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2/12: Dropping In, with Chocolates
February 12, 2012
Everything old is new again — and so’s the Carolina Chocolate Drops, the new lineup of which (Dom Flemons, Rhiannon Giddens and Hubby Jenkins, with guest cellist Leyla McCalla absent on picture day) visits the Pollak Theatre at Monmouth U on February 17.
Carolina Chocolate Drops, you had us with the spoons. Or was it the bones? The jugs? The quills?
Whatever. Just because a band gets period-precise (or rummages the kitchen junk drawer) in pursuit of an authentic “old timey” sound doesn’t make them any less than hypercurrent — provided the music is purveyed in the raucous spirit of a fruitjar corn-squeezins barndance shivaree, rather than a sleepy sermon or a fusty lecture.
Rest assured that the Chocolate Drops are THAT old-timey, thanks to their collective scholarly specialty — the black string band/ jug band music that began to capture the nation’s fancy right around the time that scratchy radios and 78 rpm Victrola records started replacing battered pianos and sheet music in American homes. Call it “dirt floor music” — but reckon that a dirt floor can be a firm foundation on which to construct a happy house made up of field-recording folk, crossroads blues, hayride bluegrass and speakeasy jazz, with a permit posted for new additions like hipster alt-country and houseparty hip-hop.
And yeah, the Chocolate Drops are THAT new-fangled, thanks to a deft mastery of social media and post-musicbiz meltdown marketing — a DIY savvy that’s allowed the Piedmont-spawned combo to top the Billboards, play the Grand Old Opry (first black string band EVER to do so, if you can believe that) and win a Grammy for their 2010 major label debut Genuine Negro Jig, nary five years from the time that founders Dom Flemons, Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson first made each other’s acquaintance via a Yahoo group.
They’ve even got a new lineup — with NYC-based multi-instrumentalizer Hubby Jenkins replacing Robinson in the core trio — and it’s this troupe of troubadors (augmented by cellist Leyla McCalla) that visits the Upper Wet Side for the first time on Friday night, February 17, for a concert at Monmouth University‘s Pollak Theatre.
The 8pm show — for which the opening act is the hot ‘n spicy bluegrass blueplate specialties of the Brooklyn-bred M Shanghai String Band (look here for our past interview with Monmouth County mandolin master Richard Morris) — occurs just under two weeks in front of the “drop date” for Leaving Eden, the band’s followup release on the Nonesuch label and the first recorded evidence of the current CCD configuration.
Recorded in the home studio of lately legendary Americana-man Buddy Miller — producer of Solomon Burke’s Nashville and some seminal sessions by Patty Griffin, Emmylou Harris and Robert Plant — Leaving Eden finds the Carolina Chocolate Drops fortified by McCalla plus human beatbox (and occasional tourmate) Adam Matta for a set of fifteen chestnuts and original seedlings that run a gamut and a gauntlet between instrumental and a capella; mournful plaints of loss and gleeful declarations of independence; barndance breakdowns and rocking-chair reveries.
We got an advance listen to this warm and inviting (but still playfully boundary-busting) platter, and we dug especially the band’s driving rip through the high-mileage hillbilly chestnut “Ruby Are You Mad at Your Man;” the jaunty bee-sting twang of “Mahalla” (we swear it sounds like one of Jonathan Richman’s friendly folk instros) and the ominous back-country detour through “West End Blues.” Taking the majority of the vocal leads, singer-fiddler-banjobelle Rhiannon Giddens is in awesome form, as evidenced on the trilling Ethel Waters strutter “No Man’s Mama” and her self-penned “Country Girl,” a hiphop-infused spotlight track that stakes a claim to new corners of the band’s stylistic turf.
Flemons, the Arizona-born banjo expert and former National Poetry Slam competitor whose multi-faceted contributions also include vocals, African gourd and the aforementioned quills (think of an Irish tin whistle’s African cousin), stopped to chat for a spell somewhere on the road between the Piedmont and Eden.
1/6: Linda Chorney, Public Nominee No. 1
January 6, 2012 — 1 Comment
It doesn’t get any more stars ‘n stripes than Linda Chorney — seen here strumming “Say No to Sarah” in a vid capture that does NOT refer to Sarah Jarosz — as the AmeriControversial musician preps to storm the gates of Grammy-lot with an intimate gig at Asbury’s Wonder Bar this very night.
She stands accused of “gaming the system;” a heinous offense that puts her on a par with any banned-from-Bally’s casino card counter — although we prefer to picture Catherine Zeta Jones in Entrapment, slinking under the laser alarms while doing a human hack into some hitherto impermeable layers of security.
She’s been placed in the middle of conspiracy theories involving the most shadowy Star Chambers of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) — in the same breath that she’s been cast as a carpetbagging, not-one-of-us interloper; a distaff Professor Harold Hill with a folding merch table and a smaller horn section.
She’s been called manipulating, fake, a player of house parties (?) — even, Helen Help Us, a “Poster Child for a Paradigm Shift.”
She’s also got a lot of people out there — including past Grammy winners and biz bigwigs — reaching for the phrase “You Go, Girl” in her defense. NARAS awards VP Bill Freimuth even went on record in Variety to point out that she’s played it strictly by the rules, and that she was “very diligent in her pursuit of attention by the Grammy voters, and it evidently paid off. Enough of the voters received her communications, listened to her music, thought it was worthwhile and voted for it.”
But Jeez Loweezy, you’d think that Linda Chorney was some kind of Carmen Sandiego villainess, the way that folks in certain rustic corners of the music industry have their polkadot bloomers in a bindle over her continued existence.
What the 51 year old, Beantown-bred, Sea Bright-seasoned singer and songwriter is at this moment is HOT — not just hotter than anything else born during the Ike administration or reliably flush with talent, but a hot topic of conversation; blazing with controversy and studio-tanning in the spotlight of public scrutiny.
Yeah, we’re well aware that we just did a feature on LaChorn a few weeks ago, but the circumstances surrounding the “local, Shore based” musician’s appearance on the national stage — including this oft-quoted story in Variety and some coast-to-coast radio guestings — are simply too tantalizing to ignore. Especially in the numbing lull of a Jersey Shore January.
To refresh your memory: Chorney — like any Upper Wet Side artist worth her salt water taffy, a relentlessly DIY self promoter with the scary skills to back up any blip of bluster — released last year her sixth and by far most ambitious album of her 30 year career, a doublewide sensation called Emotional Jukebox. An epic yet intimate moodswing sonata that traced its way home past territories controlled by pop, folk, country, R&B, classic rock covers and a fully arranged chamber symphony, the album boasted well known musicians, groovy graphics, playful sneetches of humor and a boundary-busting worldview born of an era in which recording artists — with the help of seemingly unlimited studio budgets (Chorney’s project was financed in full by a single philanthropic phan) — aimed for the stars and pushed the envelope of studio time ‘n space.
So smitten was Chorney herself over the quality of her labor-intensive babydrop — and so disheartened over the prospect of its disappearing into the black hole where “local records” go to die — that she decided to get it nominated for a Grammy. Which, while laughably improbable, is at least theoretically possible given the increasingly heightened presence of Grammy 365, the peer-to-peer social network via which NARAS members can hep each other to new sounds in an increasingly fragmented, post-everything industrial landscape.
Long story short, when the dust cleared for the announcement of the 54th Grammy Award nominations, there was Emotional Jukebox, nominated (in the company of several serial Grammy winners) as Best Americana Album — a development that didn’t exactly inspire the Nashville-based Americana Music Association to send her a congratulatory Edible Arrangement. But, not to put too hyperbolic a spin on it, it was a pretty history-making moment — the first time by our reckoning that such an uber-indie, DIY, far-from-mainstream recording had cracked the Grammy circle. We’re willing to wager that it won’t be the last.
UpperWETside managed to corral this 30-year music biz underdog for a phone interview before having to take a number behind Vanity Fair, and found her busily shopping for a gown with which to make a grand entrance — a little above and beyond the call of duty just for talking to our little blog, if you ask us, but then Linda Chorney never does anything halfway. Read on, pilgrim…
