: Are you satisfied after you write a song? Do you feel fulfilled?

WO: Every once in a while, yeah. Mostly no. But usually that’s the idea. It’s a really good feeling when it happens.

AB: You sound very free and fearless. I don’t know if that is your experience or not. Your voice sounds very fearless.

WO: Well, with a lot of re-writing you could go beyond what you feel comfortable with and then rewrite it, pulling it back to something, to start to know where you really don’t feel comfortable. But, you know, you should have some guilty pleasures as you are making things. I really would like to put in this thing, even though it’s really stupid, but then you put it in and it actually isn’t stupid. It feels really good to do that. Makes you feel good about it.

SC: Are you familiar with Wendell Berry at all?

WO: Yeah. I was in a one-act play that he wrote when I was a teenager. I think it was one of the first or one of the only attempts he made at drama. I don’t think he was all that pleased with it but it was a nice experience.

SC: He has a book called Standing By Words where he discusses the idea of what binds people together in a community are words, to give one’s word, the idea of a vow, that contract between two people in marriage, agreements between friends or a singer and an audience. The integrity of those words, that you stand by your words, is what creates the ground for authentic language. There is a sense of rural honesty, of living your words, saying what you mean. Do you feel that is something you strive to do in your writing? Or is that just putting too much weight on everything?

WO: Well, it would be nice to not put that much weight on everything but I don’t feel that’s an option. For some reason, it seems like words, spoken words, written words, are too strong.

AB: Does that every give you fear, that weight?

WO: It gets heavy, heavy, heavy. I am sure that causes stress and anxiety.

SC: Listening to you, I hear things come out as heavy as in “I See A Darkness.”  Then there is a lighter element that kind of give you a breath as a listener.

AB: A balance. It feels really good when you hear those strong and light moments. That is what structures the music so beautifully, the balance between those soft fragile moments and those that are super powerful. You do that well.

WO: I try to depend as much as possible on, usually, other musicians. But tonight, in these instances, it works. It is a great feeling to know that the words can stay the same every time and song can be completely different.

AB: Did you ever do any voice training? Because it sounds at times so technically perfect and other times so not…

WO [laughter]: Yeah.

AB: That’s what I like about it.

WO: Well I know a lot of what my voice can do. I know what it can’t do. But rather than feel like that means I can’t do things it means that, well, this type of expression is reserved for this aspect of my voice.

AB: I think it comes across as trusting.

WO: It is trying to find the best way to express the song. Listening to other records, other people’s music, finding when a voice, when a genetic quality of somebody’s voice or their ability to navigate a song, when it works with their style or their timbre and think, ok, if they can do that with that with that thin warbly thing and move me, then that means that is valid and I can see if I can use that. But, you know, some people will use that same thing and have it not work. Why doesn’t it work? Because, I don’t know, their commitment wasn’t right or because they were a half-step off in the key that they should have been singing in.

AB: Your voice sounds so comforting because you sound like you trust it.

WO: I know at this point, at any moment in a song, there’s got to be someplace I can go with my voice. Then it is a matter of thinking really quickly where is that going to be?

AB: Because sometimes it is surprising.

WO [laughter]: Oh yeah, yeah, always surprising. To me it is always surprising.

SC: Will, thank you for your time. We appreciated being able to hear you perform and talk to you. Enjoy your time in Anacortes.

AB: Yeah, thank you so much.

WO: Thank you.