Swing Time

Note.

Every spring an interactive, musical art installation goes up in Montreal.  21 Swings, by the design group Daily Tous Les Jours challenges us to reevaluate our definitions of art and play and the role of collaboration in the making of interesting and beautiful things.  Often, in our drive for success or accolades we forget that without the help of those around us, we are really only playing a solitary note.  We forget that competition and jealousy may prevent us from realizing creating something larger.  Today, make something with someone.

Watch:

https://vimeo.com/dailytouslesjours/21balancoires

Photo Courtesy of:

http://www.popscreen.com/v/72zzS/21-Balan%C3%A7oires-21-Swings

Fair Thee Well

Family.

Nothing is more exhausting and rewarding than the week-long extravaganza of music, light, love, art, and general mayhem that we call the Oregon Country Fair. Its a party, an arts and music festival, and a gathering of happy people looking for a few days to be and do entirely as they please. The fair is one of the few places I know of in which people wear their inner children on the outside, where strangers smile and hug, and generosity rules the day. It is a throwback for sure, to simpler times when food was cooked by scratch, goods were made by hand, and music was made by real people playing actual instruments. But it's a good throwback. While there has been much debate this year about the direction of the fair, its rules on amplification (very little), late night partying (do it, but keep in acoustic) and environmental impact (can you say site archaeologist?), the reality is that there is something important about preserving the old-school mentality. There are plenty of festivals for electronica and all night parties. It is, in fact, the direction in which things, hip, important-type things are going, its just not the Country Fair thing. It's nice to hear world music and see bands and other acts be given the chance to perform to a wide and diverse audience they normally wouldn't get exposure to. Someday, when the novelty of our electronics wears off, we might be glad we preserved a place to celebrate the crafts, arts, and traditions of a pre 21st century time. Love is free and analog, spread it around.

Sunday Jam

Play.

Most Sunday afternoons you can find me lurking with a rag-tag group of people that are alternately either twice or half my age, under the awnings that surround a small downtown building. On the outside, we look like we might be on break from our AA meeting or waiting for the cannabis clinic to open. None of us look like we should be hanging out together. There are teenage kids in jeans and t shirts, tall men in impeccable suits, and hunched hippies in deer skin jackets with long tassels. From the outside there is no reason for us all to be together, much less for the easy conversation and obvious camaraderie. 

Like most things, it's what's on the inside that counts. On the inside of this little building is the Sunday Jazz Jam, an all-comers welcome event that is headed by some seriously talented musicians and filled in by anyone who walks in the door and wants to play. This is not a place for divas or show boaters, though both show up and given their time in equal measure, this is a place for students. This is where you go to see how it's done by the kinds of musicians that play three gigs a week, and figure out your own style. This is where you go to listen to singers find their range, their own unique timing. This is a place to go to listen, to forget about the scene, and to return to the roots of the improvisational Jazz form.

It is a kind of Sunday service, and one that I have come to cherish. It is community, education, fun, and some damn good music. Check it out:

  http://thejazzstation.org/# 

The Dub Ball

Collaboration.

I love a good backlash movement. I love artists that buck trends, retrograde coolness, or find new ways to use the latest trend in technology. Medium Troy, a Eugene-based dub band, is doing just that. Medium Troy, with the help of dozens of artists local to Eugene, Oregon (and a couple of nationally known headliners, RJD2, ahem) is putting on a multimedia dub extravaganza this month at the Hult Center, the largest fine arts performance hall in the city. Why there? Because this is no ordinary electronica concert. This dub ball is backed up by a live orchestra. It is an approach to electronic music that has long been wanting from the scene. Audiences miss the sound of real instruments played in real time, the filling of a stage with performers rather than staring at one dude behind a laptop, and the ability to see the music being played. Medium Troy recognizes that and knows that sometimes, the new wave emerges out of an old-school idea. Medium Troy is putting their neck on the line to prove that electronic music can be cross genre and cross demographic.

Get your tickets here:
 http://www.wowhall.org/

Call to Artists

Create.
Girl Gone Wild is actively seeking projects from all mediums to showcase to a broader audience. I am looking especially for under-represented artists, authors, musicians and activists with projects that are compelling, compassionate, address social or political issues, or are just plain amazing. Do you have a project that you think is a good fit with Girl Gone Wild? Read the blog, then go to www.rubygonewild.com and send me a brief description of your work and a link to your project. I will be interviewing and writing about a project a week for the next several months and would love to hear from you. Please share this opportunity with others!

Also, a taste of a previous, proto-profile:

Magdalene.

There is a quiet revolution taking place in popular music led by artists interested in both the evolution of digital sound and the complexities offered by the rhythms and melodies of traditional cultural music. Pushing past the early pioneers of fusion, Paul Simon's Graceland, for example, recent bands such as Beirut and Beats Antique have eschewed any sense of Americanism and instead have modernized and digitized old-world sounds. Now, bands like Black Magdalene are taking the strong vocals and dominant guitar and bass that characterizes American rock and layering it with North African, Middle Eastern, and Eastern European rhythms, sounds, and mythology to create a wholly new, and wholly modern sound. They call it Organic Darkwave.

Listen:
http://www.reverbnation.com/blackmagdaleneband

Photograph:
http://www.digitallatte.com/

Organic Darkwave

Magdalene.

There is a quiet revolution taking place in popular music led by artists interested in both the evolution of digital sound and the complexities offered by the rhythms and melodies of traditional cultural music. Pushing past the early pioneers of fusion, Paul Simon's Graceland, for example, recent bands such as Beirut and Beats Antique have eschewed any sense of Americanism and instead have modernized and digitized old-world sounds. Now, bands like Black Magdalene are taking the strong vocals and dominant guitar and bass that characterizes American rock and layering it with North African, Middle Eastern, and Eastern European rhythms, sounds, and mythology to create a wholly new, and wholly modern sound. They call it Organic Darkwave.

Listen:
http://www.reverbnation.com/blackmagdaleneband

You can see Black Magdalene play live this week, Friday, at the Ninkasi home tasting room in Eugene, and Saturday at the Ash Street Saloon in Portland, Oregon.

Photograph:
http://www.digitallatte.com/

Finding the Foresaken Self

Yellow.

Only in hindsight, at the age of 35, am I able to look back on the last ten years of my life and admit how very many of the habits, likes, and affectations I have adopted over the years have been for the sole purpose of pleasing someone else or trying to fit in with those around me. Today, I returned to the music that I had forsaken years ago to please a boyfriend that had very clear ideas on what was and what was not acceptable music. Regardless of the fact that he was right in many respects. I have missed these songs and sounds that defined other, earlier times of my life and am glad to have them back. I contemplate what other vestiges from other times I might turn loose, what things might be reclaimed. 

Listen to your music.

Or, listen to mine. Coldplay. Yellow.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdVAqxNLXiw

Photograph Courtesy of:

www.RubyGoneWild.Com

How Hippies Make Their Money

Faire.

Every year since 1969 tens of thousands of people have collected in the woods outside Eugene, Oregon for the annual summer festival called simply, the Oregon Country Fair.  Long before the 21st century American Tribal Revival marked by large-scale festival events such as Burning Man and the prevalence of days-long music festivals like Coachella and Bannaroo the Oregon Country Fair was bringing together an incredible array of music, performance, theatrics, arts, and crafts.  After more than forty years the fair has proven it's ability to survive growing pains and shift with changing times, or even generations, without losing the heart of what it is, a backwoods festival run by hippies who just want to be left alone with their inner children for a few days out of the year.  And oh yeah, they want to make some money too.  

For as much as there is that is good about the fair, it is important to realize that it is a business first and foremost.  There are booths that make a substantial amount of their annual income in the three days of the fair, and there is good reason that change is so slow in coming; you have to wait your turn to get a booth at the fair, and time is the only currency that works.  I have mixed feelings about the commerce of the fair, not that it is any better or worse than any other event, but that it sells itself as so.  There is an air of hippie elitism that at one time may have been appropriate but now just reeks of snobbery and pretension.  The truth is, there is no way to scale back an event such as the Oregon Country Fair, so the only real thing to do is let it grow too big and cumbersome and commercial and played out, and it will mellow itself out in the end.  In the meantime, would you like to purchase a hand made ceramic coffee mug for twenty bucks?

Like what you are reading?  Then support the Kickstarter for my book Girl Gone Wild- On Being a Woman in the Wilderness.  Thanks!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1731666363/girl-gone-wild-a-guide-to-being-a-woman-outside?ref=city

Photograph Courtesy of:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/truen/4845275801/

Across the Boderline

Bandit.

The pervasive and definitive role of genre in our culture has a way of isolating us from works of art and literature.  I find this to be particularly true in music where everything from playlists to concert tickets and radio shows is carefully sorted into tight categories.  There are entire music services, Pandora for one, that are based on giving the reader more of exactly the same thing.  Some of my favorite albums are out of genre for either my dominant taste or my generation.  I think music is an important way of widening our world view and range of experience.

In that spirit, today I offer you a track from the 1993 Willie Nelson album, Across the Borderline.  This album, while decidedly country, deals with the overarching theme of the American Dream, having and losing it, and the condition of being an American in a lyrical and accessible series of duets with everyone from Paul Simon to Sinead O'Conner.  Love, loss, and the dusty-booted west are the main characters in this album's portrait of the broken promised land.

Listen:

http://www.lyricswow.com/willie-nelson/across-the-borderline/

Photograph Courtesy of:

http://rossiterdrake.tripod.com/id20.html

Musical Interlude

Weary.

Some days wear.  Sometimes we are rough around the edges and dusty-booted.  I think we feel this mostly acutely at the beginning and ends of cycles.  Time changes, seasonal shifts, new holidays; sometimes we look for something new and inspiring; sometimes we just need a break.  But often, every day just seems ordinary. I try to embrace these times, and find sweetness in the ordinary, the small daily things we do that in the end make up the real stuff of life.  We are all a long time traveling.

Do not trudge through the day.  Fill the morning with music.  Step out into the afternoon sun.  Dance.

Listen to the Wailing Jenny's Sing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RobjISh1m4A

Playing For Change

allegro.

Playing for Change is an organization dedicated to the creation and propagation of peace through shared humanity and aesthetics, the playing of music. More specifically, Playing for Change is an international collective of musicians that play benefit concerts for and build music and art schools in impoverished communities. The project is rooted in the belief that music is an equalizer, a common thread that allows people to transcend distance and boundaries, be they political, economic, cultural, or ideological, that music is a path to peace. They illustrate this by producing mosaic videos of musicians from around the world playing the same song, somehow together, as a one-world choir, despite the distance. And they seem to play straight up into heaven, and right through to your soul.

They have a point. Music unites.

Watch and Listen:
http://www.playingforchange.com/episodes

Participate:
http://www.playingforchange.com/participate