What Makes a Good Music Doc with Joe McAdam

Name: VHS Collection
Start: 2019-3-22T19-19-00-00
End: 2019-3-22T23-23-55-00
Location: U Street Music Hall

Brandon WetherbeeFebruary 7, 2019

BYT RadioFilm & TVInterviewsMusic 01 min read

BYT contributor Joe McAdam joins the show to chat about our recent Music Doc Guide, specifically Some Kind of Monster.

See Butt on Saturday, February 9 at Dynasty Typewriter in Los Angeles. See the You, Me, Them, Everybody Live 11 hour live show marathon Saturday, February 9 at The Wonderland Ballroom in Washington, D.C.

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22mar7:00 pmVHS Collection9:30 Club Presents7:00 pm U Street Music Hall

22mar7:00 pmRailroad EarthAll Good Presents...7:00 pm 9:30 Club

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There’s a great scene in The Last Waltz – the documentary about The Band’s final concert – where director Martin Scorsese is discussing music with drummer/singer/mandolin player Levon Helm. Helm says, “If it mixes with rhythm, and if it dances, then you’ve got a great combination of all those different kinds of music: country, bluegrass, blues music, show music…”
To which Scorsese, the inquisitive interviewer, asks, “What’s it called, then?”
“Rock & roll!”
Clearly looking for a more specific answer, but realizing that he isn’t going to get one, Marty laughs. “Rock & roll…”
Well, that’s the way it is sometimes: musicians play music, and don’t necessarily worry about where it gets filed. It’s the writers, record labels, managers, etc., who tend to fret about what “kind” of music it is.
And like The Band, the members of Railroad Earth aren’t losing sleep about what “kind” of music they play – they just play it. When they started out in 2001, they were a bunch of guys interested in playing acoustic instruments together. As Railroad Earth violin/vocalist Tim Carbone recalls, “All of us had been playing in various projects for years, and many of us had played together in different projects. But this time, we found ourselves all available at the same time.”
Songwriter/lead vocalist Todd Sheaffer continues, “When we started, we only loosely had the idea of getting together and playing some music. It started that informally; just getting together and doing some picking and playing. Over a couple of month period, we started working on some original songs, as well as playing some covers that we thought would be fun to play.”
Shortly thereafter, they took five songs from their budding repertoire into a studio and knocked out a demo in just two days. Their soon-to-be manager sent that demo to a few festivals, and – to the band’s surprise – they were booked at the prestigious Telluride Bluegrass Festival before they’d even played their first gig. This prompted them to quickly go in and record five more songs; the ten combined tracks of which made up their debut album, “The Black Bear Sessions.”
That was the beginning of Railroad Earth’s journey: since those early days, they’ve gone on to release five more critically acclaimed studio albums and one hugely popular live one called, “Elko.” They’ve also amassed a huge and loyal fanbase who turn up to support them in every corner of the country, and often take advantage of the band’s liberal taping and photo policy. But Railroad Earth bristle at the notion of being lumped into any one “scene.” Not out of animosity for any other artists: it’s just that they don’t find the labels very useful. As Carbone points out, “We use unique acoustic instrumentation, but we’re definitely not a bluegrass or country band, which sometimes leaves music writers confused as to how to categorize us. We’re essentially playing rock on acoustic instruments.”
Ultimately, Railroad Earth’s music is driven by the remarkable songs of front-man, Todd Sheaffer, and is delivered with seamless arrangements and superb musicianship courtesy of all six band members. As mandolin/bouzouki player John Skehan points out, “Our M.O. has always been that we can improvise all day long, but we only do it in service to the song. There are a lot of songs that, when we play them live, we adhere to the arrangement from the record. And other songs, in the nature and the spirit of the song, everyone knows we can kind of take flight on them.” Sheaffer continues: “The songs are our focus, our focal point; it all starts right there. Anything else just comments on the songs and gives them color. Some songs are more open than others. They ‘want’ to be approached that way – where we can explore and trade musical ideas and open them up to different territories. But sometimes it is what the song is about.”
So: they can jam with the best of them and they have some bluegrass influences, but they use drums and amplifiers (somewhat taboo in the bluegrass world). What kind of music is it then? Mandolin/vocalist John Skehan offers this semi-descriptive term: “I always describe it as a string band, but an amplified string band with drums.” Tim Carbone takes a swing: “We’re a Country & Eastern band! ” Todd Sheaffer offers “A souped-up string band? I don’t know. I’m not good at this.” Or, as a great drummer/singer/mandolin player with an appreciation for Americana once said: “Rock & roll!”

Time

22 (Friday) 7:00 pm

Location

9:30 Club

815 V ST NW, Washington, DC 20001

Cost

$28

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23mar2:30 pmBlack Dreams at Sea: The Sardine Fisherman’s Funeral and An Opera of the World2:30 pm National Gallery of Art, East Building Auditorium

23mar6:30 pmWhinderson Nunes6:30 pm Lincoln Theatre

23mar7:00 pmRailroad EarthAll Good Presents...7:00 pm 9:30 Club

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Time

(Saturday) 7:00 pm

Location

9:30 Club

815 V ST NW, Washington, DC 20001

Cost

$28

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23mar7:00 pmThe Barr Brothers9:30 Club Presents7:00 pm U Street Music Hall

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https://youtu.be/FTY9EbGAL9Q

The Barr Brothers – Queens of the Breakers

“You just try to see the thing
for what it is
and what it is
is
a heartbreaking,
soulshaking,
overwhelming
exhalation.”

– “Defibrillation”

To begin their third album, The Barr Brothers had to make some noise together. No plans or distractions, no preconceptions. No friends or strangers, label reps or engineers, no cellphone trills or city sound. No partners. No children. Not even any notebooks of lyrics – verses, choruses, chords preconsidered and plotted out. For the first time the band’s three members – namesake siblings Brad and Andrew Barr, harpist Sarah Pagé – would go songless into studio. Empty-handed, whole-hearted, down miles of snowy road to a cabin on a frozen lake, a place full of windows and microphones and starlight and sunshine, with amplifiers in the bedrooms, their volumes turned up loud.

They spent a whole week playing. These were improvisations lasting hours at a time – noons and midnights, dusks and dawns, a chance to remember who they were and who they were becoming. Some of this was groove: patterns inspired by India, West Africa and 808 drum machines, deeper and heavier than what they’d tried before. Some of it came from Pagé’s new inventions: humbuckers, Kleenex-box signal-splitters, hacks to make her harp into a versatile, sub-bass-booming noisemaker. But there was also plain old guitar – songs opened up by that big electric sound. Brad had asked, “How do we make music when there is no song?” The answer was this roaming, three-dimensional music, filled with nostalgia and experiments and rolling space, found on the fringes of Saint Zenon, Québec (pop. 1,1150).

The stakes felt high. The success of 2014’s Sleeping Operator had taken the band from Montreal to Nashville to Milan, from the Newport Folk Festival to The Late Show with David Letterman. By now everyone knew the story of the American brothers who had decamped for Canada; how they had discovered Pagé by hearing her harp through a shared apartment wall. LP3 would be brought into a world where Trump was president. Where both Barrs were fathers. And where thousands of fans were waiting for the band’s next volley.

Queens of the Breakers was born in three sessions at that cabin in the country, a place called the Wild Studio. Brad took those first free sounds and distilled them into tidal, seeking songs – stories of the way lovers and companions fall in and out of sync. More recording followed at Studio Mixart, in Montreal, and at the group’s own boiler-room of a practice space. The result is this: 11 tracks of blazing courage and failing resolve; music suffused with low grooves and darting melodies, subtle breakages, the Barr Brothers’ wide-open sense of the blues.

Some of this album takes place in the past. “Song That I Heard”, with its memories of Brad’s arrival in Montreal, the different ways he fell in love. Or Queens’ title track, which revisits the Barrs’ misspent youth – a gang of friends rambling through Rhode Island mansions, dressed in their mothers’ dresses, wreaking small havocs. How many of our old friends do we still see? How many of those dreams came true? At times the sound’s all twinkling, the score for a lost John Hughes film; at other times it’s whetted, searching, like the stuff of Lhasa de Sela or Led Zeppelin’s III.

The rawest reminder of Queens’ first jams appears on “Kompromat”, which bristles with rattle and riff, Pagé’s kora-like harp. “I think we’re in love with your abuse,” Brad snarls at his homeland. “You got one hand on the driver’s wheel / in the other a noose.” On Queens of the Breakers’ magnificent opening cut, “Defibrillation”, the reckoning is softer – but not necessarily kinder. “Defibrillation” was built atop a drumbeat, something Andrew found at a hospital one Christmas night. Sitting with his mother, holding her hand – she had fallen, needed stitches – he observed a pair of heart monitors, each connected to a different, unseen person’s pulse. They were beating together, then not, and not: parting and crisscrossing. He tried to memorize the pattern. Later, at home, he learned to play it on bass-drum and snare and tom. When he sent the beat to his brother, Brad sent back the beginnings of this: a song like a letter from a father to his son. “I just thought I’d save you some time,” he offers, “straighten it out here / make it rhyme.” Still, the singer’s not peddling fake wisdom . For all its striving, “Defibrillation” is a letter without answers, a gesture into space, a lament for the dither that exists between every human being.

It’s this tension, this dither, that lives at the centre of Queens of the Breakers. Three players – friends, comrades, music-makers, all of them trying to play in sync. Three bandmates – each of them fumbling, remembering, trying to invent something together. A band still playing, even occasionally reimagining, their rock’n’roll.

Time

(Saturday) 7:00 pm

Location

U Street Music Hall

1115 U Street NW Washington, DC, 20009

Cost

$21

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25mar6:30 pmMeow Meow and Thomas Lauderdale6:30 pm Lincoln Theatre

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Post-post-modern diva Meow Meow has hypnotized, inspired, and terrified audiences globally. The spectacular crowd-surfing queen of song had her New York Pops debut in 2015 at Forest Hills Stadium with Pink Martini, and her London Philharmonic debut in 2013 as Jenny in Brecht/Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper in Paris’ Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and London’s Royal Festival Hall. She sold out her Lincoln Center American Songbook Series and Sydney Opera House concerts, toured the concert halls of Australia with Barry Humphries and the Australian Chamber Orchestra singing 1920‘s works from Weimar Germany, and in 2014 performed contemporary opera with the LA Philharmonic in Andriessen’s De Materie and for Pina Bausch Company with their Fest für Pina 40 season in Germany, followed by an extended season of the award-winning original music comedy work Feline Intimate in London at the Southbank Centre and again a critically acclaimed season at London’s Southbank with her Apocalypse Meow. Meow starred on London’s West End in Kneehigh Theatre and Michel Legrand’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and in her own solo concerts at the legendary Apollo Theatre. David Bowie, Pina Bausch and Mikhail Baryshnikov are amongst her curators, and she has created works for festivals from Shanghai to Wroclaw as well as performing everything from Schubert and Schumann with orchestra to touring with punk outfit Amanda Palmer and The Dresden Dolls.

Named One of the Top Performers of the Year by the New Yorker, multi-award winning Meow Meow has been called “Sensational” (the Times UK), “diva of the highest order” (New York Post), “The Queen of Chanson” by the Berliner Zeitung, and “a phenomenon” by the Australian press. She opened Berkeley Rep’s 2014 season with the new music theatre work An Audience with Meow Meow. Upcoming: Brecht/Weill’s Die Sieben Todsünden for Orchestra Victoria, and further collaborations with the Australian Chamber Orchestra from Slovenia to Sydney Opera House, further performances with Oregon Symphony , with Pink Martini and the London Philharmonic. Meow’s albums Vamp and Songs from a Little Match Girl are available on iTunes. meowmeowrevolution.com

THOMAS M. LAUDERDALE (piano)

Thomas Lauderdale was raised on a plant nursery in rural Indiana. He began piano lessons at age six with Patricia Garrison. When his family moved to Portland in 1982, he began studying with Sylvia Killman, who to this day continues to serve as his coach and mentor. He has appeared as soloist with numerous orchestras and ensembles, including the Oregon Symphony, the Seattle Symphony, the Portland Youth Philharmonic, Chamber Music Northwest and Oregon Ballet Theatre (where he collaborated with choreographer James Canfield and visual artists Storm Tharp and Malia Jensen on a ballet based on Felix Salten’s Bambi, written in 1923).

In 2008, he played Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F with the Oregon Symphony under the direction of Christoph Campestrini. Lauderdale returned as soloist with the Oregon Symphony in multiple concerts in 2011, and again in 2015, under the direction of Carlos Kalmar. In 2017, he and his partner Hunter Noack created and performed a dazzling, rhapsodic two-piano arrangement of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with choreographer Nicolo Fonte for Oregon Ballet Theatre.

Active in Oregon politics since a student at U.S. Grant High School (where he was student body president), Thomas served under Portland Mayor Bud Clark and Oregon governor Neil Goldschmidt. In 1991, he worked under Portland City Commissioner Gretchen Kafoury on the drafting and passage of the city’s civil rights ordinance. He graduated with honors from Harvard with a degree in History and Literature in 1992. He spent most of his collegiate years, however, in cocktail dresses, taking on the role of “cruise director” … throwing waltzes with live orchestras and ice sculptures, disco masquerades with gigantic pineapples on wheels, midnight swimming parties, and operating a Tuesday night coffeehouse called Café Mardi.

Instead of running for political office, Lauderdale founded Pink Martini in 1994 to play political fundraisers for progressive causes such as civil rights, the environment, affordable housing and public broadcasting. In addition to his work with Pink Martini, Lauderdale is currently working on three different recording projects with international superstar and singing sensation Meow Meow, the surf band Satan’s Pilgrims and singer/civil rights leader Kathleen Saadat.

In Spring 2008, Lauderdale completed his first film score for Chiara Clemente’s documentary Our City Dreams, a portrait of five New York City-based women artists of different generations. In 2016, Lauderdale created the score and three featured songs for the Belgian film Souvenir, starring the legendary French actress Isabelle Huppert.

Lauderdale currently serves on the boards of the Oregon Symphony, Pioneer Courthouse Square, the Oregon Historical Society, Confluence Project with Maya Lin and the Derek Rieth Foundation. He lives with his partner Hunter Noack in downtown Portland, Oregon.

Time

(Monday) 6:30 pm

Location

Lincoln Theatre

1215 U Street NW, Washington, DC, 20009

Cost

$35

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26mar7:00 pmMaggie Rogersw/ Melanie Faye7:00 pm 9:30 Club

27mar7:00 pm9:00 pmFree Weekly Bar Bingo w/ Maddy's Bar7:00 pm - 9:00 pm Maddy's Bar

What Makes a Good Music Doc with Joe McAdam

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