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.

CD Review: Corwin Bolt and the Wingnuts: Screwloose

CD Review: Corwin Bolt and the Wingnuts: Screwloose

Listening to Corwin Bolt and the Wingnuts latest release, Screwloose, is like tuning-in to a haunting AM radio station on a summer night where the grass is blue and you are happy lost on the backroads of a 1930s Appalachian Dream. Bob Wills, Hank Williams and Stephen Foster are conjured forth. Bolt’s voice aches and moans with his resonating steel guitar like a strange attractor, owl-wing flutter towards a Blood Moon, at once comfortable and unsettling in its authenticity and rawness. Josh Britton’s slapping bass and Tim Long’s percussive tapping raising up the ghosts of Johhny Cash’s Tennessee Two: somewhere Marshall Grant is smiling. Dancing over it all, like musical lightning melting is Jeremy Sher’s sweet sweet fiddle playing. Every track on the album is fine, a cauldron of inventive original themes such as Made of Metal and Mile After Mile mixed with traditionals that reach out from the depths of the the collective American unconscious. The Gillian Welch song, Winters Come and Gone is given a new and remarkable reading as the involuted elements of the song are turned outwards into the willful convictions of the traditional John Henry. Likewise, the Stephen Foster tune, Angeline the Baker is fused with the dark energy of the fiddle reel, Soldier’s Joy. Corwin Bolt and the Wingnuts perform a New-Time Music, dressing the bones of Old-Time Music in a fresh and mysterious skin; creating a thing of beauty, harmony and sorrowful joy.

https://corwinbolt.bandcamp.com/

EP Review: Spider Ferns: Safety

The Spider Ferns new EP Safety unfolds seductively in your mind, laying down layer after layer of resonate musical reference, from trance to surf, jazz to dreampop - music simultaneously bright and shining new and yet as ancient as a fireside dream lullaby. The marriage of music between Kelly and Alton Fleek as The Spider Ferns has created a series of epiphanic sonic landscapes filled with poetic fragments and evocative musical atmospheres. The first track, Stronger Still, sets out with Alton’s fused-out tribal rhythms, icy guitar riffs, and Kelly’s voice like that of deep memory, reverberated and reminding: “When you turn the key.” The next track, Safety, has an elegant clock-like complexity, jazz-inflected guitar over a series of vocal questions that answer themselves in the beauty of Kelly’s asking. The hypnotic and seductive, Worlds Without Fail, with it’s Bauhaus meets Angelo Badalamenti echoes, an opium dream of a surf guitar, is one of the strongest tracks on the EP - entrancing as a ghost. The final track, In Violet Bloom (featuring Audiosapian), has intricate rhythms alchemized with sparse musical phrases and luminous vocals. The five songs on this EP are all beauties, as solid and multi-faceted as diamonds. The Spider Ferns music is music you fall into like a dream, where time and your presence dissolve into a transcendent beauty.

http://www.thespiderferns.com/

This review original appeared in What's Up! Magazine

Joseph: Music Rooted in Kith and Kin

Deep in the heart of the band Joseph's music is an eerie and beautiful spirituality, reminiscent of the haunting backwoods harmonies of the Carter Family and resonate with the echoes of ancient English and Irish folk song. Joseph is a band of three sisters from eastern Oregon celebrating kinship through music and song. The name Joseph is derived from three sources: their Grandpa Jo honoring family, the small town in Oregon representing home and the Biblical patriarch, whose ability to interpret dreams guided his life. There is bewitching mountain mystery in the music the three sisters, Natalie, Allison and Meegan Closner. Joseph sings the listener back into the essential elements of music, the lyrics as spells, the melodies as enchantment, the rhythms as the primal beatings of the heart that unites kith and kin in the shared experience of what it is to be human.

I asked Natalie about the world she and her sisters grew up in. She tells me, "we grew up in this Christian culture where is this very strange thing happens where you are not supposed to ask any questions or wonder or be curious. And that is so lifeless. Recently, after playing so many shows, we have been trying to make it as an occasion for people to pause and reflect upon what it is to be spiritual, to engage that part of themselves through the music."

On their new album, Native Dreamer Kin, the title representing the fundamental axes that define the band, Joseph has gathered in a solid collection of songs that showcase their poetic and musical sensibilities. What is most striking about the music is the harmonizing between the sisters. There is a natural tendency to associate them with other sisterly musical pairings such as the Dixie Chicks or Heart - and they do share some of the best qualities with them - but they are much closer the otherworldly Sirens trio (Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch) from O Brother Where Art Thou? In standout songs such as "Cloudline",  "Come In Close" and "Eyes to the Sky" the three sisters perform a harmonic alchemical transmutation of word and music into shimmering epiphanies of transcendent meaning.

There is an atmospheric and evocative video online of the first song of the album, "Cloudline", which places the sisters in the deeps of the Edenic Northwest woods. Chiming piano and tribal drum, incense and fog drifting through the evergreen and fern, the sisters as archetypal angelic figures stepped out of the major arcana of a Pacific Northwest tarot, chanting soul choir repetition of: "Take me to your water and lay me on your shore, I want to come in deeper but the water is so cold". As in the presence of all great music, there is a simultaneous sense of wonder and hair-standing-on-end spookiness.

Natalie tells me that "something happened in the room as we were making Cloudline that was gripping and powerful.  Through the process of recording and listening, we realized that Cloudline was the story of us taking a risk in the music. That is is our journey. And we want to reach up into the clouds to achieve the success this risk is going to take me to."

One of the more refreshing aspects about the construction of many of the songs is the lack of obvious refrain. Instead, the poetic narrative flows without break, finding resolution in single repeated, increasingly gnomic phrases. The plaintive death meditation "Come in Close" circles around the line, "What do we have but this?". The Cohen-esque gospel affirmation of "Lifted Away" returns again and again to simple statement: "It's here". "Not Mine" seductively repeats the question: "Who will stay?" answering with "You're not mine" over and over, turning the word's semantic meaning into a pure musical sound. And the sublime prayer-like musical mantra of "Eyes To The Sky" explores the repeated dynamic between the light of "I will lift up my eyes to the sky, to the sky" and the dark of "Burn up the despair that's been sinking me". At the heart of every song is the tightly woven fabric of the sister's incantatory harmonies whose ever shifting patterns shade richer meanings with each new listening.

The three sisters in Joseph perform music that is achingly beautiful and yet wonderfully strange, rooted in kith and kin, a poetic dream language and an abiding sense of home and place. Their music has that unusual quality of sounding new and also as if it has been sung for a thousand years, hearkening back to a rich tradition of home spun spirituality. The hope is that they always remain true to the strangeness and idiosyncratic beauty of the family: the private jokes, inside stories, the rich red blood stronger than any water, the sweet birthing songs and the hymns sung over the graves and dying beds. But there is no real doubt here: the music of Joseph is a beautiful musical celebration of these luminous elements of lives centered in the goodness of the family, harmony of place and beauty of dreams.


http://thebandjoseph.com/


The band Joseph will perform on Saturday, January 10 at the Green Frog.


This article originally appeared in What's Up.

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.

Blake Angelos at the Bellwether

Blake Angelos at the Bellwether



It is a typical Tuesday night at the Bellwether: Blake Angelos is playing an achingly beautiful interpretation of the jazz standard, "I'm Through With Love". Accompanying him is bassist, Rene Worst, and his usual partner in jazz, drummer Julian MacDonough. It is one of those happy instances of music here in Bellingham where you feel privileged and fortunate to be in the audience. Here in the richly appointed lounge, listening to the Blake Angelos play through the standards, you know you have found a hidden gem in the weekly music scene.

Blake has been in Bellingham for over 14 years, playing solo or as The Blake Angelos Trio. Recently, he has been performing at the Whatcom Jazz Music Arts Center. He has also performed and recorded with local singer Havilah Rand among others. He tells me, ""Jud Sherwood has me on some of his concerts as well with his Jazz Project which continues to be a great program for jazz musicians in Bellingham.  I have one coming up with him in the fall with a great vocalist from Seattle named Gail Pettis with my friend and great bassist Jeff Johnson. Just think - we have two vibrant nonprofits for creative music in Bellingham.  How cool is that?  I also regularly play with my great friend, vocalist Rane Nogales."

He tells me that one of the challenges of playing jazz regularly is to find a way to make it accessible to everyone. "It's a great gift to have the opportunity to play solo piano as much as I do and I don't take that for granted. I am always adding new songs to my repertoire from jazz standards to classic pop like the Beatles, and more contemporary stuff Radiohead, Soundgarden, David Bowie, Peter Gabriel." Regardless of the song, there is always a lovely subtlety, a quiet complexity, to Blake's playing: jazz runs curling back into blues voicings that just break the heart.

I ask him about his early experiences with jazz. "My Dad played lots of music like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, the Mills Brothers, so I grew up listening to the music but growing up in Billings, Montana wasn't super conducive to studying jazz. I did take piano lessons, played and sang in rock bands and was in choir in high school but I really started playing jazz when I went to college in Wyoming and studied with the jazz band director there, a great educator named Neil Hansen."

It was at Northwest College in Powell, Wyoming that Blake says, "that is where I first really dove into jazz." In between semesters of studying music theory and composition, he played in the summers with a trio at Glacier National Park. He adds, "the cool thing about Northwest College is its right next to Yellowstone Park and attracts lots of people who retire and move out there. One of the guys who retired was a swinging drummer named Ronnie Bedford who moved out to Wyoming from NYC.  He was really instrumental in hipping me to lots of music and the stylistic elements of Jazz."

He moved to Seattle in the early 90s. "I was working in a music store there and played a lot of gigs with a bunch of Seattle jazz artists for a few years." In 1994, Blake started working for Yamaha. He says, "I found the Yamaha work really engaging and fun and decided to leave college, moved back to Seattle, worked at Microsoft for about a year and a half, then became full time with Yamaha where I have been ever since.  All this time I have played and studied jazz primarily but really everything else as well. My job at Yamaha keeps me dialed in to all sorts of different musical genres."

Attracted by the music scene, Blake moved to Bellingham in 2000. "There are some great venues around - like Wild Buffalo, the Red Light, the Green Frog to name a few - and Jim Haupt, the manager at the Bellwether hotel, has been amazingly supportive to live jazz in Bellingham.  The fan base and support of this community is amazing.  It is awesome to live in this town for that reason. I travel constantly all over the U.S. and it is exceptional in that regard compared to other places around the country."

Every Friday and Saturday night, you can hear Blake Angelos play solo jazz piano at the Bellwether from 6 to 9 pm. And every Tuesday as a trio featuring Julian MacDonough from 5 to 8 pm.

http://blakeangelos.com/


This article originally appeared in What's Up!

The Washington State Archives: Northwest Regional Branch: City Directories, Death Records and Old Newspapers

The Register of Deaths at The Washington State Archives

As a follow-up to our Bayview Cemetery excursion, Marissa McGrath from the Bureau of Historical Investigation suggested that we schedule a visit to the The Washington State Archives at 25th Street and Bill McDonald Parkway. Our intentions were twofold: to introduce me to the rudiments of the collection and to uncover some history of the names we found on the gravestones at Bayview.

City Directories for Bellingham at at The Washington State Archives

After leaving our packs and bookbags at the front (you can bring in unbound sheets of paper, cell phones and laptops), we were led into a well-lit research room. There is a shelf of City Directories going back to 1900. Many other basic reference volumes. Also a computer terminal and a Microfiche reader.

The informative website for the Archive states:

Local government records include those from county offices such as the Auditor, the Clerk, the Treasurer, the Board of Commissioners, and from municipalities, school districts, and other service districts. Only a small percentage of the records created by these offices are transferred to the State Archives as archival records. They are selected as archival for their value as legal and historical evidence of policy development, implementation, and effect. The transfer of records to the State Archives is an ongoing process. Some historical records remain with their originating office pending future transfer to the Archives.  

Although the Archives does not hold all the records for the entire span of Washington's history from the various county and city offices in the region, it does hold extensive series of some records from all seven counties, with more complete representation in Whatcom, Skagit, and Snohomish counties. These series include: 

Birth and death records from January, 1891 to July, 1907 

Marriage records 

Court records including naturalization records, court dockets, and civil, criminal, and probate case files 

Land records including general indices to recordings, deeds, and patents 

County commissioner's proceedings, ordinances, and resolutions 

Real and personal property tax records 

School district and Educational Service District records including school censuses.

Oregon and Washington Gazetteers - The Washington State Archives

Since we were researching names on gravestones at Bayview, we asked to see the earliest Death Records for Bellingham and Whatcom County. We also retrieved several volumes of Bellingham City Directories from the shelf. What I immediately realized is that I could spend hours and hours here just looking at the covers and advertisements. They are rich with their own history and offer a fascinating window into the interests and businesses of early 20th century Bellingham. 

Cover of the 1904 City Directory
Morse Hardware Co. - Importers and Jobbers
The Washington State Archives

Interior Cover of the 1904 Bellingham City Directory
Cannery Dealers
 The Washington State Archives

Front Cover of Bellingham City Directory
 The Washington State Archives

Diehl & Simpson - Corner of Dock and Champion Streets
Ford Supplies and Sundries Always at Hand
The Washington State Archives

Standard Auto Co. - 1215 Dock Street
Overland Automobiles
 The Washington State Archives

Cole's Popcorn - "Here to Stay"
 The Washington State Archives

Sanitarium Baths - Hotel Leopold
Electric Baths and Vibratory Massages
 The Washington State Archives

Printer's Ephemera - City of Bellingham Directory
 The Washington State Archives

F. L. Dames - Died 1905
Bayview Cemetery

The first grave Marissa showed me the other day at Bayview Cemetery was for Corp.'l F. L. Dames, who was notoriously murdered in his butcher shop in 1905 by a man from Maple Falls.

We open up the oversized Register of Death and, in an charming approximation of the Palmer method of handwriting that everyone in the 19th century seemed trained in, we indeed find entry #1069 for Dames, F. L.. His address is listed at 1017 Elk St. - which is now North State Street and home to the wonderful Redlight Bar. Under cause of death, is the single word: "Murdered". And, to me, there appears just a hint of disturbance in the writing, a subtle remark on the brutal nature of the act. 

Register of Death for Bellingham, WA
F. L. Dames - Died 1905
The Washington State Archives

Register of Death for Bellingham, WA
F. L. Dames - Died 1905
1017 Elk Street
The Washington State Archives

Register of Death for Bellingham, WA
F. L. Dames - Died 1905
"Murdered"
The Washington State Archives

The next name on a grave that we are researching is that of Nicholas Caufman, whose remarkable gravestone designates him as a member of the Woodmen of the World.  

Nicolas Caufman - Died 1906
Woodmen of the World
Bayview Cemetery

Bellingham City Directory 1906
Entry for Nicholas Caufman
Occupation: Filer at Miller Brothers
The Washington State Archives

In the Bellingham City Directory for 1906, there is indeed an entry for Nicholas Caufman. He was a "filer" who worked at Miller Brothers. His address indicates he owned a home at 1534 Grant. 

Marissa points out to me that while many of the men were listed under a wide variety of occupations, the women were most often listed as housewife. In the Directory of local poet and writer Ella Higginson, who died in 1940, her occupation is listed as "widow" - as her late husband's business concerns defined her more than her own well lauded profession. 

Bellingham Register of Deaths
Entry for Nicholas Caufman
The Washington State Archives

Bellingham Register of Deaths
Entry for Nicholas Caufman
Cause of Death: Tuberculous Spondylitis
The Washington State Archives

Moving back to the Register of Deaths, Nicholas Caufman is found under entry #1213. His cause of death is listed as "Tub. Spondylitis" - Tuberculous Spondylitis. According to Wikipedia, it is also known as Pott's disease and is a form of extra-pulmonary tuberculosis that affects the spine. 

The Causes of Deaths column is fascinating. I want to compile a database of all of the causes of death in the early 1900s in Bellingham, along with explanations of some of the more arcane and obsolete medical terms. The cause of death offers a surprising amount of "unspoken" or euphemistic information. Such as the Chinese "laborer" who died of "ruptured hernia" - meaning he essentially worked himself to death. Or Oda Burton, who lived at 1121 B - which Marissa informs me was a neighborhood of brothels. She is listed as "single". Occupation: "servant". Cause of death was a "Gunshot Wound". Reading between the lines, it was highly likely that Oda Burton was a prostitute. 

City of Bellingham Register of Deaths
Women's vs. Men's Occupations
The Washington State Archives

Register of Deaths
Flora Blakely - Died 1892
The Washington State Archives

Flora Blakely - Died 1892
Cause of Death: Brain Disease
The Washington State Archives

Marissa finds an entry for Flora Blakely. Died in Fairhaven on March 15, 1892. Cause of death: "Brain Disease". She asks me if know about "The Lady in Green". Unfortunately, I do not recognize the name - which is why it is great to be at the archive with an informed guide and local historian. So she fills me in (this is from a Good Times Girl Historical Tour of Fairhaven):

  

Town Marshall Joseph A. Blakely and wife Flora Blakely owned one quarter of the Mason Block (now Sycamore Square) and lived in an apartment on the 4th floor. Flora had given birth to two children: A girl, Kay, and a boy, Roy. Kay died at the age of 10 in Brownsville, Oregon in 1890, the same year that the Blakely's moved from Brownsville to Fairhaven. Flora's sister, Retta, had suffered from "insanity" and died in 1888 at age 26 in an Oregon institution. In 1892, Flora died in the Mason building.... Of a "brain disease." 

In a time when our city newspapers would devote full columns to the death of any person of the slightest merit or with even the hint of a tragedy, the newspaper ran a single obituary article for the 33-year-old mother of a 9-year-old boy and wife of the Town Marshall. The obituary stated that she was overcome with a sudden illness and died at home. The coroner report lists her cause of death as a "disease of the brain," and said that her illness lasted a week before she died but cites no attending physician in an era when house calls were common and in a full page of death records where all other deceased entries had attending physicians listed. 

Interestingly: When psychics were brought into the Mason Block in the last few years to investigate some of the strange goings-on, two different psychics independently picked up on a woman in green that they said lived in the building at the turn of the century who had died by falling or jumping from the 4th floor balcony. 

We wonder: Was she depressed over her daughter's death? Was she crazy? Did she throw herself from the balcony? If Flora had killed herself, we think it highly unlikely that the newspapers would have printed such a story about the Town Marshall's wife. A "disease of the brain" could easily be interpreted as "mental illness." There was also major social stigma around mental illness at the time, and having a wife with a mental illness would have been an "embarrassment," so... Was she pushed? Perhaps even by her husband? In any case, Joseph remarried and had two more children while son Roy was sent to live with his maternal grandparents in Oregon. Joseph had more children and enjoyed successful career as sheriff of Pendleton, Oregon.

Mason Block (Sycamore Square)
Photo Source

Register of Deaths
Cerebral Softening
The Washington State Archives

Register of Deaths
Suicide by Shooting
The Washington State Archives

Register of Deaths
Suicide by Dynamite
The Washington State Archives

I could've (and probably will) spent hours and hours at the Archive. We didn't even get to any court records or county proceedings. The amount of information is staggering. Just as an example, as we were leaving, I noticed a couple of bound volumes of the Bellingham Herald from 1910 and 1911. Just casually browsing the pages turned up some sweet little gems:

Bellingham Herald - 1910
Whirling Spray
The Washington State Archive

An advertisement for Marvel Whirling Spray:

"Every woman is interested and should know about the wonderful MARVEL Whirling Spray. The new Vaginal Syringe. Best - most convenient. It cleanses instantly. Ask your druggist for it. If he cannot supply the MARVEL, accept no other, but send stamp for illustrated book - sealed. It gives full particulars and directions invaluable to ladies."

Bellingham Herald - 1910
The Machine With the Human Brain
The Washington State Archive

And this beauty for the Remington Adding and Subtracting Typewriter:

"The Machine with the Human Brain" which claims: "This machine not only writes but thinks. It does what a man can do only by thinking - and more. It writes and adds simultaneously, whereas one thing at a time is all that the average brain can do. Again, it automatically detects errors of operation.  No man ever had a brain that would do that - automatically." 

Washington State Archives
Northwest Regional Branch
Western Washington University, MS-9123
Bellingham, WA 98225-9123

(360) 650-3125
NWBranchArchives@sos.wa.gov

The Northwest Regional Branch is located on the southern edge of the Western Washington University campus at the corner of 25th Street and Bill McDonald Parkway.