Day 11: Merry Kittehmas & Riddle Answered

I'll say one thing for our humans: they're persistent. Yesterday they went out again and came back with another tree! This one is different: it smells fascinating, but doesn't taste so good. I guess we won't eat this one.

That means dangling decorations! Yay!

Anyway, it's time to reveal the answer to the riddle I posed the other day: why do I like Greg Lake's song I Believe in Father Christmas? Thanks, bPer for trying, but you're not really very close. The musical clue is the instrumental refrain that keeps coming back in that song: that part is not by Greg Lake, it's by Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev. It is taken from his Lieutenant Kije Suite (I can't help it if everyone spells it wrong), specifically from the Troika movement, which depicts a ride through the snow in a sled drawn by three horses (unfortunately, I cannot find an online audio excerpt).

In the meantime, I see that the humans have finished hanging stuff on the tree -- time to play!

A Fate Worse Than Death?

OK, suppose you have a heart attack. And the paramedics arrive and start doing CPR -- chest compressions to keep the brain perfused with oxygenated blood. They have to be done regularly, about 100 times per minute. So, how might you give a paramedic a rhythm to follow, to keep them on time? Well, one obvious way would be music; preferably something with a good strong beat. In fact, specifically (and ironically): the 1977 Bee Gees' hit Stayin' Alive.

Frankly, if I come to in the ambulance and the first thing I hear is Disco, my first thought will be that I died and went to Hell.

And there was dancing in the aisles.....

A final surprise set from Genticorum, last thing Sunday night:

Yann Falquet:
And on Jew's harp:Pascal Gemme:
Alexandre de Grosbois-Garand:
And just to prove I wasn't lying in the post title:If you like an energetic blend of traditional folk and modern folk/jazz/celtic/whatever -- then be sure to see Genticorum if they come to your town.

Even I was dancing. This was taken Friday at the Dance Tent, doing....well, I don't think it was square dancing as such, but some sort of organized group choreography with a caller telling us what to do next. I blame the (excellent) beer I'd just drunk for loosening my normally shy, self-effacing inhibitions to reveal the party animal that lurks within:

It was a fantastic Festival; the Dance Tent is a great idea (though they need to turn down the volume for the sake of the other west field stages). Looking forward to next year already.....

ARGH! WHAT HAVE THEY DONE?

OK, I gave them a chance for a whole week. And I tried to get used to it, really I did. But the verdict is in:

I HATE YOU, CBC!

I HATE YOU!!

I've been listening to CBC FM/Stereo/Radio 2 all my adult life. I was really attached to waking up in the morning to a bit of Mozart or Schubert, occasionally varied with a little soft jazz. I mean really attached. Nothing too jarring before breakfast, please. And a strong preference for instrumentals over solo voice.

And now, just when I hit the demographic (50+) CBC 2 is supposedly aimed at they take it away. Instead we get...I don't even know what that genre is called -- Soul? R&B? Some kind of recombinant DNA mish-mash of jazz, rock, blues and I don't-know-what, with all of the worst aspects of each and none of the better. Yesterday morning Tom Allen even played Michael Jackson. Michael. Fornicating. Jackson. Is this really what my generation is supposed to like? I must have missed the memo.

No more. We bought a clock radio with a built-in MP3 player. Load up a bunch of decent music, and wake up to that, instead. The news, we can get off the web. Buh-bye, CBC....

Credits: Kitty-vid found on YouTube.

UPDATE:
The good news (as I discovered today by accident) is they still have Jurgen Gothe, who reliably plays decent music. The bad news is he's been banished to a single hour, late Sunday afternoon. grumble, grumble

The Tao of Folk Music

More Folk Festival pix, this time of Tao Rodriguez-Seeger and his accompanists. I wonder if he ever gets tired of being "the grandson of...."
Tao's fiddler:
Communing with his bassist:
In full cry on guitar:
Genticorum got around a lot this Festival. Yann Falquet joined Tao for part of the set:
Photos taken on the fly sometimes capture odd poses and expressions -- which suggest comic possibilities (well, if you've got my warped sense of humour, anways....):

Colin Linden

I'm not actually a big fan, but I happened to catch the end of his Saturday night main-stage set, and I liked these pictures. Hope you do, too (all three of you):


And a big power chord to finish:

A Living Legend

Odetta was late for her set, having been delayed by "a dental emergency". About 4pm Saturday she was brought on-stage in a wheelchair, and received an instant standing ovation:


Born in Alabama in 1930, Odetta trained initially as a classical and operatic performer, but then turned to folk music. She was dubbed "The Voice of the Civil Rights Movement" and is credited with influencing dozens of musicians of the 60's and later. For us, she gave a solid performance of good old folk, blues and spirituals.

Two points to note about the picture below, which I snapped as Odetta was being brought on stage. First: The guy on the left in the red shirt is Tao Rodriguez-Seeger, grandson of the famous Pete Seeger -- another musical friend of Odetta from the old days (more on Tao in a later post). Second: Note the woman who is wheeling Odetta, and getting her set up -- what is her skin colour? Now reflect that, when Odetta was born, and for the first several decades of her life, it would have been unthinkable (certainly in the Southern US, maybe even up here) for an elderly black woman to have a white attendant.

How far we have come. And Odetta was among those who helped make that change.

Two banjo players and a musician went to the Folk Festival

A few pictures from the 2008 Ottawa Folk Festival, held two weekends ago at Britannia Park.

Left is Riley Baugus, from North Carolina, playing and singing "old-time" style. He was traveling with fiddler Dirk Powell. I don't seem to have any pictures of them together, but they sure sounded good. On this particular stage he was teamed with Anne Downey (one-third of Finest Kind) who seems to taking her banjo very seriously.


Providing a little balance to this workshop was Tara Nevins, from Donna the Buffalo (warning: link triggers a long and apparently unstoppable music video!).

Anne Downey looks a lot happier back on her double bass:

Here's Anne in another workshop, flanked as is more usual by Ian Robb and Shelley Posen, doing their trademark a capella harmony (I think this song was "No More Fish, No Fishermen", to the tune of the hymn "See Amidst the Winter's Snows").


It was a great weekend, and I took around 370 pictures -- more of which as I get around to selecting them and wrapping some prose around them.

Natalie MacMaster

Natalie MacMaster at the 2005 Ottawa Folk Festival

About once a year, I manage to take a photograph I'm really proud of. In this case, it was beginner's luck. We had bought DSLRs (his-'n-hers Nikon D70s's) a few days before the Festival and I decided to bring one along to play with on the weekend, just to get used to the camera.

Two things I immediately appreciated about digital:

1. The ability to change my "film speed" on-the-fly -- from ISO 200 for high-resolution under full sun, to ISO 1600 for night-time ambient stage light (as in the above).
2. The freedom to click away with wild abandon, without exhausting a 24 or 36 exposure roll -- or worrying about the cost of film and processing! One thing I noticed a few years ago about the professional photographers is that they burn film. Yes, they know all about exposure and lighting and composition -- but they also take lots of pictures, because some things you just can't control for, especially on non-posed, non-studio shots. So they'll take, like, a dozen -- or a hundred -- shots to get the one that gets published.
   

The above picture was taken maybe 20 meters from the stage, with the zoom maxed out at 300mm, hand-held. I hadn't yet heard the rule of thumb that you shouldn't shoot slower than the reciprocal of the focal length, and at 1/30 of a sec or so, a lot of the shots came out blurry due to camera shake.

But a few didn't, and the one above is the lucky winner: just caught the magic moment with Natalie backlit by a purple spot, leaning into her fiddle, with a little motion blur on the bow hand so you can almost hear the music happening.

Full disclosure: Image shot in landscape and cropped to tighten up the composition; some reflected highlights (notably: the sheen on the drummer's bald head!) toned down using GIMP.