Strange Soundfellows: Bela Fleck’s banjo and Edgar Meyer’s bass sound better together than perhaps they should.

String Theory

Fleck and Meyer are two of a kind

By Bruce Robinson

Banjo and string bass are not your usual lead instruments, but in the virtuosic hands of Béla Fleck and Edgar Meyer, they shed their lowly status to become vehicles of astonishing musical fusion. In their newly released Music for Two (Sony Classical), the duo cover material from Bach to Miles, touching musical reference points that range even further afield while maintaining a sweet, improbable coherence.

Consider the opening track, titled, with characteristic Fleckian whimsy, “Bug Tussle.” It starts with a bright, lively melody, briskly plucked with pizzicato bass counterpoint, then it quickly shifts into a new melodic line, this time lyric and legato with bowed underpinnings. And back again. Then, as the melodies begin to merge, the playing styles intertwine, everything melds into a completely natural cadence, and it’s over. A burst of applause confirms that it was all done live, and then they’re off on a Bach invention. And so on.

Although Fleck and Meyer have occasionally made music together over the past 20 years (including their shared membership in the progressive bluegrass band Strength in Numbers in the late 1980s), this is their first pure duet recording. But both men have a history of pushing the limits of their instruments far beyond traditional roles. Fleck’s jazzy explorations with the Flecktones earned him a higher profile with popular-music fans, who have come to embrace that ensemble as an unconventional jam band.

“I think our music has a little bit too much structure to really legitimately be called ‘jam band’ music,” Fleck told interviewer Daniel Taylor, “because there are a lot of jazz elements to it and bluegrass elements, and just a lot of structure. But there’s a lot of improvisation, too, which is where we do fit.”

Meyer, on the other hand, approaches their collaboration from a deep background in classical music that began with bass lessons at age five. The only bassist ever to win the prestigious Avery Fisher Prize, Meyer was lauded by The New Yorker magazine as “the most remarkable virtuoso in the relatively unchronicled history of his instrument.”

Meyer has been a featured soloist with many major orchestras, and performed his own Double Concerto for Double Bass and Cello with Jeffrey Kahane and the Santa Rosa Symphony back in January 1999. At the same time, he has done session work for such disparate pop artists as Garth Brooks, Bruce Cockburn, Lyle Lovett and the Chieftains. He even earned a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 2002.

While Fleck honed his improvisational chops, Meyer flexed his compositional skills in projects blending classical and traditional styles and players, such as the Grammy-winning Appalachian Journey disc, on which he played with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and fiddler Mark O’Connor. He also toured extensively in a trio with Fleck and mandolinist Mike Marshall in the late 1990s.

Fleck was among the featured players on Meyer’s 1997 recording project Uncommon Ritual, and the two reversed roles for Fleck’s classical crossover disc Perpetual Motion in 2001. The notion of paring things down to a bass-banjo duo grew out of those sessions, and the two set out on tour together. That worked, so they did it again, adding new compositions to augment the classical repertoire they had adapted, ultimately recording the performances that make up the new disc.

It’s an impressive showcase, including classical improvisation (Meyer’s “Canon”), crystalline readings of Bach keyboard works transcribed for their instruments, a few unorthodox moments where Meyer’s agile bass takes the melodic lead and a furious, breakneck showdown on their joint composition “Woolly Mammoth.” (While his occasional moves to the piano provide some welcome tonal variety, Meyer’s keyboard work invokes too much George Winston and not enough Schumann.) Fleck also plays a little guitar, just for a change, here and there.

Throughout, the compatibility of their two primary instruments is uncanny. As they comment in the liner notes, “Both instruments overlap in register considerably, while retaining a large register that is their own. Both instruments have idiomatic methods of accompanying and of carrying the melody. Both instruments have played notable roles in 20th-century American music, the five-string banjo in bluegrass and the bass in jazz. But most of all, they just sound good together.”

Local listeners will be able to judge that for themselves, when Béla Fleck and Edgar Meyer perform together at the Mystic Theatre in Petaluma on June 1, capping a series of three Bay Area concert dates on their current tour.

Béla Fleck and Edgar Meyer appear Tuesday, June 1, at 8pm at the Mystic Theatre, 21 Petaluma Blvd. N., Petaluma. $32.50. 707.765.2121.

From the May 26-June 1, 2004 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

High on Life: Rodd Keith garners a cult following in death.

Sound Poems

Experimental, weird and firmly dead, Rodd Keith is hot again

By Sara Bir

The fruits of the recording studio are inherently refined ones, because that’s what a studio is for: refining music, making songs sound clean and good. Even reclusive singer-songwriters hunkering down over the four-tracks in their bedrooms sculpt and refine sound. All of the wonderful three-minute songs on your mix tape and the little pop symphonies oozing out of the radio have been crafted with care to deliver the maximum amount of euphoria per second, like yummy audio crack.

There’s something lost in the process, though–the looseness, the freedom, the spark of creation, the happening. Every now and then a recording comes along with such qualities in spades, but it demands a good hunk of commitment from the listener for maximum payoff: the tantric sex of the music world.

A truly bizarre CD from obscure legend Rodd Keith offers both the tantra and the crack. Released on the defiant Tzadik label, the posthumous Ecstacy [sic] to Frenzy will easily be one of the most far-out discs of the year, and probably fewer than a thousand people will ever hear it. Such long-lost pathos is the underlying appeal of musician Rodd Keith, however. In the ’60s and early ’70s, Keith applied his palatably skewed musical genius to composing, performing and recording song poems (strange fruit of those “send us your lyrics” ads seen in magazines) to make ends meet.

Keith’s love of hallucinogens literally became his downfall when, in 1974, he fell to his death from an L.A. freeway overpass in a drug-addled haze. The song poems left behind– whose heavy reliance on Chamberlain organs give them an intoxicatingly woozy, hurdy-gurdy wobble–are the bulk of Keith’s musical legacy, and their accidental juxtaposition of pop-music conventions with avant-garde experimentalism have garnered Keith a cult following in the decades since his death.

Ecstacy to Frenzy does contain a few song poems, but it’s an entirely different trip that allows us to glimpse pure, unmitigated Rodd Keith. Prone to all-night solo recording sessions, Keith once cut a tape reel containing an epic 33-minute jam embedded with echo-laden hiccups, nonsensical babble and childlike sing-song scat.

After filling up one side, Keith flipped the tape over and proceeded to record on the other side. Thus, the resulting track, dubbed “Shome Howe Jehovason Plays,” appears in two versions on Ecstacy to Frenzy: on one, the right channel plays in reverse; on the second, the track is actually played backward (so that the left channel is in reverse). Whether Keith listened to the playback of the first side in reverse as he recorded the second side remains a mystery, but there’s more than enough synchronicity happening between the two channels to back this theory up.

In any case, either version of “Shome Howe Jehovason Plays” is befuddling enough for one sitting. Set against a backdrop of meandering organ drones and sudden piano tinklings, it’s like hallucinogenic funeral-parlor music, fascinating and exasperating in the same way that Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music can be.

After slogging through Keith’s journey to the center of the mind, the three song-poem tracks on the CD seem abrupt, even if the maniacally jerky “Beat of the Traps” (not without a touch of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins-esque spook and stagger) is hardly in keeping with what was coming out of most everything else on the pop radar at the time. Oddly enough, the titular “Ecstacy to Frenzy”–doubtlessly the result of a song-poem client’s drug trip–is suave and catchy enough to suit Barry Manilow’s catalogue.

The shamelessly irresistible two minutes and 26 seconds of “Little Rugbug” stick out like a sweet pinkie in a sea of sore thumbs; perhaps the finest example of the song-poem genre, the vapid Hallmark card lyrics dote over the anonymous scribe’s toddler (“Playing on the floor / Someone I adore / Creeping, crawling, going to explore”), while Keith’s inspired Chamberlain pipes out sappy yet achingly sentimental sprightly flute, oboe and organ lines.

For complete music dorks only, Ecstacy to Frenzy offers a rare chance to hear music isolated from any commercial context. Keith didn’t record “Shome Howe Jehovason Plays” for anything other than his own utter enjoyment, and the version heard on the CD remains blissfully unaltered.

From the May 19-25, 2004 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Both Sides Now: ‘Festival!’ and a new CD capture Dylan.

Body Electric

Rafael Film Center screens rare folk documentary

By Greg Cahill

It’s the ultimate rock myth. A 23-year-old Bob Dylan, the high priest of the ’60s urban-folk music boom and heir-apparent to folk legend Woody Guthrie, takes the stage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with an electric guitar in hand, accompanied by blues-rock guitar phenom Michael Bloomfield and other members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. It’s the second half of Dylan’s much-anticipated set. He hadn’t attended the festival with the intention of going electric–it was the first year that amplifiers were permitted–but Dylan had been offended by the rudeness of musicologist Alan Lomax toward the Butterfield Blues Band at a workshop earlier in the afternoon. That night Dylan and his hastily assembled cohorts launch into an amphetamine- paced version of “Maggie’s Farm,” the defiant anthem from Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan’s latest album at the time.

Chaos erupts in the darkened outdoor theater. The purists in the crowd boo. Pete Seeger, the lanky dean of the folk-revivalists, grabs an ax and tries to cut the cables from the soundboard. (He now denies this.) Or at least that’s how the myth goes.

After a frenetic three-song set that also included the then-unreleased “Like a Rolling Stone” and “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” Dylan abruptly mutters, “Let’s go, man, that’s all.”

In the crackle of the electrified maelstrom, modern rock is born.

The exact details are shrouded in mist, depending on whose version you believe of the events that transpired on that hot Rhode Island night. In his authoritative book Turn! Turn! Turn!: The ’60s Folk-Rock Revolution, San Francisco author Richie Unterberger likens the flap surrounding Dylan’s landmark performance to the plot of the classic Akira Kurosawa film Rashomon, in which four characters give vastly different accounts of the same murder.

“It is tempting to view Dylan’s appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival as one in which the telling similarly varies,” Unterberger writes, “according to the musical and social tastes, values and prejudices of the narrator. There are few other incidents that set the fusion–and the conflict–of tradition and innovation, young and old, and art and commerce, in such bold relief.”

The truth may be elusive, but North Bay audiences will get a rare chance to glimpse the only known visual document of that performance on May 25 when the Rafael Film Center screens Festival! a long-lost film documentary by Murray Lerner comprised of footage from the 1963 to 1966 Newport Folk Festivals and including scenes from Dylan’s historic plugged-in performance.

The newly restored documentary (scheduled for an upcoming DVD release) is being shown as a benefit for the Marin-based charitable organization Bread and Roses, whose late founder Mimi Fariña was a pivotal member of the folk scene and performed at Newport with her dulcimer strumming husband Richard. Festival! doesn’t answer any of the questions lingering in the wake of Dylan’s performance, which found him moving steadily away from the topical songs that first endeared him to folkies in favor of his more personal and often surreal lyricism. But it does provide a better understanding of the tone and tenor of those turbulent times.

Lerner, who filmed Dylan that night from just a few feet away on stage, tells Unterberger in Turn! Turn! Turn! that he was in no position to gauge the ratio of boos to cheers, but he was privy to the visceral reaction provoked by the performance. “I was stunned, actually,” he notes. “I had a sociological reaction, in addition to a musical reaction–it was that intense for me. It felt like I was entering a new world, and I didn’t know what it was going to lead to. I’d heard electric music with Butterfield but it was different. It was like I could sense that something new was being created with [Dylan’s] look and method of singing and the response of some of the people around me.

“It was exciting and scary.”

The Smith Rafael Film Center screens ‘Festival!’ on Tuesday, May 25, at 7:30pm. Director Murray Lerne and singer Joan Baez will appear in conversation following the film. $20. 1118 Fourth St., San Rafael. 415.454.1222.

Spin Du Jour

Bob Dylan Live, 1964: Concert at Philharmonic Hall, the Bootleg Series, Vol. 6 (Columbia/Legacy)

This recently released two-CD set captures Dylan at his zenith as a folk artist. Recorded on Halloween night, these performances find the musician in high spirits, trading jokes with the fans and at one point even asking for help when he forgets the lyrics to “I Don¹t Believe You.” This is the often enigmatic Dylan at his most engaging.

-G.C.

From the May 19-25, 2004 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.