I was sitting at a sidewalk table on North Main yesterday checking email when I saw a familiar figure walking toward me.
"Your flute sounded nice last night," he said, as I remembered that he heard me play at Late Night Open Mic at the Depot with the house band.
"Thank you!" I said, feeling happy for his kind words.
"You must have been playing for a long time?" he asked. Maybe he was trying to gauge how long it would take for him to gain the skills he wanted.
"I learned in fifth grade, but there was a long break in there."
He stopped to tell me a bit about himself. Turns out that in 1972, he felt inspired to learn flute because he liked its sound. He tried guitar instead, but the strings hurt his fingertips, and his attention was distracted by other things, and time passed. Hearing our upbeat jazzy improv renewed his inspiration to learn how to play.
I hope he follows up on that.
I thank him here on this blog for confirming a pattern I noticed in several conversations like this:
One way for me to empower people is by first empowering myself and then living out loud. Lucky for me, I dig that design!
Josy and I experimented on Tuesday, September 13, and then again on Thursday, September 22, to see how my songs sound when she plays douns and I sing. We feel encouraged ~~ I feel ecstatic, actually ~~ about how good they sounded. It's the foundation for the way I hear my songs in my head.
On Tuesday we found some grooves with Coconut Oil and Burnt Sugar Blues. I figured if we couldn't find good riffs for those two songs, we better just give up and go home. But they sound cool! Yay!
On Thursday we refreshed Tuesday's songs, then added Wayfaring Stranger and Fever and enjoyed another round of good luck. The two links here go to youtubes of the nearest inspirations for our take on these cover songs. I rewrote about half the words in each so I'll update this post with links to my versions.
Bob Miller of Foliba offered super suggestions and recorded the basic rhythms with his phone so we would remember them for next practice. In this picture, Bob wears a white shirt as he plays the douns.
Foliba plays Open Mic at Cafe Paradiso in 2012
Josy started drum lessons with Fonziba Koster about seven years ago, and has developed into the go-to doun player in her intermediate drumming group, keeping a steady beat for their traditional West African polyrhythms, from simple to complex.
I feel overjoyed and deeply honored to hear Josy holding the basic rhythm structures for Burnt Sugar Blues' songs.
This facebook post became blogworthy because of comments by friends . . . .
My initial post:
What is it with blues songs that open with, "Well I woke up this mornin', sun was startin' to rise ...."
When I feel blue, I wake up in the evening, maaaybe the afternoon.
Morning is for SLEEPING after you're up all night worrying about the way things might have been, or up all night doing the music thing ~~ playing or writing or blogging or imagining new riffs or rhymes or rhythms.
So I just might rewrite some of those songs to say, "Well I woke up this evenin', sun was sinkin' away ...."
Josy and I, two seeds of the gestating Burnt Sugar Blues, visited the open house at the Farmhouse at Hickory Highlands on Sunday, May 22, 2016. The gorgeous afternoon highlighted treasures of the house that John Freeberg and Susan Walch grew atop a prairie hill over the course of five years.
While there, we communed with the cows and calf, and checked in with the chickens. This little red hen contented herself in my arms ~~ she even snoozed a bit ~~ until she politely excused herself to freshen up without squirting my shirt.
I appreciated that!
Christy holds a snoozing Hickory Highlands hen ~~ Photo by Josy Welty
Last summer, Mike Scanlon and I recorded two of my hero ballads in Jesse James' new studio in his basement. (Jesse moved since then but he and his equipment are still in Fairfield.) The space was perfect for us ~~ low-key concrete, fine audio equipment, and Jesse's keen ear for mix. Josy sat beside Jesse behind the sound board, observing the whole scene with quiet support.
We had planned on recording only Hero so that's all we prepared, but things clicked along so well I added two more songs, although one of them just wasn't prepped enough to make the grade for the blog.
Although these songs were recorded a year ago, I didn't post them here sooner because the original intention was not to post them on the blog, but to give an interested drummer something of ours to work with until our schedules and practice spaces could line up enough for us to get together for a session. So they have a singer-songwriter sense, almost folk sound maybe, which is simpler and quieter than usual for me.
In spite of efforts to bring players together, we were not able to play these with a drummer, and then the band evaporated within weeks of recording these songs. So as an homage to the old band and as a sketch for a future band, I feel grateful to have these in our archives.
Drummers be warned: we did not use a metronome and the timing is uneven.
Would You Catch Me was first recorded at our first open mic back in April 2012 after I wrote it in December 2011. The audio file below is from June 2015.
Would You Catch Me posed a question in G minor pentatonic, and the answer in real life turned out to be "No". From the ashes of that dashed hope came an almost country-western ballad with a few G major chords. I wrote Hero in December 2013.
Must be the somber reflection during hibernation in winter that brings out my ballads.
Jesse James can be reached by email: jjamestech @ g m a i l . c o m
