Buttercups (Ranunculus glaberrimus) blooming in the prairie, 3/16/10. In spite of our northern location and occasional cold weather (though not this winter so much), several native plants bloom here even in late winter.

You were just spared a diatribe about the current state of academic training for musicians, because I wanted to get past that frustration with a simple proposal for improving the situation. My fantasy is that we could create music workshops based loosely on training for creative writers, where musicians could be treated as artists and present their work to their peers. I have heard writers complain about writers' workshops, that their peers give inane and unnecessarily critical responses, that you can't teach writing anyway. All true, but that isn't the point. Education is about teaching and learning, sure, but for artists it is also about having a little institutional support while you find your voice and work it a bit. Currently, music programs don't allow this because the political structure is such that your peers don't matter; only the faculty's evaluation matters. A music student is NOT an artist in the current system. To empower the students as artists and give them a voice would ideally serve to open up the area of inquiry. Not just about unlistenable "new" music, but about songwriting, about music built out of vernacular traditions. Things the teachers might have to learn about. It is very hard, maybe even impossible, for the medieval power relationships in academic music departments to evolve beyond their dictatorial nature, but music departments aren't getting more relevant as time goes on, and the world no longer cares if you can properly resolve a German sixth chord. They do care if you have the funk, though. I just got a smile fantasizing a course called Getting the Funk 101--just the thing to replace 12-tone theory, which is an absolute waste of time. I had a writers-workshop structure built into a "music production" course I designed at WSU (end run around the deadly "composition" classes), to use this method for students to present their work in the recording studio to each other, but budget cuts several years ago utterly destroyed any hope of introducing new curriculum for the foreseeable future, and of course, now I am no longer teaching there. It's still a good idea though.

I am unworthy. Two months and no posts.

It has been busy. I finished Tiana's first two CDs, and she came out and made another one in about two hours (!), which I told her I couldn't edit and mix until May or something, because I must get going on my own project. Still, you've got to be impressed with someone who is this prolific, and I can tell you, these are three CDs with really good songs and inspired performances. Richard Kriehn is almost done with his project, with one more track to go, a Brazilian mandolin tune.

I had wanted to show an early spring image of the prairie project, but the photo I took from the same angle as the one last fall still looked pretty similar. You have to look closer to see the excitement there, so that will have to wait a month or so.

Well, so how about this. Richard Kriehn and I decided to sit down and see what we could do with the traditional American fiddle tune, "St. Anne's Reel," for his CD. It ended up just being mandolin and banjo, but it got me to pull out the standard steel-stringed banjo, which I hadn't played seriously in awhile, having lost myself in the gourd banjo lately. My first versions were too close to the melody of the tune but what was needed was simpler and more rhythmic. I really like where it ended up, but after several days of playing pretty hard on those strings I had a seriously shredded fingernail.

Listen to "St. Anne's Reel"

My technique for recording the banjo is unusual--at least I haven't seen anyone else use it. I use a stereo pair of Neumann KM-84 small diaphragm condensor mics, one in front on the head of the banjo, and one coming in from behind (so the instrument has to be an open back banjo), with the two mics panned hard right and left. I also used it on the Paul Anders' banjo on the Steptoe recording of "Raleigh and Spencer" which you can hear on my website too.

In my last post, I introduced my current recording project with Tiana Gregg, and how powerful her music is with just her voice and guitar. For contrast (but not much, really) I wanted to post an example where I did add a little bit of production.

One of the songs in which Tiana imagined some added parts is "Summer Dress." I had improvised a fiddle part to it one night at the Green Frog open mike that had stuck in our minds, and so it made sense to see what I could do with my vague memories of it. I also put in a piano part, and some secret sauce.

Listen to Tiana Gregg's "Summer Dress"

The trick for me here is to bring in a fiddler, pianist, and secret saucemeister for intensity but not diminish the clarity and beauty of the song, her voice and guitar. This isn't really a final mix, but you get the idea.

Tiana and I have been talking about the weirdness of pursuing our music dreams 'way out here in rural America, with the music industry going down in flames around us, so many voices in the media rendering our little efforts inconsequential. Some of our best efforts fading into a shadow world beyond obscurity, through peculiar fortune, daily life, and the occasional music business weasel. Sometimes you want to throw up your hands, but I think you have to honor whatever gift you have by giving it your best effort. Keep putting it in the world. Somebody may hear what we do. But that can't actually play too much of a role in whether we do this stuff or not.

Tiana Gregg (on the right) with her business partner Paula Echanove has been running the Green Frog Café here in Palouse for years, and all the while Tiana has also been running an active music scene around the Green Frog. Not only that, but she also is a seriously great singer and songwriter. One afternoon last September she spent a few hours here recording 19 wonderful songs and she's coming over this Sunday to record a couple more. I just finished getting these basic tracks edited and cleaned up, and I am stunned by how good she is.

She intends to flesh some of these songs out with a little production, and that will of course be fun to do, but I am struck by the power of her music with nothing other than her voice and guitar, recorded live.

How about this one? Is this not an absolutely fabulous piece of music and poetry?

It is an interesting dilemma to have a track like this. I could hear all sorts of parts in it, a drum kit, electric guitar, piano, bass...but, isn't it more amazing with just her incredible voice and that quiet guitar back there? Sometimes good production is NOT doing things...

I have completed the planting of the prairie for the season. I had planted virtually everything a month ago, but I got a bit of Gentiana affinis seeds that had been collected by my friend Nancy Hegg and put that in yesterday in my wettest spots. Altogether around thirty species have gone in and now I wait to see what will actually come up. The photo above was taken at the end of August, my intention being to show the clean slate with which I began, the result of a significant onslaught of Roundup. Hopefully next year I will be able to take photos from the same vantage point for comparison. It is already more green than this, even at the end of November. I am sure some of the sprouts are undesirable, but I was surprised that eight Rocky Mountain Iris seeds that I had planted last year came up in the middle of that barren view several weeks after I took this photo, and other natives take advantage of the fall growing season, including grasses and an intriguing biennial called scarlet gilia (gilia aggregata). One thing I love to see is a plant contributed by the birds and it appears that they have put in a blue elderberry in a perfect spot, as well as a couple of other shrubs I couldn't yet identify.

In the studio I have at last dusted off my opera and confronted the least-worked-out piece from the original effort. Back in the late 1980s when I started, I had sought to create a few songs that could live outside the opera, and the clumsiest one of these was a sort-of "love song" that hung on in the back of my mind until this month when I realized that my characters had a whole lot more to say than that; in fact, they don't actually get along all that well. A few lines, part of one verse, survive in the new song, but even the basic instrumental texture of the song was transformed once I put the new vocal parts to it. Such a relief to have gotten back into this project again. At this point it looks a lot like the prairie--barren with a lot of potential, but hopefully by next Spring...

Actually, I am never there on Thursdays, but I thought I should post office hours.

The oddest thing about my departure from WSU was that the music department is apparently unaware that I am no longer employed by the university and so never asked for me to vacate my office. I had the good sense to get everything important out of there but decided to maintain my office as a kind of installation. I had shared the office for several years with Ron Pond, a genuine Umatilla/Palutspu shaman who taught Native American music at WSU, but they found some reason to get rid of him this last summer too--I have no idea what the reason was (there is some sort of gag order about it because it involves "legal issues"). We had thought of our shared office as a kind of ghetto for non-European music, and the quiet elimination of our positions speaks volumes about diversity in the university.

I just pulled out my materials on my musical Cassandra yesterday, the real work I need to do now. I am finally getting some projects out of the studio that have been an obstacle to that work, but I have really enjoyed producing CDs for other people here, too. I have been able to use these productions to explore textures I want to use in Cassandra, and working with other people has made me much faster at getting work done in the studio. I decided to post examples from productions I have done the last few years on my website (www.palouserivemusic.com) and thought I would comment on them here.

Steptoe, "Raleigh & Spencer" (traditional), from Doggone Sophisticated (2007)
Listen to "Raleigh & Spencer"

Steptoe (Von Walden, Tina Hilding, Paul Hill, Paul Anders) is a great bluegrass-esque band from Moscow, ID. The three tracks on their 2007 CD that we recorded here represents the least amount of production I've ever done as a producer, as they had very particular ideas of what they wanted and very high standards. It was exhiliarating to work with great musicians with great ideas and do my best to realize them, producing as a team, and I think they made a wonderful record here. They had an excellent sense of how to capture a "live" performance and also enhance the production artistically. The live rooms I've set up here with good mics and preamps are perfect for this music.

Shiloh Sharrard, "Santa Can't Stay" (Dwight Yoakam), from Don't Make Me Go to School (2007)
Listen to "Santa Can't Stay"

I first heard Shiloh when she was eleven, and she had a great country voice even then. Her 2007 CD, Don't Make Me Go to School, recorded when she was fifteen, was conceived by Shiloh as a concept album around her parent's divorce, and she chose an intriguing set of a few new country songs embedded in a foundation of the country classics of failed marriage, including "D-I-V-O-R-C-E" and "He Stopped Loving Her Today." She came in on one day and played all her guitar parts and sang all the songs on the next day. Maybe we did one or two things later, but the approach to this CD was that it would be based around what she does when she walks out on stage with her guitar, and Shiloh is an authentically great performer, so you should see her if you get a chance (her website is www.shilohsmusic.com). I decided that this should be an acoustic production, no drums, and feature the piano in the "band," since I was finding such elegant Floyd Cramer and Pig Robbins piano parts in all these old country songs. I took it upon myself to learn their parts where I could and inject them into these interpretations, though in this song I went with a fat boogie-woogie left hand groove that I came up with years ago. And then I had three great musicians to back her up: Shayne Watkins, who plays the fattest almost-electric-sounding acoustic guitar lead I've ever heard, Alane Watkins, who had a perfect complimentary harmony voice for Shiloh (and these two have performed a bunch with Shiloh and knew her stuff), and Richard Kriehn who plays fabulous fiddle lines and driving mandolin percussion on this track. On this Dwight Yoakam tune (which sounds so intriguing coming from a still-young-sounding voice, as do many of the tracks on this CD), I sought to create the most driving trainwreck of a groove I could using acoustic instruments.

Mike and Olivia Haberman, "September Song" (Mike Haberman), from as-yet-untitled-and-unreleased (2009)
Listen to "September Song"

Olivia and Mike Haberman are a daughter-dad team of singer-songwriters, based in Lewiston, ID. I worked on their CD this last summer and we're about to finish mixing the album as I'm writing this. Besides Mike and Olivia, we brought in Richard Kriehn who plays duet fiddle on this track, and I added piano and bass. Piano and guitar textures will be a central part of the sound of Cassandra and I came up with a simple part I liked around Mike's guitar part. Olivia is another unusual young talent in the area; she just started at the University of Idaho this fall.

By the way, all the links I use to the website access the broadband version of the mp3s. There is also a lower-fi version on the site. If you have trouble playing the whole file, you might try downloading the other version.

This gate/arbor and fence for my wife's garden was the big house project this summer. The fence boards, gates, and roof of the arbor are recycled cedar siding that I had stored in the barn for 18 (!) years. I knew I would use it someday! It is a little hard to see the old-fashioned wire fence between the boards, but that fencing used to run down the east edge of the garden all the way to the barn, and Dona and I pulled it up and reused it here. Like all recycling projects, ignorance is your friend. If we had known what a pain it was to unbend all the nasty kinks in that fencing we probably wouldn't have done it, but it sure is nice now that it's done. Dona made the gravel paths and did all the brickwork. And is planting a thousand plants and flowers inside.

I almost titled this post, "What I Did with my Summer Vacation." School just started this week at WSU, and it is a little weird not to be going through the stress of getting the semester going. Not so weird that I miss it, however. While teaching world history (which was my odd WSU gig of the last 15 years besides teaching music--odd because my training is in music, of course) was a great education, I have neglected a lot of important music work over the last two decades because I had this great day job. That WSU ended the World Civilizations program because of a stupid turf battle (having nothing to do with budget cuts, in spite of what they say publicly) is tragic for the quality of undergraduate education, but they don't really care, and ultimately it was a good thing for me. I may go back to teach a course in world music for the Honors College at WSU, but that is on the back burner. Still, today is a day I would be running around on campus, teaching my two sections, and with my son in his first week of second grade, he isn't around either...it is a little unsettling. I feel like I'm playing hooky to work in the studio today, but really it is that I've called in "well" for the rest of my life.