PHOTO: Jay Blakesburg

With:
DAROL ANGER, TIM O'BRIEN, MIKE MARSHALL, ALISON BROWN, PHIL AABERG, TODD PHILLIPS

Xmas Heritage tour report

Photos will be added as they come in and get scanned!

From Mobile, 11/17/98
Phil & I just got into Mobile,the first stop on the trip and it's a heckuva lot warmer here than Montana this time of year. The rest of the crew will be heading into town tomorrow, premeiring the show here at the local theatre and then on our big toor bus out to Atlanta. The more or less complete schedule is on SRO's web page(www.sroartists.com), and the sorta kinda complete schedule is on my page under "Concerts".

From Atlanta:
Greetings from Atlanta, Georgia...the unbroke but slightly bent Christmas Heritage Tour just rolled in on the same tour bus used by Ricky Skaggs' band last summer, complete with a little "Bluegrass Rules" framed picture in the attractively appointed lounge area. We're playing the famous gum-on-the-floor music palace Variety Theater tonight in Atlanta's historic Little Five Points, land of tie-dye and heads of the dead. Last night was the equally historic premier show of the tour, stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues. Most of the band came in the night before, by plane, bus, or taxi, including Mike Marshall who was bumped off a plane from Spain and hastened onto the stage only 2 hours before showtime. Tim couldn't make the show because the end of his tour with Jerry Douglas overlapped with this one, but he's joining us in Atlanta. We hope.
The first show went surprisingly well, given the fact that no appreciable singing got done, and the fact that Thanksgiving is still in a nebulous future. Well, one can only cram so many income-producing days in before The Big X. But the musicians (Mike Marshall, Alison Brown, Todd Phillips, Phillip Aaberg, and Yrs truly, DAnger). played incredible and the audience went bonkers and bought many many Xmas Heritage records. Drove overnight to Atlanta... Mike, with jet lag, woke up on the road and persuaded Phil to break out his brand new accordion, which he had only played for the first time the previous night (I mean accordion for the first time!! the piano viruoso acquitted himself pretty darn well, even though it was, musically, a right-hander job. What the hell do all those little buttons do, anyway?). So our ragtag little band of steady rolling early risers became the only thing you can be at that hour, a celtic band, playing mindless 16th notes in a steady stream on Gminor to F.
If you live in Atlanta, fall on by tonight, otherwise catch us at Keenan Auditorum in Wilmington, NC futher up the road. The whole darn schedule's up on the website. Thank you.

>Looking forward to the CD. When will it be released?
> from: Kay & Wendell Norman

It's out now, on Six Degrees records. Should be one or 2 copies in your local store or it can be ordered from Music Boulevard on the Web. It's called A Christmas Heritage.

Mo' exciting tour news: I was trying Phil's brand new accordion, made byt a little company called Main Squeeze in NYC, and all I could get out of it was the organ riff to "96 Tears", by the legendary Detroit band Question Mark And The Mysterians. Well, the bus driver turns around and sez to us, "You know, I was the drummer on that original recording!" Man, it's a small world out here in Bigtime Professional Showbiz.

Greetings from not-so-sunny Wilkesboro
Played a really fun show up at the college where Merlefest happens, in the nice theatre there. The last time I was in there, I remember standing on stage with 12 other fiddlers with Laurie Of Lewis singing out The Blackest Crow...This was an equally high night. Real good sound and an audience which caught everything. Hitting some smokin' tempos and I don't mean just fast ones. The groove is starting to lay in there real thick now, whether it's N'awlins or a gospel 3 or driving the nine pound bluegrass spikehammer.
Our sound tech supremo Tim Carter (to many Tims on this trip, we're thinking of calling him Brad instead) found a very nice fiddle mic to use on my axe... all the band members have eschewed all our pickups in favor of mobility and great tone: wer're using mics on stands, and digging it deeply. It's all-important to have somebody out front who knows what it should sound like, who we can rely on, and Tim-Brad is that man.. found out we share a birthday, we're both May 7th guys. Wo! Like too synchronistical, dude!
More intrigue about our 96 Tear drummer/driver... List member Dave Troller weighs in with an historical note: the name of this Mysterian percussion major: Roberto Martinez. Sure don't want to blow anybody's cover, but he asks us to address him as J Edgar. Ran into him out on the sidewalk behind the hotel yesterday pacing off 209 yards. He was checking the accuracy of his new laser distance meter- you gotta check these newer gadgets to make sure they're accurate-- wouldn't want to overshoot a 209 yard...whatever. Hope this wasn't one of the guys out behind the grassy knoll. He sure can drive, anyway...

From a Fiddle Discussion List Posting
List Just thought I'd mention that we're out here with the Xmas Hair-itage band (Tim O'Brien*, Mike Marshall*, Alison Brown, Todd Phillips, Phillip Aaberg, Yrs truly*) barnstorming around the east coast in a big red bus, fiddling* much of the time. (*fiddle content here) This band is so stupidly great! I'm sorry, it's rhythm heaven 'round here right now. Our sound guy's got a very juicy-sounding AKG C-3000 mic on my axe, and we just might be coming to your town if you live in one of those towns we're gonna be playing in!
Anyway, Sunday's gonna be the Grand Opera House in Wilmington, Delaware, Monday's going to be the Rose Lehrman Radioactive Arts center in Harrisburg PA and so forth... it's on my website, and on the SRO website: sroartists.com or something like that.
The record came out, it's in the stores, on six degrees records, it holds up real good. Wouldst be nice to meet some other fiddlers out there on the road. Say hi if you can- check out this wild-looking fiddle I'm playing, or trying to play.
We're working up one of the scariest Tex Logan tunes I've heard: Come Along Jody. Might have it ready by Harrisburg, esp. if we can connect it with Christmas; any suggestions? We're playing Breakin' Up Christmas with 3 fiddles & a banjo & it burns with a clear blue flame-- profuse thanks to the folks on this list who helped me find that tune back in March, esp. Fletcher who faxed me actual music.

Greetings from somewhere in Pennsylvania; nice weather has been following us around. Played at the beautiful Grand Opera House in Wilmington Delaware, land of corporate havens and big big Walmarts. Big news of last night's show was that Alison's astronaut friends Marsha Ivin and Pamela -- didn't get her last name-- drove their JET out to the gig from Houston for the day. I'm not kidding! It was a blast getting to talk about space issues with real astronauts. They're like jockeys, I guess- about my & Alison's size and really smart and extremely personable, of course. We showed them around our shuttle, they liked the unidirectional orientation of it. But of course one has to walk everywhere on ours.

A mandolin rehearsal on the bus.

Subject: Re: Durango Christmas Heritage Concert
Sent: 11/24/98 2:56 AM
To: lisa shapter@hotmail.com
>How did the Christmas Heritage concert and album come about?

My long-time agent, Jeff Laramie at SRO Artists, has a Christmas show that he likes to book all over the country every year with different musicians on his roster. Early this year we were talking, and I fantasized with Mike Marshall about a 'dream band' that could play these shows, plus tune from my recent 'Heritage' CD. These are musicians whom I've been eager to work with, and some whom I have worked with for years. Jeff took it all seriously and came up with a lot of gigs. Then Six Degrees, the record company that released Heritage, got wind of the tour and said, "you should make another recording with this very band! You have the tour already to promote it!" So we did.

>Is this configuration of musicians one that plans on performing together >beyond this tour?
There is a definite possibility for that... we'll see if the promoters are interested in repeat performances.

>Do you plan on making this tour an annual event?
I don't know if I would want to spend the holiday months of every year on the road, but it's certainly a ton of fun right now.

>How will the concert work...will you all perform solo as well as >together? Will you play in several different configurations?
On previous incarnations of this tour, there was a lot of solo stuff and very little 'band' material. One of the basic criteria for our choice of players was the ability to play great in a band context, and get along really well & support each other. So this year, we have an incredible band, and nobody's really that interested in solos...that said, we do mix it up a lot, and there many combinations represented onstage, including 3 fiddles and a banjo, 5 mando-instruments, a bluegrass band, solo guitar & piano, various trios and so on. Tim sings on about 1/2 the show.

>Will the concert be strictly holiday music, or do you plan on playing >more secular, if you will, music?
The running joke is that each tune has a varying Holiday quotient which varies from 100% in a tune like Upon a Midnight Clear (done in a R&B Gospel style) to 10% (an old Montreux favorite like Near Northern) and then some hard-to-categorize tunes like Tim O'Brien's original about a Standing Stone site in Ireland intended to mark the Midwinter Solstice, or a Jewish tune like Hevenu Sholem Alechem. We certainly mix it up, and by that point in the tour, maybe we'll be trying to develop our Summer Solstice repertoire...who knows?

From Newark
Hey hey hey, back on the bus...After some really great shows in the Chicago, Madison and Kalamazoo areas where we ran into the great violinist Rachel Barton and fellow Lister Andy Rogers, we just had a little 4 day break in the Kritmat Hair Tour, some went home, I hung out in Connecticut and DC and with friends & family. Drove back up to Newark to rendezvous with the bus at this incredible Spanish restaurant called 'Spain', oddly enough, in downtown Newark next to the train station-- the bus didn't come ( it was coming from Nashville), didn't come, we closed the restaurant, didn't come, closed the bar, we're hanging out on the street with all our shit including Mike's 30K Loar, The restaurant owner drives back around the block in his Lexus and just hangs with us till the bus comes. Mike called Garry on his cel phone, I HAVE to get one... next year. Apparently the bus was stuck trying to turn a corner about 3 blocks from the reataurant- plus they don't have street signs anymore on most of the main streets in Newark so they got lost. As well as having the most confusing freeway system ever built in the inner planets. And of course the bus is just about the size of the Titanic. Newark scares me more than earthquakes. Todd left a joke message on Gary's phone saying Phil died and they raped Mikey and Todd just crawled out of hiding in the sewer long enough to call. Not funny enough!

But we got on! The Restaurant Guy got to see the bus interior- later that night we stopped at a rest stop and some guy asked us who it was on the bus--it was such a relief to be able to say, oh it's just a Kritmat band.

I keep being reminded that his band is one of the best bands I've worked with... So much virtuosity, kept under control, and with such swinging taste. Lots of flexibility, too. Obviously Tim is one of the greatest singers ever to come out of American String Band music. And Mike is arguably the most virtuosic American mandolinist ever. Alison is one of the few (three? two?) banjoists whom one can compare with Bela Fleck.Todd never does the obvious thing, always economical with the most sound. Phil has an absolutely unbelievable range as a pianist, and everybody plays with so much heart always. It's just a total gas, even playing Christmas music. It's like this band just cannot play a bad note.

We're playing at the Great Aunt Stella Center in Charlotte and staying at the four points Sheraton. How is that different from stars? Are there four points to a star in Charlotte? Maybe it's not even a complete star... just four -fifths of one star but compared to what? Maybe they have high standards in Charlotte. Maybe almost one star is a good as anything else anywhere, maybe they're saying. It is a Sheraton. But wouldn't the Sheratons all have the same rating system? Are there any two star, 3 points Sheratons, for instance? What the fuck am I talking about?

Now TimCarter, our intrepid sound man, has brought out this other new AKG condenser mic for the fiddle that he likes even better- apparently he had 5Khz down a bit on that other one, the AKG 560, but this one he doesn't have to do that, and he got it for about $285, which is superdupercheap. It's a D-3000, a side-address condenser with a nice big capsule, and it even beats the SM57s which still seem to work better than 90% of the fiddle mics out there.

From Louisville
2 hugely wonderful shows back to back at the Birchmere and the magnificent Great Aunt Stella Canter in Charlotte.
Not a lot of publicity on the B-mere show besides the strip ad, but the folks that did show up were great. This was my first time out in the new giant cinder-block complex they've built... very nice room, once you go through the pizza-parlor Bluegrass Purgatory in the front! Had some good friends show up in Arlington: guitarist John Jennings, fiddler Bruce Molsky, All Things Considered director Marika Partridge. John brought one of guitarmaker supremo David Berkowitz's incredible baritone guitars, and David himself brought an acoustic bass guitar and a 12 string. Mike played the Baaritone onstage for his solo number, and it was amazing... more like a piano than a guitar, really. We managed to fit more people than ever before onto the bus after the show! Phil's sister-in-law brought a whole poached salmon and other goodies, so we had the band, a couple of nice kids that Compass just signed, and all the aforementioned people plus their partners crammed in there swingin' from the ceiling...shagadelic, bay-bee!
We finally figured out the decor style in this bus, it's Modern Disney Bordello!

Last night was the beautiful newly renovated church/community center in Charlotte, and they audience was a super-special bunch. They were really like a member of the band. We were so thrilled to play, everyone was right on the energy tip, and the fact that they were running a 4 camera video shoot just made it more exciting. Love thang all over the place. We just felt bad about the $40 ticket price.. didn't find out 'til we got there. Other than that, I think promoter' Jerry Klein & his crew are doing an amazing job there. Got to meet fellow lister Shelia! Yo gal, hope you dug it. Had some exciting moments with the super-slick waxed floor backstage and my brazilian Beatle boots, which didn't get along. My feet flew out from under me twice, holding the fiddle and octave mandolin... managed to roll gracefully to the floor each time with axes held high. I guess there's some agility in this old geezer yet, but that should teach me not to wear them country heels. Another all-night drive to Luhville tonight, maybe we'll watch the Austin Powers:International Man Of Mystery video another five times on the way there!

New exciting & dramatic update on our driver mystery: As you know, our bus driver, who requests we address him as J Edgar, played on the original Mysterians recording of 96 Tears, under the name of Robert something. We also know he's pretty handy with a laser range finder. Well, when we were in Alexandria, he took some of the musicians to a top secret Maryland site where he teaches evasive driving on skid pans and the like. Some of us got to learn how to do controlled spins and get out of skids, and some FBI-approved ways to get around difficult corners... Man, in this age of road rage¨, I'm rill glad we got us actual pro driver with them high-up connections!

Interesting discussion of antique outdated language and clauses in recording contacts today on the bus: stuff like singles (who do we all know that makes singles anymore, or ever? that's for them pop entertainers--I guess!) and breakage/warpage deductions (usually about 25% of any total, deducted from the royalties paid to the artist) which applied to vinyl LPs. Garry sez that stuff just has to stay in there because then the lawyers can just ignore it, knowing it's standard- they get freaked out when somebody tries to streamline it 'cos then they have to start from square one.
Plus it comes in handy when they want to take back at the end what they give you in the beginning (NOT OURzz record company!!!) There are all these weird complicated algorithms now to sort of get around those clauses, just added onto what's there, like a computer operating system, or the English spelling rules. The Music biz has come into its own as a byzantine layered complex culture...maybe someday we'll manage to layer some music in there too.

That's taken in the bus ceiling mirror. Good for card games & other stuff. CEOs Garry & Alison on the bottom, Tim & Kit on the right, usual suspects all round.

We Love The Bus
This bus has really driven its way into all our hearts. It's my first bus tour, as I said, it was apparently designed decor-wise by Vince Gill, and a good job he did too, eleven bunks, two lounges, both with home entertainment centers, one with a table & fridge, counters for Mike to cook on (we'll make sausage yet) a Microwave, bathroom (no #2!) fancy lighting. bla bla. No, we haven't named it. Gals name their buses, guys don't, and Alison's too busy running her record company to care. It's The Bus to us.
When we get to the hotel, nobody wants to get off! Hang out & gab, eat, drink in the lounge. Same with the gig- we use it for a dressing room. The bunks are great, like little boxes, plushy coffins, put the musicians away in their drawers. Todd's gotten more sleep in the last 3 weeks than in the last seven years. He loves his box. He's the Christmas Vampire. You can see his little fang buds sprouting now when he smiles. I kinda doze in there on the overnight drives, it's a bit bouncy & loud, but it beats sitting up neck bent over sideways on the plane & the van six ways from Sunday. It ain't the space station but I can visualize one of these things up there in orbit, yeah, shagarific, bay-bee!

Report From Norman
Norman, Okalahoma, that is...
As the Xmas Heritage band winds toward completion of this tour, the shows seem to be getting better and more relaxed. Much talk of a possible repeat of the tour next year, might try to do a couple summer festivals here & there.
Anyway, slight disaster on the Bus, I was cooking French Toast on this little hot plate while travelling between Springfield, IL and Norman, had a pretty good pile going, and wooooooooooothe bus hit a curve, all the stuff on the counter came at me --wineglassescoffeemachinepapertowelsbreadfruitbowlbatterbowlfrenchtoast and hot hotplate!! Garry & I both grabbed at it, slight burn on the left pinky for me but Garry got himself right on his bass playin' finger, ow! While fruit went down, toast went down, other stuff too. Let that be a lesson to us all- Don't be frying up stuff while rounding a corner at freeway speeds without a seat belt. Only lost two toasts, thank St Christopher.
Mike is the one really fixing up the great stuff- he found an amazing Italian Deli in Cincy and loaded the fridge: buffalo Mozzarella, three other cheeses, special salami from Provence, instant polenta... yum!
Audiences are bigger, more picker fans, more enthusiastic. Cincinnatti was a blast, our big dessert is to play "Blue Night" for the 2nd encore and let Tim beller it out in B like nobody else can. I swear I've added at least three years to my life from playing that tune with this group. Todd sez "it's like opening a big six-pack of whupass".
Waiting to go from the gig in Cincy, waiting for J Edgar to stop sleeping and drive us, best to leave around 2 AM so we can get where we're going late enough for the hotel rooms to be available, we're in a funky part of town. The bar next door to the hall closes around 1AM or so, and 2 gals come along to see if anybody famous is hanging out on this big red bus. Todd lets them on the bus! We're sitting around picking or working, we don't know these party girls from Adam. Luckily they're unimpressed... just a bunch of ageing pickers with no drugs out. They leave quickly.
We're so boring!

We all went to a sushi place in Springfield--- sounds like danger to me! Pretty far away from any coast... The cab guy who took us over said it "sucked", "they don't cook the fish enough"... they don't have burgers. Sounded better & better. Turned out to be one of those silly grill places on the bottom, a real nice sushi bar up top. After a few sakes, we got into a 3 hour jokefester...first of the tour. Wall to wall! Weird how it suddenly just started up. Maybe bravado from fear of fish from far away.

Have reached the great Rocky Mountain Plateau and Durango, Colorado. Incredible weather! Screaming sunshine and high 40's F. Got a sold-out show tonight, or nearly. This is a good place to play cause it's near Pagosa Springs, home of a great little summer music festival. The town is beautiful, no mall, and hight craggy mohntains and monumental gravel piles all around. The band's relaxed, and well-fed having come from a stop in New Mexico where we ate at one of the greatest southwestern restaurants: Los Cuates. What food these morsels be! EVERY INCREDIBLE ITERATION OF CHILE PEPPERS that you can't even imagine, plus Posole (a kind of hominy stew) that surpassed everything I thought I knew about hominy.

Recent gigs have taken a musical turn for the better, also very relaxed yet high energy. We're fooling around with the internal workings of the tunes and making complex rhythmic adjustments whilst playing. Mike & Alison over on one side of the stage are creating their own spinning gearbox contaptions tangential to what Tim and Phil get into on the other side and I just ride on over, spewing alternative barlines and displacing melodies while Todd skewers his spots. Some really scary warpology moments at the end of sections when the whole tune melts & morphs into shattering mirror fragments and then sucks back into itself. That's what I like, Bay-bee! Good times at the NearNorthern intro when Alison & I sling & hook on SallyEagleGoodin before we hit the contrary counterpoint of the main tune. Hell, it's all good. Haven't had so much fun playing slow since I don't know. Let's play a gig again real soon. Wish everybody coulda been here, coulda picked with this band.

Mike got an Oud record on ECM that absolutely kills. Double strung fretless big fat low bowlback mandolin is what it is, with some sympathetics. This guy Anouar Brahem really plays it, and he has a fiddler with him who is incredible... almost eastern Euro fiddly sound mixed in with the Persian, and a slow webbly vibrato I can't even describe. Try to find this record...it's ECM 1432. Make already transcribed one tune last night on the bus, we're gonna try to learn it. it's not as impenetrable as some Indian classical music, but it's still got that wiggly wobbly flavor.

Last two shows of the tour, even though both in Colorado, couldn't be more different. The first was at a beautiful brand-new multi-million dollar facility at a famous ski resort. Only a year old, this hall was dug right into the side of a mountain and covered with three layers of disneyesque shops and a skating rink. Beautifuly designed & appointed in rich woods & fabrics, the hall looks perfect, sounds goodÐ until the power goes on. The hall feaures a beautiful, elaborate sound system which nobody working there knows how to operate! Tim, our sound technician, had to mix inside a hermetically sealed booth (the windows don't open) and nobody could figure out how to make the interior speakers work! A vast array of gear, all hard-wired into a complex patchbay, which was unusable because the intstallers had come & gone, any manual was either lost or never written, and the crew was a bunch of well-meaning but clueless ski guys who couldn't make anything work. I'll never forget the poor monitor guy staring a hole in the mixing board trying to figure out how to run one; we could only make two out of six channels work and practically had to tear the whole thing down for him and build it back up again.

Thank the sound gods for Our Man Tim Carter, who managed to work around the crew's mispatches and total ignorance of their own system. The light guy did seem to know how to work his stuff, they had some cool rotating color changng pods, would have been good for a dance group. He seemed to be the head stage guy and was as sympathetic and helpful as he could be under the circumstances. The Presenter came down a couple of times in a bluster wondering why it was taking so long to do stuff (we had to hold the doors while trying to make the monitors work), and got some short but complete explanations from our redoubtable road manager Mr. West. Good that he didn't try to talk to one of the by now hungry & crabby artists crawling around on their hands & knees following cables around the floor.

Of course, no food was available before the show and after a 6.5 hour drive with no stops, this had an effect on some of the musicians. Todd finally went to try to find a sandwich or something so he woudn't be dizzy during the show; getting out of there is like getting out of NORAD, but he found the rink and shopping area, and a sandwich shop. After getting his twelve dollar turkey sandwich & a hot chocolate, he headed back and finally found a door back to the bowels of the complex and while trying to get the door open dropped the sandwich and spilled the hot chocolate over it...5 minutes to show time! The facility is a good example of a place which is built for the best reasons, with unlimited funds, but flounders because it has nobody yet with a clear vision and the skills necessary to actually run it; more than just booking a bunch of acts and doing the accounts, a hall/arts organizastion has to reflect the vision of an involved, knowledgable, creative mind who can draw the required talent and skilled personnel into the organization.
One of the best examples of that very situation is Dick Van Kleeck at the Louisville Center For The Arts, or the folks at the magnificent Boulder Theater, which is where we played the last night of our tour.

Great staff in Boulder, some of whom we all knew from various other situations, all drawn there because the management was committed to hiring the best. The theatre also hosts and is partners with Nick Forster's great public radio show E-Town. The theatre was beautifully hung with xmas lights and the old stage was fitted out with a great system. Here everything worked! Did an instore at Bart's CD Cellar, a great CD and Vinyl shop, where we met up with dobroista supremo Sally Van Meter and a burning new talent, fiddler Zack Kline. Sally handed me and Mike a couple of CDs of our summer show at the Fox... all nicely packaged, with cool graphics, and edited into a neat show...kinda brought us up short! hopefully they're just trading it! Boulder is crawling with great musicians these days and at the show were many of the String Cheesers, Charles Sawtelle, Nick Forster, Peter Wernick, and other friends, some folks from the List! The show itself went great, the audience was there to see us, and it was bit emotional. And at the end, the Party In The Lobby turned into a Party In The Bus... everybody was fried, gave all the rest they had. As we should.

Here we are in Madison WI with the Bus.Todd,Tim O'B,Phil,DA,Alison,Tim Carter.

Airport Day dawned whitely... first snow of the tour was our last night in Boulder, and it didn't stop all night. Trying to pack all the crap we'd spread out into the corners of the bus was a real task which kept us up til 4 AM, with an 8:30 bus call.

Of course, disaster struck at the unbelievably badly designed Denver Airport, where various United Airline employees decided to beat us up in every way they could, making us go back and check all our instruments; Mike had to take his Loar out of the case and hold it in a towel, same with Phil's accordion.
Attention musicians: United has instituted a de facto anti-musician policy, and means to implement it in the most hostile and rude manner possible. Don't plan to bring an instrument on the plane, no matter how expensive or delicate. You'll just get shouted at, and you'll miss your flight or have it smashed. At the Denver airport, they don't even allow gate check-ins!!! This is saddening for me after twenty-five years of flying on United, but the world do keep on changing, don't it? If you have a United disaster story, there's enough of a groundwell to have started a website: it's called untied.com and you can tell your story there.

As I write this, everyone is home safely, and we're looking forward to next year's Winter Heritage tour... Thanks for letting me ramble on, it's been a gas. See you in the future.
D.Anger

CONTACT:SRO Artists!(608) 273-2000