Jenny Brook Bluegrass Festival - Thursday

Every year something magical happens to the small Weston Recreation Park just north of the precious hamlet of Weston, VT. On Wednesday morning this field surrounded by the rolling hills of central Vermont is a grassy few acres with a stream-fed swimming hole, two tennis courts, a basketball court, and a ramshackle green trimmed grey stage building labeled Jenny Brook off in a corner. On Wednesday afternoon at three the campers lined along a small dirt road are allowed to enter and set up their rigs. By Thursday noon the vendors are set up, the sound man has arrived and wired the stage, volunteers are ready to assist in all the tasks surrounding a festival, and four days of bluegrass music begin.

It's Not All Work

Gettin' Ready

Yesterday, at Jenny Brook, something truly remarkable happened. A community was created. It coalesced around a young family whose dignity, courage, and strength dominate this event. Candi Sawyer, struggling against the ever encroaching menace of multiple sclerosis, frail and sweet, maintains the vision that moves the event forward, this year for the eighth time. Seth, her amiable and talented husband, moves through the week with power, taking on the tasks of co-promoter, husband and father in an appearance of calm. Adam, age twelve, and Mathew, nine, both need medical attention, and both perform and help as they can. Mathew, who is slight and near-sighted, resembles his mother. He has had numerous spinal surgeries as he grows and has had to deal with pain for most of his life. Adam, favoring Seth, is a sunny and funny youngster on the edge of puberty who may soon need work on his spinal column, too. These four people, along with Candi’s parents form the core of a group dedicated to making this festival happen each year.

Candi Sawyer

Adam Sawyer - Thursday Emcee

Thursday at most festivals is a day set aside for people to arrive. Music usually starts around 6:00 PM, and, except at large festivals, offers just enough entertainment to divert attention as people wait for the “real” musicians to begin on Friday. Candi has different ideas. The day was devoted to showcasing new talent and to present family and friends associated with the Sawyers to perform. Around this, event itself created a sense of fellowship and appreciation that will pervade these grounds until Sunday afternoon when the few remaining people will form the circle one more time and sing together “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” as they conclude this year’s festival and begin looking forward to 2009. Altogether it will be a celebration of the healing power of music, family, caring, and love.

Breakin' Strings

Holly, Cliff, and Mandy (Breakin' Strings)

Josh Williams (Showcase Winner)

The day started off with four showcase bands chosen from applications. The bands were all enjoyable, and one was excellent. Breakin’ Strings, a young band from Maine offered strong bluegrass with lively instrumentals and solid vocals, especially from Holly Hughes and Mandy Garnet. Cliff Randall sang lead and emceed the group. Bob Hamilton, a very solid flatpicker, and Ed Howe on fiddle, filled out the band. This is a promising group worth watching for. Twelve year old Josh Williams, attractive and precocious won the vote for best showcase band and a performance slot for Friday. Breakin’ Strings had a full set Thursday afternoon.

Derek Corbett and Mathew Sawyer

The Sawyer Family Band

A rather long break was followed, allowing time for a bingo session to benefit the Shriner’s hospital program, which has provided services for Mathew Sawyer’s many surgeries. Derek Corbett, representing the Shriners gave a short introduction about the Shriners hospital programs before receiving a check from the festival with the receipts from the bingo games from Matt Sawyer. The Sawyer Brothers Band then followed with Mathew and Adam singing accompanied by Seth on guitar and Candi on bass. Seth, who has one of the best unheralded voices in bluegrass sang a little, but the focus was on the boys, who audiences at Jenny Brook have been watching develop since they were quite small. Their improvement and the delightful interplay on stage between them and their parents helped set the tone for the evening and the festival.

Brenda Mathews and Friends

Brenda Mathews

R0b Ravlin

Brenda Mathews and Friends followed with an enjoyable set of classic country music. Brenda is Candi Sawyer’s mother. She performed with grace and humor, accompanied by a strong backup band of local pickers.

Family and Friends

Harry Ralph Sr.

Butch Ralph

Harry Ralph III

Linda Ralph

The closing band was Family and Friends, the band fronted by Linda and Butch Ralph, owners of Danby Four Corners store in Danby, VT. This little country store on the back roads of this rural state is one of the top 100 Martin guitar shops in the world. They were joined by their son, Harry Jr. on fiddle and Butch’s father, Harry Sr. (84) on rhythm guitar. They sing classic country songs with the set featuring young Harry, a very fine professional fiddler, closing the set with a fine Orange Blossom Special. The entire tone of the evening set a tone of family togetherness in a special intimacy between performers and audience. The evening finished on a pleasant note as sound man Harry Grant projected cartoons and then a classic Flatt & Scruggs set on the huge screen erected in front of the stage. Jenny Brook will continue for three more days with national headliners and top notch regional bands. Headliners are the Dan Tyminski Band, the Gibson Brothers, Dan Paisley and Southern Grass, David Parmley & Continental Divide. Regional bands will be lead by Amy Gallatin & Stillwaters, Acoustic Blue, White Mountain Bluegrass, Smokey Greene, Old Time Bluegrass Singers, and the Seth Sawyer Band. Look here for pictures and some text each day for the rest of the weekend.

Faces of Bluegras

Bluegrass is my Second Language - Review

When I sat down with my advisor to prepare the defense of my doctoral dissertation, he looked at me and said, “You didn’t write the study you proposed.” I gulped and looked helpless. “But don’t worry about it,” he said, “If anyone brings up the question, we’ll just change the title.” John Santa has written an engaging book he calls a novel, but which really could be more accurately called a meditation on music, the life well-lived, friendship, and the loves of an open and likeable somewhat lost man in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. His persona somewhat reminds me of Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of John Kennedy Toole’s riotous cult novel A Confederacy of Dunces in that he sort of collides with life as he experiences it, clumsily but effectively winning over those he encounters. Meanwhile, unlike Ignatius, he is won over by them, coming to love and appreciate the bluegrass sub-culture he enters.

John Santa’s Bluegrass is my Second Language is a self published novel describing how a somewhat bumbling musician, composer, video producer, and dog lover is introduced to and then seduced by the bluegrass world of pickers and pickin’ places in central North Carolina. Not really a novel nor a memoir, Bluegrass is my Second Language can, perhaps more accurately, be called a meditation on life, music, and the oneness of it all. It’s easy to be critical about its lack of structure, the need for more editing, its language idiosyncrasies, and more, but that’s all a waste of time because the story emerging in what Santa calls Book One, is a man of generous spirit taking the risk of sharing most of his life with readers. It’s also a coming of age story in that it presents a middle-aged man of significant accomplishment discovering a new self within and developing that self in full.

When I started reading BGSL (bluegrass for Bluegrass is my Second Language), I decided to put my preconceptions (fiction or not, self-published, double spaced, ragged borders, written in faux southern dialect) aside and to just experience the book. First, I learned the narrator came to bluegrass from a rich life in music as a multi-instrument musician and composer with broad knowledge of blues, jazz, and rock informing his introduction to bluegrass. He writes of a “blind date” picking experience “…you just…listen until it tells you…what to play. So after a while you just get good at LISTENING and hearing what things ‘need.’ This song would sound great with a little lead guitar and some harmonica fills, this one a banjo pushing it along, that one a mandolin. And of course, the cello.” All of which puts Santa in a league with the great Sammy Shelor who says he just plays in response to what the singer is saying in the song, or Eric Gibson, whose backup banjo is designed to serve the purpose of the song. This is musicianship of the highest order, so I know I’m not dealing with a person hearing a new language, only a different dialect of a language he’s already deeply familiar with.

John Santa

In the second chapter, John is asked to play a gig before a large party of political folks with people he hasn’t met before, playing songs he doesn’t know and magic happens, as it often does in bluegrass. The five men coalesce and make great music from the heart. He says, “…if you play from the heart and open yourself to music and just TELL THE TRUTH, the music will LIFT YOU UP.” Santa is a musician’s writer rather than a writer’s musician. His book is an extended riff on bluegrass music, a multi-instrumental bluegrass break referencing the tune. twisting it inside out, exploring around it, getting the essence while never being slavishly tied to specific format. His background in blues and jazz emerges in every word he writes while he captures the sense, the feel, the reality of the music. Readers know that to find truth, read fiction. Great truths about bluegrass music emerge in every page of Book One of this novel. Perhaps there are more truths to be learned about bluegrass in BGSL than in Neil V. Rosenberg’s great Bluegrass: A History. That’s the nature of good fiction.

Santa does a particularly good job introducing us to his friends in music, taking us into Haleyland or Brown’s Ol’ Opry, delightful venues where musicians come together to make music. (Shameless Plug – look at my Bluegrasser’s Dream Day here or Hometown Opry here) His tributes to people like Pammy Davis the Queen of Bluegrass, the Macs, Keith, Fred Martin, the Yarbouroughs, BJ, and more are affecting and honest. Their reintroduction in the Glossary is redundant and irrelevant. Santa’s journey through bluegrass is accompanied by several dogs who are lovingly and carefully rendered. His relationship with dogs shines with love, respect, and understanding. He’s a little less successful in his picture of women, though he tries hard. Women in bluegrass have been somewhat problematic. Women, you see, have not been, despite Mother Maybelle Carter, Hazel Dickens, Emmy Lou Harris, and Alison Kraus, seen as at the center of the bluegrass world, which has largely been, until recently, a pretty exclusive boys’ club. Similarly, black people represent a tiny minority of bluegrass population in both performance and audience, despite the fact that their instrument, the banjo, imported from Africa, is absolutely indispensible in bluegrass, as is much of the blues and jazz they also contributed to American music in general and bluegrass in particular.

Pammy Davis, Queen of Bluegrass

At about the halfway point in this volume, Book One ends. I found the story complete and shed a tear at its ending, just as one should when finishing a good book and wishing it would go on. Unfortunately Santa gives in to the urge to give the reader what he thinks the reader thinks he wants. More. He therefore follows up providing two hundred and fifty pages of back story, Glossary, and acknowledgements. This addendum is not completely without merit, as it provides some interesting insights and some moving moments. All of these, however, with good editing could have been folded into the original text, where they belong. As they are presented, however, they’re self-indulgent and irrelevant. They serve to weaken a strong book. And there’s the weakness of self-publishing. It’s like walking a tightrope blind-folded. Good editorial advice and competent copy reading pull a book together, make it coherent, give it form and structure, all the things Bluegrass is my Second Language is missing. Much of Book Two would more appropriately be placed in a blog, which I dearly hope John will undertake to write and maintain.

John on TV

In the end, Bluegrass is my Second Language is worth your time and effort. Book One is a thoroughly delightful excursion into a mostly rural world which the more or less urban sophisticate stumbles into and comes to love. That’s an experience many of us have had in some way or another. John Santa brings the ear of a professional musician, the eye and sensitivity of an artist, and the wonder of a child to exploring an exciting and new world to him. You can purchase this book directly from the author for $25.00 plus $7.50 for shipping or handling or from a number of independent book stores in the University triangle.

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell - Book Review

Blink’s subtitle is The Power of Thinking without Thinking and that’s pretty much what it’s about, except it’s not. Early in the book, Gladwell, a staff writer for the New Yorker, tells several stories that set his point up for him. He describes a sculpture thought to be ancient Greek the Getty Museum acquired and was about to put on display when several noted art historians expressed instant doubt about its authenticity. He tells of an experiment in which subjects are asked to play a game with stacked cards that subtly favor the red cards over the blue cards. Players began to alter their playing behavior way before they were able to determine that card color was the determining factor. In another example, he examines the work of a psychologist who has learned to predict with a high degree of accuracy the likelihood of a marriage’s lasting or not based on a fifteen minute conversation between the couple. In each case, the knowledge of the outcome preceded the understanding of the reasons for the knowledge.

On the basis of these and many other interesting illustrative examples, Gladwell’s thesis emerges. He says the subconscious often knows the truths of which the conscious mind is unaware. He says the subconscious mind is behind a “locked door” and this is a good thing, as we open the door perhaps to our peril. He calls these insights “thin slicing,” suggesting that we can often make correct decisions based on very little data. In fact, he says, sometimes too much data works contrary to good decision-making. He talks about “priming” as a way to effect decision making without people’s know it. For instance, showing pictures of successful black people to black students about to take a test has a tendency to increase their scores.

In one chapter, Gladwell describes the “Warren Harding error” as an example suggesting that thin slicing may not always work. Harding was an extraordinarily handsome and likeable man with a deep voice and a seeming concern for people. His image was so good that people elected him president of the United States without every discovering that he was neither bright nor thoughtful. He turned out to be one of the worst presidents we ever had.

In the chapter concerned with Paul Van Riper’s war he shows the advantages of deeply informed experience over theory and data. Van Riper was a retired Marine officer with extensive combat experience in the Vietnam was as well as command experience throughout his career. Van Riper was asked to command the Red (enemy) team in a large war game conducted by the joint chiefs shortly before September 11, 2001. In these games, the Blue (allied) team had the full resources of all the systems the joint chiefs could bring to bear on conducting a simulated war in the Middle East. Van Riper, using unconventional insurgent strategies and defying behaviors expected by the Blue team commanders quickly won the war. This would all be fine, except in a second run-through all Van Riper’s assets were taken away from him and the Blue team won going away. Much of the doctrine growing from the unearned second victory became the strategy for initiating the war in Iraq. The lesson learned from this experience, says Gladwell, is that rational decision making not informed by deep experience but based on process principles takes too long and often leads to wrong decisions. In the fog of war, the neat and clean decisions made in war planning often blow up in the faces of the decision makers.

The nagging question for me, as I read this book, revolved around the situation we’re now in. A president who trusts his gut and derides book learning has made bad decision after bad decision. He met Vladimir Putin, looked into his eyes, and knew he could trust him and work with him. Putin, during the Bush administration, has managed to re-create a near dictatorship in Russia, ruthlessly crushing freedom of expression and enriching a group of vicious oligarchs. Furthermore, he catapulted us into a war based on his instinct and the bad advice of close advisors without ever listening to or acknowledging the reservations of people who had greater knowledge and expertise. In fact, he ridicules expertise frequently.

Gladwell states pretty clearly that our quick judgments improve with expertise and deep knowledge. In example after example, he shows how people’s learning helps them prepare to make the quick decisions stress situations require or to make the informed judgments required. He also shows how to avoid the unconscious prejudiced judgments we often are capable of making. For instance, in one story he describes how using a screen to hide the performers in orchestra auditions led to a German symphony’s hiring its first woman trombone player over their preconceptions that women weren’t strong enough or forceful enough to do the job. He points out that experts internalize objective criteria, making their judgments more precise. Whether the field be analyzing food’s taste, couples interactions, or musical performance, an informed critic’s assessment trumps that of a novice. He says, “…whenever we have something we are good at – something we care about – that experience and passion fundamentally change the nature of our first impression.” (pg. 184) This may be the reason that having a professional politician who’s also an attorney might generally yield a better president. Why watching a professional musician listen to music, his own or someone else’s, is such a revelation.

In the end, the lesson of Blink is that our subconscious can help us see with more insight and make better decisions, but our subconscious informed by education and expertise is an even more powerful tool. Finally, there are times when finding ways to mask our unconscious mind can allow us to avoid mistakes we might otherwise make. Gladwell’s book provides an interesting and informative stroll through the workings of human decision making and helps us understand ourselves and others in a most readable format.

Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell is published by Back Bay Books, a division of Little, Brown and Company, New York, 2005 and is available on-line, at chain book stores and from your local independent bookseller.