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Event
RAILBIRD with STAR ROVER and special guest BENJAMIN LAZAR DAVIS
Thursday 5/23 -
RAILBIRD
STAR ROVER (exploring the musical world of JOHN FAHEY)
BENJAMIN LAZAR DAVIS
$8 advance / $10 at the door
8:30 doors / 9:30 show
www.railbirdband.com
www.fyorecords.com/artists/star-rover/
RAILBIRD - the experimental pop band from Brooklyn returns to the Lizard for another night of adventurous music featuring the oh-so-cool vocals of Sarah Pedinotti.
STAR ROVER - guitarist Will Graefe and drummer Jeremy Gustin - explore the musical world of John Fahey
"Guitar is a caller. It brings forth emotions you didn't know you had." - John Fahey
Will Graefe (Railbird, Miss Tess) and Jeremy Gustin (Delicate Steve, Larkin Grimm, Railbird) spent 2012 in a Bushwick loft - modest but airy and bright, with a wall of windows so that, in the moments when their attention wavered from music, they could watch garbage trucks unloading across the street. Perhaps this is the reason that their attention so rarely wavered. While dissecting the music of John Fahey, Sonny Sharrock, Lighting Bolt, and Leadbelly, they discovered music yet-to-be-played and yet-to-be-heard.
Among all their guides in this journey, John Fahey was the central influence. Fahey, that monumental American guitarist and composer, who sought out and studied with Booker ("Bukka") White, earned a masters degree at UCLA for work on the music of Charley Patton, and translated America's country blues finger-picking tradition into his own singular and beautiful repertoire, hated folk music.
John Fahey was a blues obsessive who had little patience for the 60s folk revival. He bemoaned the deaf idolization of all things old. He loved and respected, as great American musicians, Skip James, and Bukka White, and the autoharp virtuoso Bryan Bowers -- all of them cosmopolitans, voracious listeners, and experimenters in new sounds. And it frustrated Fahey to no end that much of his folk festival audience could not tell the difference between artists of that ilk and just any band in vintage hats running through "My Gal Sal".
Star Rover is no nostalgia act, but a reinvention. When Will and Jeremy play a song by John Fahey, it's transformed. Portland Cement Factory at Monolith, CA is split into component parts, the melody is slowed is slowed; Fahey's finger-picking slightly altered and re-orchestrated, for drum set and guitar playing that sound less like two instruments and more like a tight ensemble of ten. Those 6 strings, kick, snare, tom, and cymbals separate and recombine, lead and accompany, and both push and pull the time with much more variety than seems possible.
Graefe and Gustin's original compositions use Fahey's aesthetic and his style of playing guitar as launching point for interstellar explorations. The title track on Western Winds Bitter Christians is a call to attention, a blast of grungy backwoods distortion. It's crooked like an Appalachian fiddle tune, sour like a Mississippi lament but still brash and majestic.
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LocationThe Lizard Lounge (View)
1667 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States
Categories
| Minimum Age: 21 |
| Kid Friendly: No |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: No |
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