Have you ever played your face? You should.

I was so reminded yesterday by a remarkable musician named Joe Craven, who performed a music education workshop/concert at the school my chlidren attend. I have since been following Joe's advice. Use two fingers on each hand, alternately hollow up your mouth, then widen it, and observe.

As with a Nigerian talking drum, you can wring actual tonalities from your face. Joe Craven made a room full of kids and a few grown-ups beat their cheeks into music in the course of a marvellous hour-long seminar and demonstration of rhythm, melody, musical tradition and innovation.

Joe is a multi-instrumentalist specializing in percussion, violin, mandolin and a slew of ethnic and homemade stringed instruments. He has played for 17 years with "Dawg Music" folk-jazz mandolin maestro David Grisman, and recorded or performed with artists including Jerry Garcia, The Persuasions, Maria Muldaur, and Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and bluegrass stars Darol Anger and Mike Marshall. Joe is based in Northern California, but came up to Puget Sound for last weekend's Winteregrass Festival in Tacoma.

He's got a major gig at Town Hall in Seattle this Friday (see below), part of a busy touring schedule.. I'm glad to know he'll be de-mystifying music for lots of elementary school students in special workshops along the way.

In the Grisman band, Joe plays a lot of percussion, and fiddle. But I (and a bunch of students, some teachers and a few other parents) got see his mastery of varied percussive, stringed, vocal and electronic instruments and techniques.

He played a "panatar" made from a guitar neck, turkey roasting pan, an exhaust pipe, and wood; plus something with a mandolin neck and strings appended to a hospital bedpan. Joe also plays oud, quatro, saz and balalaika, not to mention wastebaskets, coffee cans, toy telephones, and if you're really lucky, his raincoat.

Joe began the show with an old-fashioned fiddle lament, which worked its way into a frenzied hoedown. His foot-stompin' fiddle got the 1st-3rd graders clapping hard, and spontaneously. He then took the solo acoustic fiddle tune into a rock-blues electric guitar-styled rave-up. A big, if highly informal nod to the Clapton and Hendrix legacies - pretty awesome. Not a lotta fret space on that acoustic fiddle neck, either. But enough. The kids went nuts.

Then he seamlessly segued into some fierce human beat-box/mouth-right-on-the-mike percussion virtuosity, leading back into more acoustic fiddle pryotechnics. The kids were "Yee-Haw"-ing at length.

The seminar continued, with Joe demonstrating the role of rhythm in daily life, and the beginnings of life. Like the sound of a baby's in-utero heartbeat, contrasted against mom's heartbeat; then the popping sounds of birth.

Followed by a person walking and a lawn spinkler hissing. Joe vocalized this into his electronic sampler:

Clomp, clomp, clomp, comp.

Hiss, hiss, hiss, hiss;
Hiss, hiss, hiss, hiss.

In other words:

1 2 3 4.

1234
1234

Then played some very bluesy-jazzy mandolin licks over the lawn-sprinkler beat box rhythms.

Followed by a freshly-created vocal tape loop of some simple spoken words, meant to show the melody of the human voice: "If you loop it, which is what happens in music, you can begin to hear the melody."

As this was repeated over and over and over, the kids: a) cracked up; and b) totally got it, as did I. The rise and fall of the human voice DOES contain inherent melody. Joe used this looped backdrop as base upon which to layer some more piquant stringed melodies.

Seeing, creating, is forgetting the NAME of what you're working with, Joe said. Like Picasso, Joe explained to the kids. One day Pablo looked at an old rusty bicycle, welded the handlebars to the seat and called it a bull's head. And so it became something new, because he was able to forget what it was he'd been seeing before.

Similarly, Joe said: forget about always playing the "right" notes - just feel a rhythm and bang it out. You can work on getting it perfect later on. If that's your aim. Joe sought and found a volunteer who'd never played an instrument before. This 5-year-old girl was up there sawing away at Joe's fiddle, unfretted, first with his help and then on her own, while he played perfectly-in-tune mandolin melodies. It sounded quite nice, altogether.

Kids walk around around wearing "No Fear" skateboard fashions, but too often they're "absolutely terrified" to let go and make music, Joe said. We need to incorporate making music into our daily lives, he emphasized.

Joe reminded us how many folks have instruments gathering dust, and how much inspiration is to be found in waste cans, coffee cans, plus your face, belly, and thighs. He's quite right. At home, I recently noticed that a thick rubber band, stretched from a doorknob to a small lock handle above, produced some beautifully resonant sounds - similar to the Gambian harp called a dusongoni. The tonalities varied according to where I plucked the rubber band. I jammed for a while, then my kids.

There were some other high points of Joe's show.

These included a percussion-laden take of Johhny Cash's "Got Rhythm," a shoeshine boy's song, highlighting Joe's rich, bluesy vocals, with fine brushwork on a very small plastic garbage receptacle.

Plus, a percussion and melodic improv on and around an Indian claypot, or Ghatam, an open-necked, gourd-shaped object used to great advantage by performers in guitarist John McLaughlin's Shakti group, and other traditional Indian music ensembles.

Also, a fine calypso vocal accompanied by snappy rhythms fashioned from a double-sided, donkey's jaw-bone; a "lowdown on the hoedown" rap tribute to the history of American folk music; and the blues tune "Corrina, Corrina" played on a uke-like "commodium" - constructed by Joe from a gleaming silver (and wholly disinfected) hospital bedpan, melded to an (eight-stringed) mandolin neck, pot top, and fork.

Joe Craven's two CDs - "Camptown" and "Django Latino" - earned rave reviews from listeners; he does live gigs; recording sessions, and educational music workshops. This Friday, March 4, he's part of a great concert at Town Hall in Seattle, 8th Ave. and Seneca St., at the eastern edge of downtown.

It's titled "Gypsy Jazz With a Hint Of Bluegrass" and features Pearl Django, Joe Craven, 16-year-old mandolin whiz Jake Jolliff, and the Washington Middle School String Orchestra. Tickets available at the door; also through Ticket Leap (keyword: Washington Middle School); plus at Silver Platters and Sonic Boom stores.

Joe's a hoot - and way funky, to boot.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at March 2, 2005 11:37 AM

---

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.rosenblog.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/746