Our two weekends in the studio left me with a hard drive full of recordings, a bunch of scribblings in the journal, and a humming head full of thoughts. I was also exhausted. This recording project, a disc that is half a “solo project” for Zdenek R. and half a normal release from the band Roll’s Boys, is more than I’ve done in the way of concerted musical work in a while. Here, at the end, it feels good to have it done, but in the midst it was a bear. I like this set of faces from the first (long) night of recording:
After two days of recording, I just slumped home to Praha – I could have stayed for the next day of recording and tried to ethnograph some vocal production…..but I just couldn’t. Kaput.
10-12-2007 – A self-doubting, Lee-ish suspicion about what I’m about here : “In “fieldworking” I am trying to find and record moments that i can use to argue for my already-formed ideas about what is going on.”
I wasn’t so much trying to foment dissertation-worthy discussion at the “Petr Brandejs Band Fall bluegrass workshop“… but it seemed to happen all on its own. One bit of talking from the weekend was briefly a part of my SEM paper before I had to edit it out:
“Petr Brandejs, banjoist, pedagogue, and one-time president of the Czech bluegrass association, was perturbed when I was telling some other folks at our lunch table that I was writing my dissertation on Czech bluegrass. “It’s AMERICAN bluegrass,” he protested. I posed my typical response to this insistence that the “music itself” is American: the activity is Czech – we were sitting in the middle of a hundred Czech people who were all learning from other Czechs how to perform this music. Conversation stalled….neither of us could really resolve the point, or was willing to concede. I take the standstill as a truce; maybe we are both right…all this activity is somehow both American and Czech.”
It all fits… So much of the weekend in the little town of Malé Svatoňovice was Czech: from the “house of culture” on the square that hosted the big jam on saturday night to the food served at the jidelna (cafeteria) of the local Stredni Odborni Uciliste. (a sort of applied high school where folks train as waiters, hoteliers, mechanics, bodyguards, etc.) …but we were all singing and playing bluegrass.
In the fiddle class I got a sense of more subtle “Americanness” in musicality. (or perhaps it is simply a bit of bluegrass musicality.) Liběna, a student who I have also seen at workshops in Hustopece u Brna, asked Jirka Kralik about some notes that he plays, the “čistě falešní tony.” “Falešní” can mean “fake,” but also “out of tune;” she was asking about dissonance.
*more to follow here – I have recordings from the workshop that I’m still processing.
For now, here’s a preview of the professionally-made video of the workshop’s gala concert on Saturday, Oct 11.
8-14-2007 I copied the words to the hymn “Nearer my God to Thee” in my journal, copying them from Fanda’s (nickname for “František”) “spěvník” (songbook). Last night we sang this one, as well as “Amazing Grace” (it’s first in the songbook; arranged with the first verse as a chorus, and with only two verses: “Twas grace” and “when we’ve been there”).
I think it was Fanda who commented – “wouldn’t it be weird if Americans knew we were here in this little town in the Sumava, singing these songs?”
It seems Zbyněk is the source of all this sacred singing – he comes to Kaspersky Hory often, with family, and plays and sings with some local guys, Frantisek, Luděk, and Adam – I think that’s right. Anyhow, these folks sing some obscure hymns that I can’t imagine anyone but a hardcore gospel bluegrass band singing. I was pressed into service for baritone lines, and even a few tenor screechers, and waqs thrilled to be singing, and actually did well – mostly because I am familiar with the harmonies of this genre and some of the songs. I have no idea why I knew how to sing through “nearer my god to thee” but somehow it worked – and was lovely.
I glanced through Fanda’s spevnik some more, and found some celtic-sounding pieces (he blazed through a few of those the other night on guitar – smokin’) as well as some classic czech-grass numbers like “Myslim na Coloradu.”
When we have been playing, though, it’s just classic bluegrass and maybe a touch of country. (Zbyněk is also very into classic US country, and of course the steel guitar – but this trip did fine on guitar, and even tremelo-ed out some credible solos on a plywood mandolin he borrowed from Ludek).
