The Musical Box

donna boyd of the center for old music in the new world in rehearsal at st. michael's episcopal church. photo by herald-leader staff photographer mark cornelison.

It has long been designed as one of the final holiday celebrations in Lexington, a performance staged on the closest available Monday before Christmas. But this year, the Center for Old Music in the New World is really coming down to the yuletide wire.

On Monday, a mere three days before Christmas arrives, the organization devoted to the performance of early music presents a holiday concert of traditional carols and songs that has become a tradition unto itself.

For more than three decades, the center has presented A Handefull of Christmas Delights. The program defines “old music in the new world” by presenting medieval and Renaissance music that celebrates numerous aspects of the season. Lutes, recorders, viola da gambas and more bring the music to life. And there are voices. Many voices. They sing of the season, of the solstice and of celebration.

As such, A Handefull of Christmas Delights has become one of the most lovingly unspoiled of Lexington holiday celebrations. But squeezing it in with so little breathing room before Christmas itself - a time when seasonal stress seems to reach its zenith - is both a challenge and a reward for the performers.

“The fact we are almost always one of the very last events before Christmas is a challenge,” said Donna Boyd, director of the Center for Old Music in the New World and a veteran of all 30 previous Christmas Delights concerts. “Things get so frantic, and there is always so much to do. But people tell me when this concert comes around, it feels like it’s time to step back from all that and become part of a more peaceful celebration of the season.”

This year’s Christmas Delights concert will have a broadly European feel with emphasis on early carols and winter festival music composed from the 12th to the 15th century. “There is Czech music, Spanish music, Italian, German, Scandinavian, Scottish, French. … We just love to do a great mixture of things.”

The concert is rehearsed in sections. A band of five medieval instrumentalists rehearses separately from Boyd and a group of about a dozen vocalists. Soloists round out the performance. Several are Lexington professionals. Some even spend weekends delving into sounds vastly removed from the early music of Christmas Delights. Among that pack is John Hedger, who has been a featured lute soloist for more than 25 years with the center. But he is also one of Lexington’s most established blues guitarists. He leads Johnny Roy and the Rub Tones and is a guitar instructor at Transylvania University, Berea College and Centre College.

Hedger brought up one of the more immediate but unavoidable obstacles in performing music - any kind of music - at the heart of the holiday season: winter illness.

“Respiratory illnesses around this time of year can sometimes knock out a key singer in the group,” he said. “They become so ill that they absolutely cannot sing.

“Actually, two Christmases ago I was working hard, preparing my lute solo for the program, and came down with pneumonia. I had to cancel about two weeks before the program because I couldn’t continue practicing and preparing.”

But even in the mildest winter weather, a substantial level of chance surfaces in bringing the instrumental and vocal groups of Christmas Delights together. While each practices extensively on its own, joint rehearsal time is minimal.

“What we finally put together for the concert happens in one or two rehearsals,” Boyd said. “The ability of that to work really depends on people who are devoted to making music in any situation. You take a big risk doing things this way.”

Adding to the danger element is that Christmas Delights isn’t like The Nutcracker in that it doesn’t enjoy an extended run or even a repeat performance. It happens once.

“It’s not a tour,” Hedger said.

“There is only one chance for us to perform this music,” Boyd added. “Of course, that means there is only one chance for the audience to hear it, too.”

But above the physical and rehearsal demands of performing so close to Christmas is the motive for making the music in the first place. Boyd doesn’t want Christmas Delights to be viewed, as she terms it, as “an antiquarian kind of thing.”

The sounds and songs might be centuries old, but she is devoted making the music alive and in-the-moment.

“This is living music to us, and I think that is communicated to the audience,” she said. “After all, they are there. They are part of this living thing.

“Music exists in the performance and in the connection between the audience and the performers as it happens. That’s a real creative synthesis right there. All of this comes together, especially at Christmastime. But that’s partly because the audience brings such a special spirit of its own.

“What we’re presenting isn’t a religious celebration, although there is a spiritual aspect to the music that everyone responds to. Our audience is wonderful in that respect. It’s an incredible representation of a lot of differences in the makeup of our community. To me, that’s just a really special thing.”

The Center for Old Music in the New World presents “A Handefull of Christmas Delights” at 8 p.m. tonight at St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, 2025 Bellefonte Rd. Tickets are $5 (students), $8 (seniors) and $10 (public). Call (859) 269-2908.

the manhattan transfer: tim hauser, janis siegel, cheryl bentyne and alan paul

The most humbling aspect surrounding the Manhattan Transfer’s ongoing international popularity is the fact its members initially counted themselves lucky just to have a fanbase here at home.

Take singer Tim Hauser, the one-time Madison Avenue marketing executive who started the first Manhattan Transfer group in 1969. That ensemble didn’t last long. But when a second lineup began to establish itself with a blend of robust jazz harmonies, pop appeal and, eventually, scores of stylistic inspirations and variations, the world came calling.

When we caught up with Hauser earlier this month to discuss Manhattan Transfer’s final concert of the year - a Saturday performance of holiday music and more that will team the group with 25 members of the University of Kentucky Orchestra - he was out of town. He was way out of town. Hauser, in fact, had just arrived at his hotel in Tallinn, Estonia following a flight from the group’s previous destination: Tel Aviv, Israel.

Before making its way to the Singletary Center next weekend, the Manhattan Transfer will play Finland, Slovakia and Russia.

“It never occurred to me when we started that we would be an international band,” Hauser said. “Never. My visions back then as far as popularity went were very limited. Now, musically, they weren’t limited at all.

“What I was looking at then musically was what we’re doing now. It’s grown since then. But the various styles we address were already there - vocalese, rhythm and blues, swing, big band, four part harmonies and gospel harmony. I thought it would be great just to get steady work in the United States with that.”

The second Manhattan Transfer was formed in 1972 when Hauser was paying bills as much by driving taxis in New York as he was through performance work. Save for one lineup change - Cheryl Bentyne for Laurel Masse in 1978 - the membership of the Manhattan Transfer has remained consistent through the years. Janis Siegel and Alan Paul complete the group.

“There is a very high level of communication when the four of us are onstage,” Hauser said. “Of course, it helps that we really like each other. We’re friends offstage. But when we’re onstage, the communication becomes pretty linear. By that, I mean, we don’t falter. It’s a sacred place for us.”

While the Manhattan Transfer’s music may be rooted in jazz, undercurrents of pop, in almost every sense of the term, are strong. Hauser absorbed the music of vocal greats like Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington and Frank Sinatra in his youth. But it took a voice from his generation to make the prospect of a professional singing career seem real and possible. That voice belonged to Frankie Lymon, the African-American soprano from Harlem that found stardom at the age of 14 in 1956 with the Teenagers hit Why Do Fools Fall in Love.

“I listened to Frank Sinatra and Dinah Washington. But they were adults when I was a kid. I couldn’t grasp the idea of singing like them because they were just on another level. But when you’re a kid listening to another kid, you go, ‘I can do that.’ I mean, it’s all still incredible, but at least you can aspire to it.

“Franklie Lymon was one of the greatest singers I ever heard. At his age, he was singing and phrasing like (Swing Era bandleader and vocalist) Billy Eckstine. He was remarkable.”

The links between jazz and pop quickly became a multi-generational - and, in some cases, multi-cultural - journey for the Manhattan Transfer. The group brought lyrics and vocal life to a celebrated jazz fusion instrumental (Weather Report’s Birdland) and crafted pop hits out of everything from vintage doo-wop (a cover of the Ad Libs’ The Boy From New York City) to TV themes (Paul’s Twilight Zone/Twilight Tone). It revived standards (a 1981 a capella version of A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square), devoted entire albums to specific jazz styles (1985’s Grammy winning Vocalese and 1997’s Swing) and even diverted into Brazilian music (the 1987 album Brasil) and children’s songs (1994’s The Manhattan Transfer Meet Tubby the Tuba).

So it should follow that the Manhattan Transfer would visit holiday music on 1992’s The Christmas Album and 2005’s An Acapella Christmas. The latter, true to its title, put exclusive emphasis on the intimacy, playfulness and swing of the group’s harmonies. The odd sleigh bells and finger snaps served as the only accompaniment.

“Music is always a challenge,” Hauser said. “I mean, that is certainly true when it comes to performance. But that’s a given. You also have to develop arrangements that are either fresh enough to put a new spin on a tune or, by virtue of the voicings, are able to make it sound so rich that someone might say, ‘This is the one of the best versions of that tune I’ve ever heard.’ No matter how good you sing, if you don’t have a good arrangement, nothing else will make any difference.”

The challenge awaiting the Manhattan Transfer in 2009 will be a recording devoted to the music of jazz keyboardist and composer Chick Corea. Hauser hinted that Corea himself may even make an appearance on the project.

“You know, I never used to think about how far this band would go,” Hauser said. “That just never occurred to me. I was always thinking of it in the now, if you will. It wasn’t until we became really successful that we started wondering how long all this would last.”

The Manhattan Transfer performs at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, December 20 at the Singletary Center for the Arts. Tickets are $45, $50, $60. Call: (859) 257-4929.

ben sollee. photo by liz linder.

Ben Sollee had a plan. After graduating from the University of Louisville in 2006 with a music performance degree, he decided to give himself two years before even thinking about graduate school. First, he wanted to taste the life of a working musician.

Let’s see how he did. During that time, Sollee recorded an album called Learning to Bend, hit the road for national and international concerts with the Sparrow Quartet - an ensemble that includes such star string players as Abigail Washburn, Bela Fleck and Casey Driessen - and cut a follow-up EP called Something Worth Keeping which features vocal help from another famed Louisvillian, My Morning Jacket’s Jim James.

As for touring work, we caught up with Sollee last month while enroute to a gig - in Montana.

“I gave myself two years to go out and be a musician in the world,” said the Lexington native. “And so far, it’s been a really good run - good enough certainly to keep doing it. I’ll go to graduate school at some point. But for now, I’m going to keep following the music where it leads me.”

Now here’s the novel part of the story. Sollee’s instrument of choice is a cello, even though his music celebrates everything from folk and Americana to indie pop and R&B. In short, he is as progressive as contemporary songwriters and instrumentalists come. It’s just that he plays the cello. Not only that, he plays it alone, using his voice and the instrument to harmonize with each other. As one man string bands go, Sollee is in a class by himself.

“I grew up having an Appalachian fiddler for a grandfather, a dad who played guitar around the house and a mother who sang,” Sollee said. “But I play an instrument that is usually studied within a classical institution. So the push and pull of all that sort of makes up how I play the cello.

“Most of my music, though, tends to be a very organic thing. For me, it’s just about being able to use the instrument for whatever a song is asking it to be used for and feeling OK about that.”

Introduced to the cello while a third grader at Yates Elementary, Sollee was quickly versed in the classical stereotypes often tagged to the instrument. Using the cello to play a pop tune? Now, how could that be?

“There have always been conventions about how the cello should be played within the realm of what is considered ‘legit’ music. I’ve heard that word used a lot. But when teachers talked about ‘legit’ music, I never got that. The cello is a big wooden box that I play that makes sound. I should be able to play it however. Of course, what these people were trying to say was that you need a classical language to be able to explore other styles and languages on the cello.”

That’s not to say Sollee hasn’t immersed himself with classical studies. Among his first high profile performances were concerts with the Central Kentucky Youth Orchestra. But he eventually quit when a more engaging gig presented himself - specifically, a spot on the WoodSongs Old-Time Radio as a member of Michael Johnathon’s Folkboy Orchestra. He would remain with the show for nearly four years and roughly 200 broadcasts.

“Week after week, I got to hear different artists talk about the music business. I got a feel for what the world was like with respect to making a living playing music. I was exposed to great Irish bands, to Matt Haimovitz playing a cello concerto and Jimi Hendrix music, and to Odetta and the way she sings. Seeing all these figures gave me a huge breadth of stuff to draw from when it came time for me to be a lyricist, when it came for me to be a singer and when it came time for me to an arranger.”

Sollee left WoodSongs when touring alongside blues stylist Otis Taylor began to intensify. But it was the connection with the Sparrow Quartet that gave the cellist a concentrated glimpse of life as a professional musician. This year, the group toured extensively throughout the country and as far afield as China. It even wound up at WoodSongs, making Sollee a featured guest instead of a performance volunteer.

“With Sparrow, there was this incredible level of musicianship every night. Then there was the business aspect, where I learned what it was like to have a band with a major label release and the publicity push that comes with it. I also learned a lot about the actual touring, about why it’s so significant and so consuming. Stuff like that was just mindblowing to me.”

For now, though, Sollee’s sole performance mate is the cello. While he is out to explore pop and rock possibilities for the instrument, he is also broadening the scope of the venues he plays. As with cellists like Haimovitz, he is taking his music to rock clubs. Hence his Thursday show at The Dame.

“It’s not too intimidating, really,” Sollee said. “For people who haven’t seen me with Sparrow, it can be an eye and an earful. There is still that association with classical styles, so you can get a lot of people who are kind of taken aback in trying to figure out what’s going on.

“But it’s a challenge for me, too. I’m just trying to find a way to fill up a room without compromising the natural beauty of the cello.”

Ben Sollee, Daniel Martin Moore and Neva Geoffrey perform at 8 p.m. tonight at The Dame, 367 East. Main. Tickets are $10. Call (859) 231-7263.

juliana hatfield

One of the more desperately humorous turns in Juliana Hatfield’s recently published memoir, When I Grow Up, deals with fame - or, more exactly, the quickest exit available from it.

It outlines the singer’s attempts to get out of her contract with Atlantic Records. The label had initially managed to bring Hatfield’s indie rock reknown closer to the pop mainstream. But in its corporate hunger for a hit single, Atlantic refused to release what would have been her third album for the label, a doomed 1997 project called God’s Foot. So Hatfield wanted out.

In a chapter titled Begging to be Dropped, she describes the nails she planned to drive into the coffin of her major label career. Most dealt with personal hygiene. A week before meeting with Atlantic president Val Azzoli, Hatfield stopped bathing. She stopped brushing her hair. She avoided sunlight. The persona she wanted reflected to Atlantic is summed up in three words: “ugly, crazy, dirty.”

The truly sad part of the tale is that this is one of the few true, joyous victories Hatfield entrusts to When I Grow Up. While many parts are wickedly funny, there is an underlying sadness to the book’s parade of broken love and faith in personal as well as professional circles.

“I’m able to see humor in a lot of things,” said Hatfield, who visits Lexington for the first time in nearly 15 years this weekend. She will sign copies of When I Grow Up at Joseph-Beth Booksellers on Saturday and perform songs from her critically lauded 2008 album How to Walk Away (and from throughout her career) at The Dame on Sunday.

“Even at the time these things were happening, I thought they were funny. I remember my manager and I laughing about the Atlantic meeting. ‘Yeah, I’m going to stop bathing.’ Of course, it was also kind of sad.”

For Hatfield, who became a near iconic figure for a blooming indie music revolution during the ‘80s with the Boston-based Blake Babies, stardom started unfolding with her debut solo album, Hey Babe. That’s when Atlantic came calling. Her first album for the label, 1993’s Become What You Are yielded a pair of sizable radio hits, My Sister and Spin the Bottle.

Hatfield’s subsequent return to the indie ranks, along with a brief Blake Babies reunion in 2000, wasn’t always a cheery experience. Though most of her post-Atlantic records have been well received critically, Hatfield details in When I Grow Up her own dashed vision of her life and work.

One sentence savagely sums that feeling up: “I had no faith for what I was doing.”

The times took a physical toll, as well. Following a Blake Babies reunion tour in 2001, Hatfield’s weight dropped to 100 pounds. In a chapter titled Hunger, she describes confronting an eating disorder with roots that stretch back to her high school days. Such passages avoid pandering drama but play out with such frank and conversational detail that one wonders how comfortable Hatfield had to be with herself to share them in the first place.

“That’s the question I have to ask myself a lot,” she said. “In this world where everything happens so fast, it’s hard to sit back, take the time and contemplate. ‘Should I do this or not do this?’ So I just went with my gut.

“I’ve always done that with my music. Sure, I run the risk of leaving myself vulnerable by being so open. But I’ve always been honest, emotionally honest, in the music. With the book, I’m just continuing the tradition of telling the truth about myself. It’s just done in a more plain spoken way.”

While Hatfield admitted she shed a few personal demons in writing When I Grow Up, her battles with anorexia didn’t end with the book. With a string of late fall dates, including the Dame performance, already confirmed, the singer entered an eating disorder clinic. In keeping with the frankness of When I Grow Up, she wrote about the experience as it was happening in her online blog.

In an entry posted just before her mid-November discharge, Hatfield said, “In this environment, they shorten ‘eating disorders’ - the name of our problem - to ‘E.D.’ and say like a man’s name (‘Ed’) like he is a bad man, an evil man we need to cast out of our lives, our psyches.”

“I felt refreshed getting this stuff out of me,” Hatfield said in our interview. “It’s like purging, to use a… well, it’s like purging. It feels healthy to get them out. It’s a way of not going crazy.

“There was a real benefit from the blog posting. I think I was reaching out for help and support from people. I needed sympathy from whomever I could get it from. I reached out to friends, to everyone I could think of. With the blog and the book, I received tons and tons of well wishes, prayers and support. That was what I needed most.”

Stating she is now “on the mend, back on track and ready to rock,” Hatfield is writing songs for what will be a predominantly acoustic followup to How to Walk Away. The challenge there may be mightier than she planned. How to Walk Away is a bold pop record detailing the desolation, desperation and, in some cases, indifference revolving around romantic encounters. With vocal help from Nada Surf’s Matthew Caws and The Psychedelic Furs’ Richard Butler, How to Walk Away has been deservedly described in numerous reviews as one of Hatfield’s finest recordings.

So how does all of this bode for the future? With an album widely praised by critics and fans and writings that have revealed her demons to the world, has Hatfield reclaimed the faith she so succinctly confessed had been lost?

“Yeah, definitely. I have it all back. I have the same motivation I had when I started out. Motivation is just this potion to create stuff, a compulsion to express the truth of my own experiences in this life.

“So the goal is to make better music, to sing better and to keep improving every year. All I’m trying to do is to keep going and keep evolving.”

Juliana Hatfield will sign copies of When I Grow Up at 6 p.m. Dec. 6 at Joseph-Beth Booksellers, 161 Lexington Green. Call (859) 271-5330.

Hatfield will also perform at 8 p.m. Dec. 7 at The Dame, 367 East Main with The Everyday Visuals. Tickets are $14. (859) 231-7263.

jj grey performs tonight for woodsongs.

Even though he has made a lifelong home in the Sunshine State, there is something distinctly unsunny about the music of JJ Grey.

That’s not to say the Jacksonville, Fla. singer, songwriter, bandleader and multi-instrumentalist doesn’t pack his Southern-steeped records with considerable warmth and jubilance. It’s just that within the blend of funk, blues and vintage R&B Grey creates with his band Mofro is a sound that is altogether swampy.

It’s as though the music was cooked in some thick, humid, Cajun-less bayou. OK, so Jacksonville isn’t exactly bayou country. But for Grey, who will perform a solo acoustic set tonight for the WoodSongs Old-Time Radio Hour, his Florida homeland is where all the magical soul inspirations of the South - and even a few sounds from other regions - converged. The evolution of those sounds continue to inspire Grey’s Mofro music, especially the horn and string orchestrations that play into his new Orange Blossoms album.

“It was kind of a mutual exposure,” Grey said last week during a tour stop in Birmingham, Ala. “The music I listened to went from R&B to soul to vintage country, especially George Jones and his tracks with those huge, almost orchestral arrangements. There was a point in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s where strings and horns made a big appearance. They would eventually get into all kinds of music, from disco to punk rock. To me, that music always sounded so powerful.

“Mostly though, I love the guitar sound of Tony Joe White and Jerry Reed. I love the drum tone of (Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section player) Roger Hawkins, especially his playing on records by Aretha (Franklin). But I also love the bass playing of James Jamerson and all that great Motown stuff he played on.”

On Orange Blossoms, such inspirations play out in the way wiry guitar riffs peak through a dense, funky percussion shuffle to ignite an almost intimate post-psychedelic bushfire in the title tine. Later, on Higher You Climb, the patient but purposeful Southern inflection of Grey’s singing works off a groove charged by clavinet and organ. And on Ybor City, the soul sound is all Southern even if the inspirations seemingly aren’t. The tune sounds like a cross between the rockier tunes of Chicago bluesman Billy Boy Arnold and the West Coast swamp music John Fogerty designed nearly 40 years ago for Creedence Clearwater Revival.

In fact, you could play spot-the-influence for hours with any of the four Mofro albums that Grey has recorded. The resulting music is never an imitation, though, but a hearty and original assimilation of those rootsy sounds.

“Once you find all of those elements, you have to make sure they all fall together without sounding too derivative,” Grey said. “You never want the music to only sound like the sum of those influences. You have to allow that intangible to happen. But then, that’s something you can’t force. It just has to happen.”

Allowing that “intangible” to ignite has meant anchoring a Mofro lineup that shifts from album to album with a few mainstay elements. Specifically, guitarist Daryl Hance and producer Dan Prothero have been in Grey’s corner for all four Mofro albums. Then there is the matter of where those records have been cut - namely, a St. Petersburg studio that Grey has spent over half of his music-making life in.

“While there have been a number of variables with these records, all of them have been recorded in the same studio on the same gear,” Grey said. “I’ve been recording there since I was 18. I’m 41 now, so it’s been a long time. It helps that Dan possesses a scary knowledge of how the control room, the amplifiers - everything there, really - works.

“Dan, in fact, has really pushed me to become a better musician. I was always content to let other people play so I could just sing. Dan kept telling me, ‘You will wind up playing around your singing. It will make a difference.’ He explained to me the story about Aretha and how they got good recordings of her at Muscle Shoals. But when they sat her in front of a piano and let her play as she sang, things started going to a whole other level. Dan, to me, is a just a genius.”

Of course, when Grey visits WoodSongs, the Mofro team won’t be around. It will just be himself, his guitar and an unaccompanied instinct for making great Southern stewed music.

“It was a big challenge playing solo at first,” Grey said. “One of the first lessons I had to learn was to not worry about trying to recreate what you do with a full band. You just sing and play the songs. Tony Joe White would often have to do the same thing. He would change the way he played just a little bit so he could accompany himself.

“Once you can do that, the music becomes less about all the funky stuff and more about what you’re singing. The lyrics take on a life of their own.”

After eight years of solo gigs and Mofro tours, Grey’s music is championed by a devout but still somewhat modest fan base. He sees younger acts that have clocked fewer road miles pass him by on their way to larger audiences. But Grey doesn’t sweat that. His enthusiasm for the art of live performance, as well as his sense of hope at establishing a wider fan following, remains undiminished.

“You can look around and see a lot of bands playing in a garage one day and then, it seems, they’re getting signed to some big time record label,” Grey said. “And you can get aggravated with that. But I’ve also seen plenty of other groups that work really hard where things don’t come nearly as easy. For us, we have to go out and play every night that we can. And to be honest with you, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I don’t mind working for what I’ve got. The road to here has taken eight years to travel. But it seems like the blink of an eye. I wake up every day and say, ‘I get to play the music that I love in front of great crowds.’ And that feels great.”

JJ Grey and Victoria Fox perform at 7 p.m. tonight at the Kentucky Theatre, 214 E. Main St. for the final 2008 taping of the WoodSongs Old Time Radio Hour. Tickets are $10. Call: (859) 252-8888.

todd snider sings "peace queer" tonight at woodsongs.

It was seemingly business as usual when Todd Snider last visited Lexington.

A popular local draw for years, the East Nashville songsmith was in town for an evening set at the Christ the King Oktoberfest. Though limited to a mere 50 minutes of stage time, Snider opted for the familiar. His performance was full of folkish, nervous tic reveries like Alright Guy, Can’t Complain, Beer Run and a curiously brief Ballad of the Devil’s Backbone Tavern, a tune that usually comes with a motion picture-length narrative as a prologue.

It was like any other Snider show - whimsical, fully unfrilly and ripe with an amiable, boozy charm.

That afternoon, a package arrived. It remained unopened until my arrival home after Okotberfest had shut down for the night. Its contents: a new Snider EP disc called Peace Queer, a record still three weeks away from release. As Snider had chosen not to introduce any of the new songs at Oktoberfest, Peace Queer was immediately sent to the stereo.

What was expected was more of the same revelry the songwriter had conjured onstage earlier that evening. What came out of the speakers was arguably the most sobering and topically minded music Snider has ever recorded. It was rootsy and unassuming in tone, save for the brief electric boogiefest that erupted during Stuck on the Corner. But it was also politically turbulent in terms of temperament.

If Peace Queer was any indication, it seemed life for the Alright Guy had become troubled on an almost global scale.

“I usually go to a bar before my gigs,” Snider said by phone last week. “Or if I’m home, I’ll go sit in a bar and listen to people talk. And these days, people are almost always talking about war. You’re not supposed to talk politics and religion in a bar. But today, believe me, they are. Me, I want to talk about the Cubs. But what I’ve been hearing really informed these songs.”

Peace Queer’s political tone is ushered in with a disarming Bo Diddley groove on Mission Accomplished (Because You Gotta Have Faith) and the sort of confessional storytelling charm that has long fueled Snider’s best songs. But the antagonist of Mission Accomplished is to pretty easy to spot within the shuffle.

“Working for a man who could not stop lying; drove us all off a cliff and called it flying,” Snider sings. “That ain’t flying. Most men flying seem to understand that a man hasn’t technically flown until he lands.”

The eight song, 26 minute Peace Queer then veers into a sailor’s wartime lament set to an easy country blues melody (The Ballad of Cape Henry), two versions of a more homeward battle with a schoolyard bully (the spoken Is This Thing Working? and the sung Is This Thing On?) and the disc’s cool, comfortable title tune (Ponce of the Flaming Peace Queer) which, in a major shift for Snider, is an instrumental.

But Peace Queer is also disturbing in a way that even Snider couldn’t have predicted. On Dividing the Estate (A Heart Attack), gluttony is redefined, whether intentionally or not, for the new age of the corporate bailout.

“The Bible says that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter heaven. It astonishes me there are so many wealthy Christians in our country. I’m not judging them. They can live by and break whatever rules they want for all I care. But I grew up a Catholic kid, so I speak Catholic. So what I wanted to do with this song was paint a picture of a person, maybe even a system, that started off humble and just got fatter and fatter until it eventually popped.

“I mean, if I go out on the road and become the guy that eats everything on the deli tray, drinks every beer and tries to hit on every girl that passes by, I’ll just get fatter, louder and dumber until, eventually, I’ll just fall down.”

Peace Queer’s ace in the hole is a reworking of the Vietnam War protest anthem Fortunate Son that John Fogerty wrote and recorded with Creedence Clearwater Revival. Snider slows the tune into a dark, whispery meditation colored by ghostly, reverb-drenched singing by Patty Griffin, who also harmonizes on Cape Henry.

“My intention was to make the song sound hopeless and exhausted.

“My friend Doug Lancio, who plays guitar for Patty and sometimes produces her music, lives down the street. I was over at his house recording the song and Patty stopped by. She heard what we were doing and said, ‘Can I sing on that?’ I said, ‘Are you kidding? Of course, you can.’ I really look up to Patty. She’s a lot like Dylan. She just keeps finding new ways for her music to change and still stay interesting.”

On Monday, Snider returns to Lexington for a taping of the WoodSongs Old-Time Radio Hour, a program he seems to have special affinity for. The songwriter’s 2002 performance of Long Year on the show was so to his liking that he included it on a concert album the following year called Near Truths and Hotel Rooms.

But unlike Okotberfest, the Peace Queer songs will be front and center for the WoodSongs return.

“It sounds silly, but I really don’t get to control where these songs go,” Snider said. “In that sense, I guess I’m more of an editor than a writer. I really teetered on whether I would even let these songs out of the house. They were planned for the next album (the just completed The Excitement Plan, due out in 2009), but they didn’t really fit in.

“It was like they were screwing the movie up. So I thought I’d put them out on their own little EP. I wanted them to be their own little thing.”

Todd Snider performs at 7 p.m. tonight at the Kentucky Theatre, 214 E. Main for the WoodSongs Old-Time Radio Hour. Also performing will be The Refugees. Tickets: $10. Call (859) 252-8888

the rev. al green. photo by christian lantry.

“Man, I wish the Derby was going on while I was there,” said the Rev. Al Green of his impending Kentucky performance. “We could go out and put some money on those horses. But seeing as I’m a preacher, I’d have to keep my bets to two dollars and fifty cents.”

Following such a modest proclamation was a vocal trait almost as endearing and distinctive to Green as his singing: laughter. It came like a cloudburst - quick, explosive and transforming. Almost without realizing it, you find yourself laughing with him.

“Hey man, when I sing For the Good Times (the Kris Kristofferson song Green refashioned into a soul hit in 1981), it means ‘for the good times.’ It don’t mean for the bad times. It means we’re going make the most of our time together. We’re going to make it work. We gotta make it work, because it’s getting pretty late in the game, baby.”

One can’t help but think Rev. Al has his next Sunday sermon in mind when he talks like that. After all, the veteran soul singer with the killer falsetto has also been an ordained minister in his adopted hometown of Memphis for over 30 years.

But “late in game” seems to also reflect the secular side of Green’s life and music. Two days before our conversation, he was winding up a European tour in support of Lay It Down. The recording is the third in a series of critically lauded albums for the Blue Note label that have set Green back on the path of the earthy, upbeat soul he explored during the early ‘70s. The hits Green fashioned back then with producer Willie Mitchell - Let’s Stay Together, Tired of Being Alone, Love and Happiness, I’m Still In Love With You, Here I Am (Come and Take Me) and many others - came to define one of the final golden eras of American soul music.

“Every house we played over there was rocking,” Green said of the European tour. “But this music is my life, man. I’ve been doing it ever since I came to Memphis and met Willie Mitchell in ‘70 or ‘71. We’re gonna do what we do wherever we go.”

Curiously, Lay It Down is the only one of the three Blue Note albums (2003’s I Can’t Stop and 2005’s Everything’s OK were the others) that did not have Mitchell at the helm. Instead, Green co-produced Lay It Down with Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson of The Roots. He also enlisted such new generation soul stars as John Legend, Corinne Bailey Rae and Anthony Hamilton.

While it summons more of Green’s ‘70s muse than the other Blue Note projects, the songs on Lay It Down were hardly pre-meditated. In fact, he wrote the bulk of the album’s material with Thompson and several collaborators after recording sessions had begun.

To set the scene, Green keeps his distance to offer a third person perspective of his work at the sessions.

“If you had a picture of Al at the recording sessions, he would be sitting on the floor. Everybody else would be around him - the organ player, the drummer, the bass player. They’re all in a circle around him.

“That first night we got together, we wrote eight songs. I was talking to Willie about that. He thought that was astounding. So I asked if he liked the album. He said, ‘Of course, I like it. My only problem is I didn’t get to produce it.’ But he wished me well, hugged me and said, ‘Hey man, a fine album.’”

What Lay It Down shares with the preceding Blue Note records is Green’s boundless vocal exuberance. At 62, the gleam and fire of his falsetto and the sheer jubilance of his phrasing haven’t diminished.  The singer admits he takes care of himself, walks 3 ½ miles every morning and again, “at a very brisk pace,” in the evening.

“I’m still striving to be the best,” Green said. “The girl singers in our band say, ‘What are you trying to do when you’re out there onstage singing that hard?’ I say, ‘I’m trying to perfect something.’ And they’ll go, “Perfect something? This music was perfected when you cut it.’”

With that, the laughter pours out again like a waterfall. “I guess my music is like an oil painting. I just try to touch it up - a little blue here, maybe a little red or white. I just want to perfect it so when I’m done with it, I can say, ‘Now I can sign my name at the bottom of it and present it.’ That’s it.”

When asked if he had a favorite song among those paintings, Green momentarily fell silent before using audience reception on his recent North American and European tours as a gauge.

“Whether it’s overseas or in America, it’s going to be Let’s Stay Together. On that one, everyone stands, everyone sings and everyone dances. And then Al comes out and throws flowers and roses everywhere (reviews of Green’s recent shows attest to the latter). It’s just a song that makes everyone come together.”

Of course, when Al Green, soul superstar and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, isn’t touring the world, he remains Rev. Al to the members of the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Memphis. But while concert audiences and church congregations may approach his music with different forms of devotion, Green says spiritual and secular followings are more similar than either realize.

“Man, I find life similar,” Green said. “And I always will. If we look at ourselves, we will fine we have more in common than our differences. Take both groups and put them together and you have the answer because if you smile, the whole world is going to smile with you. But if you’re a cry baby, well you’ll just be crying by yourself.” 

Al Green performs at 8 p.m. Nov. 18 at Newlin Hall at the Norton Center for the Arts, Centre College in Danville. Tickets are $60, $70, $80. Call (877) 448-7469.

mates of state: kori gardner and jason hammel . photo by cracker farm.

OK, let’s address the seemingly biggest shift in Mates of State’s music right off the bat.

Since its inception over a decade ago, the husband and wife duo of Jason Hammel and Kori Kardner constructed their luminously bright indie pop songs almost exclusively on drums and keyboards. And not just any keyboards, mind you - but a ‘70s organ with a huge, swelling and marvelously organic sound.

Hammel and Kardner wrote songs on it. They recorded with it. They dragged the thing out on the road. As the duo’s popularity grew, the organ became viewed as one of the most recognizable, distinctive and ultimately essential components of the Mates of State sound.

So why is it then that the instrument’s presence on the band’s new Re-Arrange Us album has been so severely downsized? The reason boils down to an ages-old artistic urge: the desire for change.

“We had been writing songs on that big, vintage organ for over four albums now,” Hammel said. “And we were like, ‘You know what? We’re getting kind of bored with this sound. Let’s use a bunch of other sounds and see of we can still maintain the energy of Mates of State.

“That was our biggest concern. Was the organ - or the lack of it, really - detrimental to that energy? Thankfully, we found out that it wasn’t.”

That explains why the first thing you hear as Re-Arrange Us comes to life isn’t organ, but a gentle, solitary hammering of piano. But when Gardner’s soothing vocals and the equally evocative pop melody of the album’s lead-off tune, Get Better, kick in, you realize what really rules Mates of State’s sunny, though sometimes bittersweet sound: vocals and truckloads of alert pop hooks.

In short, the real change on Re-Arrange Us isn’t in the band’s overall sound, but in the choice of tools employed to create it.

“We found out it was the vocals that really explained what we are,” Hammel said.

And the pop sensibility within the band’s music? Hammel confessed that evolved over time and a few fairly unexpected influences.

“You would be surprised. I listened to a lot of metal when I was in junior high. Then I got into skateboarding, so I got into skate punk. When I got into college, I started listening more to college indie rock. Once I got out, that’s when I started to get into the more classic music by Leonard Cohen, The Beatles, Pink Floyd and Nick Cave. Right now, I’d say they are my biggest influences. But at an early age, it was metal and punk rock.”

Another highly unexpected inspiration that played a major role in the evolution of Mates of State’s music was Ira Glass, host and producer of public radio’s This American Life. When Glass mounted a touring production of the show in 2007, he invited Hammel and Gardner along. But instead of organ, Gardner found herself playing piano.

“We really felt a sense of accomplishment as a band being able to play alongside Ira and the calibre of his writers,” Hammel said.

“We were playing big, sit down, 3,000 seat capacity theatres in cities like Boston, New York, Seattle and Chicago. For the shows, we played maybe five or six songs, just piano and drums. That kind of gave us the impetus to start mixing up our own tours a little bit. We could still have tours where it would just be straight up rock with the two of us. But there could also be tours where there might be various configurations of instruments to portray our sound in ways that would be different and fun.

An example of the latter came when Mates of State toured over the summer. For newer songs off of Re-Arrange Us, the duo became a quartet with the addition of brothers Anton and Lewis Patzner, the cellist and violinist from the California “string metal” band Judgement Day. When Hammel and Gardner play tonight at The Dame, multi-instrumentalist (and Mates of State tour manager) Chris Cosgrove will sit in for roughly half of the performance.

Truth to tell, Hammel and Gardner have two permanent additions to their touring entourages that most audiences never get to see - their daughters Magnolia and June. It seems the family that plays together does indeed stay together.

“We definitely have an untraditional lifestyle,” Hammel said. “But it’s not that odd or strange, really. We are able to do what we love and still have a family. That’s not to say we don’t go through a lot of the same tribulations of anyone else who works, is an artist or has a family.

“It’s really the only way we can make things work. If Kori and I were in different bands, it would be very difficult. I know we wouldn’t want to be away from each other for the amount of time it would take to properly work with those bands. So we feel fortunate. We feel satisfied. But we’re never complacent. We want more.”

Mates of State and Brother Reade perform at 8 tonight at The Dame, 367 East Main. Tickets are $10 advance and $12 at the door. Call (859) 231-7263.

the soweto gospel choir performs tonight in danville.

As he speaks from his hotel room in Vancouver, British Columbia, Kevin Williams is half-a-world away from home. But as a three year member of the Soweto Gospel Choir, he has become a versed global traveler.

In short, Williams carries home with him. As one of the Grammy-winning choir’s 27 touring vocalists, he brings his faith, voice and message of hope wherever he travels.

“As individuals, you can find yourself by yourself,” said the native of Durban, South Africa. “You could be in your hotel room, where you often look at pictures and think of home. But as a choir, we are family. When we’re together, we’re home. When we’re onstage, we know our family members are around us. It takes our mind off the distance of home and the measure of love we’re missing. But we receive that same measure within the choir.”

In just over six years, the Soweto Gospel Choir and become one of the most visible world music enterprises to emerge out of post-Apartheid South Africa. Formed as a self-described “super choir” by musical director David Mulovhedzi, the choir gathered singers predominantly in their late teens and twenties from Soweto and Johannesburg.

“Growing up in South Africa, we knew, as did our parents’ and our parents’ parents, that one of the main ways of communication was through music,” Williams said. “That music speaks through many tongues in many different ways. But the songs always make you feel loved. They make you feel good about yourself. It has really made a difference in our lives, especially the spiritual side of the music.”

Language is seldom a barrier for the choir, Williams said, as the population of South Africa speaks 11 officially recognized languages. Within the choir itself, several members speak four or more languages. Some are fluent in as many as eight. On the choir’s new concert CD/DVD Live at the Nelson Mandela Theatre, songs are predominantly sung in zulu and sotho, although introductions and explanations are provided in English.

Then there is the repertoire. Much of the music is a capella. Some is augmented by percussion. Other tunes enhance the singing with surprisingly Americanized rhythm sections. Similarly, mixed in with the predominantly traditional African music are established American hymns (Amazing Grace) and even pop songs with strongly spiritual casts, such as Bob Marley’s One Love and Bob Dylan’s I’ll Remember You.

“It’s the meaning and the motives behind these songs that inspire us,” Williams said. “One of the songs on the album is called World in Union. We see that as a plan. As a group from South Africa, we one day hope for a universe of people standing as one.”

For now, though, a number of high profile fans are standing with the Soweto Gospel Choir’s message of faith and unity. Some are cultural heroes, including former South African president Nelson Mandela. Last summer, the choir performed as part of an all-star concert honoring Mandela’s 90^th birthday (other invitees included Annie Lennox, Quincy Jones and Sidney Poitier). Others are non-African artists that have helped introduce the world to world music. Leading that list is Peter Gabriel, who collaborated with the choir on Down to Earth, the closing credits tune from last summer’s Disney/Pixar robot flick Wall-E.

“He was one of the guys who really motivated us while we worked with him,” Williams said of Gabriel. “We’ve been really touched by his songs and just by his presence alone.”

But Williams stressed that the choir’s spiritual fervency is expressed generously in any company, be it the Canadian crowd the group performed for recently, the Kentucky audience that will be waiting at Danville’s Norton Center for the Arts tonight or the South African communities that will greet Williams and his mates when the choir’s sense of home finally returns home.

“We are the Soweto Gospel Choir,” he said. “The name alone should tell you we sing gospel music. In everything we do, we put God first. So everybody in Kentucky should look forward to a blessed time with us. Come to expect, come to receive, come to accept a different sound and a different style of music.”

Soweto Gospel Choir performs at 8 p.m. tonight at the Norton Center for the Arts at Centre College in Danville. Tickets ate $40, $45 and $50. Call (877) 448-7469.

drew carman and dylan solise of the corduroy road.

Banjoist Drew Carman and guitarist Dylan Solise couldn’t help but combine their respective musical preferences on their debut recording project.

For the two former Lexingtonians and Henry Clay High School grads now living in the vast musical haven of Athens, Georgia, that meant blending Carman’s interest in old time string and mountain music, especially the kind chronicled by the Whitesburg-based roots music co-op June Appal, and Solise’s enjoyment of indie pop, particularly the type cultivated by the celebrated Elephant 6 collective that was inspired by late ‘60s psychedelia.

The catalyst for the duo’s music, though, was the progressive string music of acts like Old Crow Medicine Show and The Avett Brothers that pumped new generation drive into decades-old acoustic sounds.

“When we first went into the studio, it was supposed to be a smaller project - just a self-financed thing,” Solise said. “We wanted to get as much for our time as possible, so we ripped through it and cut about 17 songs over about 2 or 3 weekends. It came out to about 5 days of recording. We planned to put what we had out ourselves and sell it on the road. Then, thru the studio, we got in touch with a record label here in Athens (Mule Train Records) that really wanted to help us to expand what we were doing.”

The result is a new six-song EP disc and the subsequent addition of bassist Tim Helms and drummer John Cable. While Carman and Solise have performed locally as a guitar/banjo duo, the most recent instance being a summer show at Al’s Bar, this weekend marks the local debut of the full quartet lineup as well as the release of the new EP. The name of the band, as well as the recording, is The Corduroy Road.  

“As Dylan and I started out as a duo, it was very limiting with just guitar and banjo and our vocals,” Carman said. “Now with some of these other instruments, we can really start to put meat on that skeleton that we worked up with our songs.”

The instrumentation and vocal harmonies of The Corduroy Road suggest bluegrass. But on tunes such as Desperate Man, a blend of piano, banjo and pedal steel guitar create a far more evocative and atmospheric presence.

“When it was just Drew and myself playing, we got pegged as a bluegrass band quite a bit,” Solise said. “A lot of that just had to do with the fact was have banjo in what we do. Obviously our sound is indebted to bluegrass in a number of ways. But I’ve never really tried to adhere to that tradition strictly. While I definitely respect that, I’m more interested in combining all those influences to create something different.”

To put that combination into practice, the full quartet lineup of The Corduroy Road have begun work on a full-length album with help from producer/engineer John Keane, a fabled member of the Athens music community who has worked with, among many others, Widespread Panic.

“I’ve got tons of his records here at the house that I listen to,” Solise said. “This is a really neat opportunity for us to be able to work with him for our next record and bridge that gap a little more between modern music and that great music from the past”.

The Corduroy Road performs at 10 p.m. tonight at The Fishtank, 500 E. Euclid. Cover charge is $5. Call (859) 254-3474