House concerts are lovely

This is my observation for tonight: house concerts are lovely. They are a great opportunity for an artist to play in a market (like, say, Burlington) that does not have singer songwriter friendly venues, to a whole new audience of people. And, in my case, all the money from the house concert goes directly to the artist. So they can take home a healthy sum for an evening of singing, playing, and telling stories to an attentive audience. To me, that's what it's all about.

Oh, and for the audience, it's a great opportunity to see a really talented player right close up, where every person can be involved in the show. Won't get that at the ACC, that's for sure. Except for Bob Dylan, 'cause he ROCKS.

But I digress...this is the point: come to the living room, my friends...it is a lovely place.

My yard looks like a fairytale in yellow

It's windy here today in Burlington - windy and 18 degrees. It's a beautiful humid air out there today, making me rethink my choice of a long sleeved shirt to wear when I got in my car to do some groceries for the house concert I'm hosting tonight.

What I saw when I left the house was like a fairytale in yellow...leaves from a neighbourhood full of trees were blowing every which way, falling to the ground and skipping in the wind to finally rest against a curb in the hazy sunshine.

Not bad for the second last day of October.

Fall on, leaves, for the ground is welcoming.

Someone asked me a question once...

...he said: what was the moment that sits in your mind as the moment you realized the existence of folk music?

On the surface, a pretty simple question requiring only a short scan through some significant memories. He asked the question and all of us (7 around a small table) looked stumped. And while the two people in front of me told their stories, I looked around in my memories for the correct answer...and this was it:

I had a teacher in Grade 8 who scheduled an afternoon of music class for us every Friday. We had a song book of lyrics to a whole bunch of songs, mostly folk songs now that I think back. He would play his guitar and we would sing, songs like Leaving on a Jet Plane and El Paso and The Boxer (with the line about the whores on 7th Avenue taken out). Then one afternoon he closed the blinds in our second floor classroom, turned the lights off, and told us to close our eyes. The room was silent as he put in a tape none of us had heard before. Through the air floated ethereal notes, the ghosts of The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. We listened to that song with our eyes closed in the darkness...and tears came unbidden to my eyes. It was then that I saw for the first time the power of music and words, the power of what I would come to know as folk music, to evoke a time and place...and to fill a room with ghosts.

Conversation

I had the supreme fortune not too long ago to sit with a fairly diverse group of people (although it was a folk festival conference, so we all had a couple of things in common) and have an actual conversation. I think the art of conversation is quickly becoming obsolete. It's certainly not really necessary these days, with truncated words and quick as light emails and the speeding up pace of the world. But to sit in a deserted university campus bar on a Sunday afternoon when none of us had had enough sleep and just talk to each other for a few hours, about music and how it has affected our lives...this was a wonderful experience.

I say: converse, people. It does the body and soul a very good turn.