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COLUMN OF THE WEEK
May-June 2013

Workshops of the 8th Ever Los Angeles Old Time Social

By David Bragger

My very, most favorite, super awesomest, out-of-control, spectacular musical event in L.A. is The Los Angeles Old Time Social. This year from May 16-18th is the 8th Ever LAOTS and I’m chomping at the bit to help get it started! It is a volunteer and community driven 3-day event that brings people together to listen, perform, dance, study and play old time music. So naturally it’s my favorite annual event in the city. Each year the turnout grows exponentially and I am proud to be teaching and coordinating the workshops this year.

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CD REVIEWS

TITLE: ROOM ENOUGH FOR ALL

ARTIST: BATTLEFIELD BAND

LABEL: TEMPLE RECORDS

RELEASE DATE: April 8 2013

By Andy Doerr

The Battlefield Band recently played on my show the Roadtunes Sessions on KCSB FM 91.9 at UC Santa Barbara and by happy coincidence soon after I was asked to write this, my first ever, review.

The Battlefield Band has a storied history beginning in 1969 and counts as one of the bands that, along with the Tannahill Weavers in Scotland and bands like The Bothy Band and Planxty in Ireland, brought a spirit of innovation to traditional music and thereby brought this regional folk music to a much broader audience. Their latest release, Room Enough for All, continues in that spirit and the current lineup of Michael Katz, Alasdair White, Ewen Henderson, and Sean O’Donnell continue the band’s longstanding tradition of moving “forward with Scotland’s past.”

The recording gets off to a rousing start with Sean singing Bagpipe Music a song penned by Irish poet Louis MacNeice in the 1930s, that at first reminded me of a nonsense song like Bedlam Boys covered by Old Blind Dogs among others, but is in fact about, as MacNeice himself stated, the “cultural decline of the highlands” and the attendant collision between folk culture and the spread of urban culture into the rural north. Like the song In Contempt by Aaron Kramer, also on this record, but very different in presentation, Bagpipe Music takes its place in the long line of Scottish activist songs, that transcend the local and give voice to the universal struggle for justice and dignity as the times are inexorably a changin’

TITLE: IF IT AIN’T HERE WHEN I GET BACK

ARTIST: BRUCE MOLSKY

LABEL: TREE FROG MUSIC

RELEASE DATE: 2013

By Sylvia Toor Cumming

Bruce Molsky - IF IT AINT HERE WHEN I GET BACK I am a die-hard Bruce Molsky fan and have a true jones for his fiddling. For him to do wrong, he would have to do something really weird, like an Alvin-and-the-Chipmunks-style Hawaiian slack-key klezmer album. Fortunately, he’s not done that.

If It Ain’t Here When I Get Back is an album of what Bruce Molsky does best: bare-bones simple American folk, with a solo Bruce playing fiddle, banjo, and guitar and occasionally singing. It’s brave music. A musician’s mettle is proven in solo work, and Molsky proves he’s a pro at deceptive simplicity. Not an out-of-tune note, not a missed chord, and acoustically true.

The music is unpretentious and gorgeous, and it satisfies, in the truest sense of the word, that craving for honesty that much popular music lacks. It sounds as though he sat down one afternoon on your front porch and gave you a solo concert.

Molsky starts the album with Wreck Of the Dandenong, an Australian shipwreck tune sung to a fiddle accompaniment.

UPCOMING EVENT PICKS

Saturday, May 18, 2013

LOS ANGELES OLD TIME SOCIAL

JOSHUA TREE ROOTS MUSIC FESTIVAL

JACK TEMPCHIN

MARCIA BALL

Sunday, May 19, 2013

JOSHUA TREE ROOTS MUSIC FESTIVAL

TOPANGA BANJO FIDDLE CONTEST & FOLK FESTIVAL

MASANGA MARIMBA ENSEMBLE

Wednesday, May 22, 2013