Eclectic Company: Recordings and Performances

I’m writing this on the longest day of the year, and it’s in the 90s here on Long Island. Sweltering. Sticky. Me cranky. If you were to ask me today which I’d prefer to hear — live music or records — where I’d usually hands down say I’d take even the crappiest live gig over a crystalline studio album any day (though it being the official beginning of Summer, most of the gigs I’m planning to go to will be held out of doors in the hazy fug), but today I’m actually inclined to sit in the coolth of my air conditioning, and turn to the albums I’ve loaded onto my iTunes, mostly picked up at concerts and festivals over the last few months.

Elizabeth LaPrelle, from the tiny town of Rural Retreat, Smythe County in southwest Virginia, learned to sing from her mom Sandy, a transplanted northeasterner with a sharp ear for gorgeous turns of tune and phrase. They’re both fond of old songs and big ballads, many learned from traditional singers in their mountains, and Elizabeth’s high clear nasal voice echoes the sounds I heard in the 1970s from the front porch and kitchen singers who’d been invited up north to perform at the folk festivals. LaPrelle’s versions of “Mathey Groves” (from Birds’ Advice), “Pretty Saro” (from Lizard In The Spring) and “Gypsen Davy” (from Rain and Snow) are unfamiliar renderings of some well-loved traditional works, and each is a musical revelation. It’s no wonder she was asked to perform on Garrison Keillor’s old-timey radio show, A Prairie Home Companion. I heard her at the New York Folk Music Society’s Spring Weekend, where she brought out her “crankies” — handmade giant artwork scrolls depicting the stories of her ballads, that were revealed by steadily unrolling (cranking) the tapestry from one pole to the other as a visual accompaniment to her singing. Her charming light-handed recordings organized by her dad, Bossman John LaPrelle, and featuring mom Sandy on harmony vocals, Jim Lloyd (guitar), Amy Davis (banjo) and Jon Newlin (fiddle) may be found at www.old97wrecords.com/elizabeth-laprelle. If she plays in your neck of the woods, run, don’t walk, to get your tickets.

I’m very fond of close harmony singing, from The Vienna Choir Boys to the Everly Brothers, and many recent concerts have featured that special interplay of voices I find so satisfying. One group, Finest Kind, a trio from Canada featuring Shelley Posen, Ann Downey and Ian Robb, sings sea chanteys, ballads and pop songs with equal vigor. “Song of the Lower Classes” (from For Honour & For Gain) updated by Robb from an 1850s Chartist song, with choruses “we’re not too low the bread to grow/but too low the bread to eat” and “we’re far to low to vote the tax/but not too low to pay,” that perfectly articulate the widening divide between the one percent and the other 99% more than 160 years later, and their “John Barleycorn Deconstructed,” in which the traditional ballad’s tune made popular from the rock version by the late-1960s English band Traffic is paired with a line-by-line description of how they’re making the sounds you hear, showcase the breadth of their inspirations. Their music’s fun and pleasurably instructional. You can get your schooling at their website www.finestkind.ca.

And then there’s Brother Sun, the trio of Greg Greenway, Joe Jencks and Pat Wictor. All three had successful solo careers before they discovered the power and glory of their joined voices, so in performance, they make the most of individual spotlights, singing backup to one another where needed, and with heads thrown back in full-throated cry, they make music that’s muscular, tender, and purposeful. At the Phil Ochs Song Night, they joined emma’s revolution, Magpie, and John Flynn to open with Phil’s “Power and Glory,” surrounding the room with their warm sound like a politically-inspired Eagles in a firmer, deeper key. Find their first and definitely not their last record at www.brothersunmusic.com.

Wictor is a slide guitarist with impeccable taste and a deep back catalog of sweet-sad and ripe songs, who covered the late great Mose Allison’s “Everybody’s Crying Mercy (When They Don’t Know The Meaning of The Word)” in his solo turn on the Phil Ochs night. When I first heard him in 2006, Wictor was singing his own “Heaven Is So High . . . And I’m So Far Down,” a bluesy-gospel sounding number that made me feel humble, and since then has become available on his album of the same name. www.patwictor.com.

Greg Greenway hit my notice years earlier, first for some wonderful between-songs patter (Greg throws out a few fragrant but rarely used English words, then says: “My mother was always asking me how I was going to use my Bachelor’s Degree in English. This is it, Mom!”), and then for intimate versions of familiar songs he made me hear with fresh ears on the strength of his singing of them. His “Highway 4am (Driving)” made it onto the eponymously-named Brother Sun CD in a fully-fledged harmonized version, but it’s also on Greenway’s 2008 CD Standing On The Side of Love, alongside other gorgeous songs, available from www.iTunes.com. Learn more at www.greggreenway.com.

Joe Jencks is the trio member I knew least about before the Ochs night. In his early promo photos, Jencks looks like a burly thug sporting a mullet that his mellifluous voice and degree in vocal music (opera, Broadway, Jazz, et cetera) completely undermine. Jencks’s heartfelt rendering of Bob Gibson’s “Let The Band Play Dixie” (from Links In A Chain), named for Abraham Lincoln’s compassionate quote to the nation when Lee surrendered the Confederate Army to Grant, is a wonder, and if he could hear Jencks singing it, I know Bob Gibson would have a lump in his throat. Taste test the rest at www.joejencks.com.

The POSSLQ and I will get to festivals and concerts all summer long. I can see the backlog of albums to review growing. More when next we meet.