NEWS FOR YOUR HEART: THE MUSIC OF
JEFF & VIDA "I said hello She said don't start Listen boy I've got news for your heart." -----"News for the Heart," Vida Wakeman and Jeff Burke Don't worry that it's a woman singing this song of a husband who's done been left. Just listen to the lead
singer and the way her voice meshes with the harmony vocal. Vida Wakeman has a voice that can be as sweet as molasses and that can blister paint. Jeff Burke sings perfect accompaniment and plays guitar,
mandolin, and banjo with a fresh crispness. When you first hear them live, you will probably be overwhelmed at the energy and enthusiasm powering their performance. That's how I heard them first and the
sound coming from the duo on the stage was bigger than you often hear produced by full groups. You haven't heard Jeff & Vida until you've heard them live and once you do you'll want to hear them again.
But when you get your copy of their cd One Horse Town
--it's available at their gigs--and take it home, you realize that this is not only a fine cd but it's also is the kind of recording you might find yourself putting on at 3 in the morning. In fact, Jeff
& Vida have been taking on some American giants in a most unpretentious way. They're written a Dust Bowl ballad a half-century after Woody Guthrie wrote his; the title "Love is Just an Empty
Word" can't help but put you in mind of Bob Dylan. Vida's singing can be as raw and haunting as Maybelle Carter or as sassy of Loretta Lynn. Lynn herself could have sung Jeff & Vida's "I'll
Give You My Heart." Back when he was young, Bob Dylan tried to explain where his music came from. "Call it historical-traditional music," he said. "It comes from legends, Bibles,
plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death." Jeff prefers to call their music Americana. "I know it's sort of a broad, sweeping term but that's what I like about it," Jeff told me.
"It gives the music a lot of leeway to swing back and forth through various styles." He pointed out that their songs "Seven Years" was bluegrass, "I'll Give You My Heart"
honky-tonk, while "One Horse Town" he considers folk. "All these forms of music have been fragmented and genrefied over the past 50 years or so, but they all come out of the same pot where
they used to intermingle and develop and now I think the term Americana lets them do that again." They've written one song that might be called a murder ballad--"Road to Abilene"--an
old-fashioned factory girl song, a song about a ghostly lover, and lots of songs about lovers and their betrayers. One of their most memorable songs so far must be "The Land that You Love," a
simultaenous lament and prophecy about the Dust Bowl and, just maybe, the landscape inside the singer's head. "Board up them windows boys Ye who love the earth There's a dust storm coming You'll die breathing dirt." None of these songs sound "old-timey" any more than "old-timey" music did when it was new.
Jeff & Vida have rooted themselves firmly in the imaginative ground of America. Ghostly lovers, hard times, betrayals--some stories just never stop happening. It's all news for your heart. May, 2001Mike West is a Very Skinny Man About a year and a half ago I stumbled into the Kerry
Irish Pub on Decatur Street here in New Orleans around midnight on a rainy night. In the bar was the barman and two customers, talking among themselves, and at the back of the bar was Mike West with
Sneaky Pete on bass, performing just as if the joint was packed. Mike sang songs he'd written himself and moved from mandolin, to banjo, to a Kay 200-style acoustic guitar. The music sounded like
it might be traditional but the lyrics were incisive and contemporary. You could call it Americana, but bear in mind Mike isn't an American.Mike West is from Australia and has turned himself into a
Ninth Ward New Orleanian--if somebody from the Ninth Ward came be expected to play banjo. Mike sometimes describes himself as an urban hillbilly, a designation he could share with Jimmie Rodgers.
Mike West wrote a song about Jimmie and it sounds at first purely light-hearted. Maybe it is and I'm over-thinking. The principal observation Mike makes about Jimmie Rodgers is that he was a very
skinny man. True enough and hardly news. But before the song comes to an end, Mike compares Jimmie Rodgers' authentic skinniness and the image of Elvis Presley being sold at Graceland:
"If you go to Graceland and you pay to get in You can see all the King's jumpsuits have been taken in To fit all these skinny little Elvis mannequins
Yes they want you to think that Elvis was thin." And here you start wondering if being skinny is some kind of metaphor for authenticity. And of course you know already why Jimmie Rodgers
was skinny--he had tuberculosis his entire performing career and did his last recordings playing guitar and singing propped up with pillows in an easy chair. TB killed him before he turned
thirty-six. Jimmie Rodgers was a very skinny man because he was dying. Mike West knows this. Whatever point Mike is making in a song, he's likely to come at it obliquely. He's not afraid
that the listener won't make the connection. One of his most beautiful songs, "House Full of Flowers," discusses flower deliveries but is about the death of Mike's father. "Snow In
New Orleans" summons up a man's way of thinking by his insistence that the most amazing thing he'd seen, in his whole vivid life, was snow inNew Orleans. "Melissa", a brutal
tour-de-force, portrays a man who's so hemmed in by his own rage the only way he tries to communicate with his daughter is by violence toward her lover. Mike West plays in New Orleans much of the time and
occasionally tours. He's made several cds, including one with Myshkin, all of which are available through the Mike West/Myshkin web site: http://www.mojono.com/mm/
His two most recent, Home and 16 Easy Songs for Drill and Banjo were released by Binky and should be available at your local music store.
If they aren't, holler until they are. Having Tea With the Grand Duchy This world of ours is full of country girls that
got out and full of people back home who don't understand why they left or what they're doing now. Myshkin dedicated the cd Why Do All the Country Girls Leave
to "all the girls that come this way" and her song "Dallas" to "all of us who made it out however we could." Myshkin was kind of a country girl herself--she grew up in Indiana--but she got out. The three women in the song "Country Girls," the ones who now live in Hong Kong, Sidney, and the Australian bush and have tea once a week with the grand duchy, are Australian but the story happens all over the world and runs all through Myshkin's music.
There's Ariel Angelo, working at a highway gas station, who would explain herself by saying "Nebraska is flat and she'll never go back" and asks "if you stop for gas some night don't treat
her like she's stupid or sad or naive." There's the waitress from Dallas who's left the father of her children and is scared that some night at the end of her shift she'll break down and phone
him. In "Milk and Honey" there's the girls from the Old Country, the immigrants who love America and are doomed to die foreigners. Listening to Myshkin, herself the child of immigrants,
you realize if we are a nation of immigrants, we must be a nation of girls who left home, and that restlessness and hope alike are our legacy. And Memphis Minnie has as much claim to the road as Hank
Williams. If I give the impression that this remarkable singer/songwriter only sings about country girls, I've misled you. Like most artists, she has themes to which she returns, but she's is no more
limited thematically than she is musically--which is to say not at all. Myshkin has been described as a punk torch-singer, a term more quotable than helpful. But there is no category that would
include the range of her music. Why Do All the Country Girls Leave has songs Myshkin designates variously as rock, comparsa, polka, and--shades of Nanci Griffith's
"folkabilly"--ska-billy. When asked about her musical influences, she says everything from Patti Smith to Bessie Smith, but singles out Bob Dylan, another singer/songwriter who shakes off
categories like a dog shaking off fleas. Myshkin told me that "I have a new band I’m very excited about, called Myshkin's Ruby Warblers. My old drummer, Scott Magee, and a new bass player, John Lutz.
Scott has a very interesting experimental band in town called Muvovum, and John leads a tango band called Mi Longa, so what they both bring to the project makes for an interesting thing, more grooving
than anything I’ve done before, plus I’m writing all these gypsy waltzes and spanishy things lately, so we are making a new sound." Anybody coming down to New Orleans for the Jazz
Fest can find them playing at the Spotted Cafe as well as the festival itself. They'll also be touring soon. |
