Chris Campanelli has played in The Hill & Wood and Nettles, and led his own band, Camp Christopher. He debuts his untitled song cycle at New Dominion Bookshop on Saturday at 7pm. In his evocation of classic literary themes, Campanelli says he’s “trying to draw out the grandeur of what can feel really mundane and petty.” Photo by Amy and Jackson Smith
While rehearsing songs for this Saturday’s show at New Dominion Bookshop, Chris Campanelli’s been thinking about his audience.
But he says he hasn’t envisioned playing for the people who might fill the seats, or the passersby who may wander in from the December evening chill. He’s been thinking instead about performing for the books, for the tens of thousands of tales both true and invented held between their covers, all part of a persistent, perpetual conversation that transcends both time and space.
It’s a fitting setting for Campanelli’s return to the Charlottesville music scene, and for the debut of songs that mark a new chapter in his own songwriting story.
For a number of years in the early 2010s, Campanelli’s life centered around music. He played in local folk acts The Hill & Wood and Nettles, and, along with members of those bands, had his own project, Camp Christopher. It was “a kind of rotating circus,” he says with a quiet laugh.
In 2012, Camp Christopher released a record, Beyond the Word, and not long after that, Campanelli’s focus shifted away from music and toward other things. He got married and moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife. The couple had a child, moved back to Charlottesville (where Campanelli teaches high school English), and soon after had a second child.
Though he hasn’t released music since 2012, he’s been writing all the while. Music has “been something that has continued to gestate in some ways, on a deeper level, while tending to other things,” he says. “Different songs come out of that, when music is not squarely center in your life.”
The songs that have come out of that seven-year stretch have a certain “internal coherence to them” for Campanelli, who refers to this set of songs as a song cycle. A number of themes course through the compositions, including humankind’s dialogue with the four seasons, and the question, “How do you move toward someone?” But if there’s a thread that ties it all into a bow, it’s one of affirmation.
“My tendency [is] to see a massive shadow from a little cloud,” says Campanelli, who, upon receiving an increase in his fourth grade homework had a bit of an existential crisis. He remembers telling his mother that “life is difficult, because homework continually takes away your time, and then you go to college, and then you work, and then you die.”
For Campanelli, “affirmations have been a learned way of countering that tendency.” It’s something he got from 20th-century Irish poet Seamus Heaney.
In his December 1995 Nobel lecture “Crediting Poetry,” Heaney said, “I began a few years ago to try to make space in my reckoning and imagining for the marvelous as well as for the murderous.”
“Crediting the marvelous” is what Campanelli seeks to do in song form. He meditates on a tree (how long it’s been there, who planted it, who else has looked at it) in one song; in another he ruminates on the Vancouver clouds, how the sun hits them just so. Campanelli describes it as “wanting to freeze that moment and harvest it in a song,” so that it can act as an anchor, one of those “stable, irreducible things in the world to return to” when everything you see on the news feels dark, or unstable.
“High above the ancient plain / Where man first found his tongue confused / The tumbled clouds and sun composed / A city made of finest substance / That memory can never follow,” Campanelli sings about the clouds as he invokes the 13th-century Italian poet Dante. In Paradiso, Dante talks about how, at times, he’s been so absorbed and present in his experiences that his memory cannot follow. “I’ve always been fascinated by that notion, that we can experience something, know something, and yet not retain it,” says Campanelli, whether it’s the childlike desire to live amongst some spectacular clouds, or something else.
Another song, “Seven Years,” explores Campanelli’s experience of “reaching for something to say and not having it.” It’s “a song from the distance of exile, the distance of alienation, searching for an affirmation, knowing one’s there but not having a name for it yet.” As he points out, seven years is the amount of time Aeneas is away in Virgil’s Aeneid, and the amount of time that Odysseus spends on the cliffs in Homer’s The Odyssey.
Throughout the song cycle, which Campanelli hasn’t yet titled, he searches for affirmations, reaches them, and then falls away from them before locating them once again. In this motion, and in his evocation of classic literary themes, Campanelli says he’s “trying to draw out the grandeur of what can feel really mundane and petty.” And he’s found that some songs have stuck for a reason: “They were teaching me when I first wrote them. They say things that are better than what I say.”
“I’ve increasingly seen that as something I want to do in my songs, affirm something that other people can also have access to,” says Campanelli. “To state the obvious in such a way that you realize it wasn’t obvious.” He wants his listeners to credit the marvelous, too. It’s a gift he hopes to present to the people who fill the seats at New Dominion on Saturday.
So perhaps it’s not just the books he’s been rehearsing for, after all.
Chris Campanelli has played in The Hill & Wood and Nettles, and led his own band, Camp Christopher. He debuts his untitled song cycle at New Dominion Bookshop on Saturday at 7pm.
Kate Bollinger celebrates the vinyl release of her 2019 EP, I Don’t Wanna Lose, at the Southern on November 14. “Music is always around for a lot of people and it’s, I think, subtly powerful, but [not everyone] knows that it can really change people’s lives and change their brain patterns," she says. Publicity photo
The health benefits of music have been widely researched. Evidence has shown that music can alleviate stress, reduce pain, and lead to better cognitive functioning in patients suffering from memory loss. A popular study released last year asserted that routinely going to concerts can contribute to an increased lifespan. Charlottesville native Kate Bollinger witnessed music’s neurological impact firsthand while growing up: Her mom is a music therapist.
“I think it was important to see music in that context—as something that really, powerfully can help people get better,” Bollinger explains. “[My mom] works with a lot of older people that have dementia, and then she also works with younger kids who have autism and developmental disabilities. Music is always around for a lot of people and it’s, I think, subtly powerful, but [not everyone] knows that it can really change people’s lives and change their brain patterns.”
Bollinger’s musical lineage can be traced back to those early music therapy sessions.
“My mom was always releasing children’s music albums, so I grew up singing in children’s choruses for her albums,” says Bollinger. “From a young age, I had the chance to see how it works to record in a studio and to sing with other people.”
Meanwhile, both of Bollinger’s older brothers played music, hosting band practices in their basement. This exposure informed her own approach: She joined the girl’s chorus in middle school, and by high school was recording and releasing her own songs on SoundCloud.
Now a fourth-year cinematography major at the University of Virginia, Bollinger’s teamed up with classmate John Trainum, and they’ve put out a string of singles over the past couple of years. Trainum plays keys and synth on Bollinger’s tracks, and is credited with mixing and production.
“[Trainum and I] put out two songs together that we just recorded in his room—I guess it was two years ago now—and then he would make beats and I would write over them,” she says. The duo have been recording at White Star Sound in Louisa.
Over the summer, Bollinger released a five-song EP, I Don’t Wanna Lose, which marked a period of growth for her: It’s the first time she’s worked with a full band during the recording process. Along with Trainum, the disc features drummer Jacob Grissom, who Bollinger met in high school. Enrolled in the jazz program at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Grissom brought along fellow VCU jazz students Chris Lewis (guitar) and Jimmy Trussell (bass). Possessing all the familiarity of a lo-fi bedroom recording, I Don’t Wanna Lose is a languid collection that’s easy to get lost in.
While the EP’s themes are universal—a sense of insecurity about the future and the pains of heartbreak—Bollinger says songwriting, for her, began as personal catharsis.
“I feel like I’ve written a lot of songs in tears about something, so it definitely started from a self-centered place, just trying to hash out what I felt and trying to make something productive out of usually bad feelings,” she says.
But as her audience continues to grow, it’s clear that Bollinger’s work harkens back to the touchstone of music therapy—music as a communal tool for healing.
“It’s been really cool to hear that [my songs have] helped with people’s anxiety, so I’m definitely thinking now in a bit of a broader way, that hopefully it can help other people with their feelings.”
Guitarist Jordan Perry will perform his solo work at The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative on November 8. Photo by Amy and Jackson Smith
Jordan Perry’s been here before. He doesn’t mean physically here, at The Pie Chest on High Street, where we meet for an afternoon coffee—he means he’s already done this interview.
Last night, he had a dream about it. While he can’t recall the full content, Perry remembers, “in no weird dream terms,” telling me the detailed story of how he got his first real guitar.
Perhaps it was a premonition, I tell him, because the first question I prepared for him is, When did you first pick up a guitar?
“That’s hilarious. Oh, that’s great,” he says, chuckling and setting his coffee cup down as he launches into the story.
Perry spent many summers in Blacksburg, Virginia, with his grandma, an enthusiastic pack rat who kept just about everything; most rooms were treasure troves of junk and family relics. When he was about 9 years old, he was digging through her attic and came across a 1960s Kimberly electric guitar with a black and red sunburst body, a “super ornate” pickguard, and “an obscene amount of switches.”
Perry rushed downstairs and asked his grandma if he could have the guitar. “I’ll have to call [your uncle],” she said.
“Can you call him today?” Perry asked, eager to make the instrument his own. He’d played violin, and even had a toy guitar when he was a toddler, but with the Kimberly slung around his shoulder, he says he “definitely felt cool.”
And it made him feel like writing music. Perry’s been composing on guitar ever since (another dream turned reality, if you will), and he’ll play some of those original pieces at The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative on Friday night.
It’s difficult to label Perry’s solo material. Experimental instrumental guitar is perhaps the closest classification, as Perry says the music comes out of “literally experimenting…following curiosity.” But that doesn’t completely describe what Perry’s written for his two solo records so far, both his 2016 eponymous debut and 2018’s Witness Tree.
In high school in Harrisonburg and later while living in Philadelphia he played music both on his own and in bands with friends. He played in grungy bands, a pop punk band, and a series of punk and hardcore groups (like Eat Forever and My Mind) that occasionally also drew inspiration from the baroque pop-rock of acts like The Kinks. Simultaneously, Perry got into traditional folk music, particularly music from the English folk revival of the 1960s, artists like Shirley Collins and The Watersons. Then, while formally studying music at Shenandoah University and later Temple University, Perry got really into classical guitar while also playing in a riff-y stoner rock band, Heavy Sons.
The physicality of classical guitar’s fingerpicking resonated with Perry, and he started writing solo material informed by the technique—early versions of what he’s playing now (though he kept playing in rock bands, playing guitar and writing lyrics for Charlottesville twee-boogie group New Boss).
“There’s a lot of stuff at work” in his instrumental guitar compositions, he says, and not just because of his myriad musical influences (experiences like living abroad in Palestine for two years come into it, too, he says). But Perry hesitates to say what this music is or is not. He prefers to talk instead about how he makes it.
Photo by Amy and Jackson Smith
He comes up with “musical gestures, impressions,” and strings them together “in kind of a narrative way.” Perry’s interested in “the little bit of movement there,” and in “the kind of extraneous friction sounds that can happen on the guitar from some less consonant intervals rubbing together and creating this kind of throbbing sound that comes through sometimes and sometimes doesn’t.” He’ll create fret-hand finger pattern loops over a melody to encourage that.
Perry often composes based on the feeling he gets from the place he’s in at that moment. It’s later, once he’s practicing or performing, that the depth of those impressions comes into focus. A composition created amidst the smell, the sound, the scene of tidal flats in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, can end up containing—in its atmosphere, and Perry’s use of tension and release—symbolism about rising sea levels.
On his first record, Perry says he created “a basic compositional vocabulary” for himself, and within that vocabulary, he came to “a realization of some kind of voice” on Witness Tree. As he begins to tug at the thread of his next record, he says he plans to use that voice to explore and expand his singular compositional vocabulary.
“Someone said there’s a textual aspect [to the music], and that feels kind of right,” says Perry before taking a sip of coffee.
Now I’m the one with a bit of déjà vu—in a previous article for C-VILLE, I described the experience of listening to Witness Tree as “not unlike reading a series of related short stories.” We laugh about it for a moment before Perry ruminates a little further on instinct and music.
“What happens if you trust a little bit in this meager language that you’ve created for yourself?” he asks. “I’m interested in pushing it, becoming more fluid about that idea.”
Guitarist Jordan Perry will perform his solo work at The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative on November 8. The Ambient Eye and WolfRavenTagCloud share the bill.
Saturday night at The Front Porch, a group of local musicians pay tribute to Nirvana's "MTV Unplugged in New York" record, released 25 years ago this week. Getty Images/News.com
The fuzzy, sage green granny cardigan hasn’t been washed in more than two decades. It’s missing a button, and the knit is stained in spots and cigarette-burned in a few others.
That sweater fetched $334,000 at auction last weekend because, despite its flaws, it’s an iconic piece of rock memorabilia, worn frequently by Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain in the months before his death in April 1994. Chances are, you’ve seen the sweater—it’s the one Cobain wore for Nirvana’s appearance on “MTV Unplugged.”
Released as an album on November 1, 1994—the band’s first after Cobain’s death—MTVUnplugged in New York has come to be regarded as one of the best live performances ever recorded, a series of songs that, many musicians and critics would argue, is considerably more valuable than the cardigan.
Nirvana was the reason Coman picked up a guitar in the first place, when he was a preteen at the tail end of the grunge era. During his fifth grade talent show, some of his friends played a few of the band’s songs, and Coman soon asked to take guitar lessons. One of the first songs he learned was “About A Girl,” off Nirvana’s 1989 debut, Bleach.
Coman loved grunge—Nirvana, Alice In Chains—and he couldn’t imagine listening to or playing anything else, particularly folk music, which “seemed too cheesy. Like campfire songs, things you’d sing at summer camp.” That changed when he got a copy of the Unplugged album and heard his grunge idols close their set with, of all things, a blues arrangement of a traditional folk song.
Nirvana was at the height of its popularity when the band recorded that segment in November 1993. The previous year, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” from the 1991 release Nevermind, topped music charts all over the world, and was credited with bringing grunge into the mainstream. In January 1992, The New York Times noted that Nevermind was selling more than 300,000 copies a week.
MTV likely would have loved for Nirvana to play an acoustic version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” says Coman. But that wasn’t the band’s vision for the set. “It wasn’t greatest hits with acoustic guitars,” he says.
Instead, Cobain and his bandmates Krist Novoselic (bass) and Dave Grohl (drums), plus a few guests, played new, mostly acoustic, folk-influenced arrangements of 14 songs: one from Bleach, four from Nevermind, three from In Utero (1993), and six cover songs, including three tracks by the Meat Puppets; David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World”; The Vaselines’ “Jesus Doesn’t Want Me For A Sunbeam”; and closed with blues musician Lead Belly’s version of a traditional song, “Where Did You Sleep Last Night.” MTV Unplugged in New York was Coman’s introduction to roots music, and he’s played it ever since.
When Will Marsh of Gold Connections was in middle school, his dad showed him the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” music video, and not long after that, sometime in the early 2000s, Marsh got a “best-of” Nirvana CD (which, he notes, he still keeps in his car and plays from time to time).
“Nirvana was the first mythological influence on my music, one of those few bands that’s way bigger than a band,” says Marsh. “There was this wholeness to the music that struck me,” the way Cobain brought in sonic structures from the Pixies and song structures from The Beatles, says Marsh, “he brought it all together and gave me a formula for writing songs and performing. He’s been a huge influence.”
Alice Clair wasn’t even born when the album she’s helping to celebrate came out. In fact, she wasn’t really into Nirvana when she signed on to do the show. She’d heard the band on the radio and on the Guitar Hero video game, but says that grunge music gave her “a lot of anxiety” when she was younger.
When Coman approached her to participate in “Come As You Are,” the only song left was “Polly,” an anti-rape song Cobain wrote about the abduction and rape of a 14-year-old girl in Tacoma, Washington, in 1987. Clair learned the song from scratch, and says she’s come to appreciate and respect how many Nirvana songs are “heartfelt, and protest-type” songs,” ones driven by “raw emotion.”
Saturday night, Coman, Clair, Marsh, and a number of other Charlottesville musicians and Nirvana fans will play all 14 tracks from MTV Unplugged in New York, in order, but not exactly as Nirvana would have done it. It’s an homage, not a recreation, says Coman, adding that a friend summed it up for him pretty well: If Kurt Cobain could give you advice about what to do, it would be to be true to yourself and your performance style when you do these songs.
Ultimately, that’s the spirit of the record, says Clair. “I think it’s cool as hell that they went out and didn’t play all the hits. That, in some ways, [Cobain] is being difficult for all the pop audiences,” she says. “It’s great to be paying tribute to this particular performance, because while it wasn’t made to cater to so many, it absolutely did.”
Fans of go-go will get their kicks on Saturday night when Ebony Groove delivers it old-school style at the Jefferson. “There are some things that we just didn’t, and don’t, want to bend on,” says vocalist and saxophonist Ivan Orr. Photo courtesy Ebony Groove
When Ebony Groove posted some old photos to its Facebook page in 2009, the comments came quickly.
“Can we get a reunion please?!”
“OMG what memories.”
“Damn, now this brings back the real good ole days, cats!”
“How about a reunion concert?”
“You know I will be there if there’s a reunion!!!!”
The band had put up throwback photos from its go-go group beginnings in the late 1980s, photos of band members posing together in loose-fitting faded jeans and high tops (and, in one case, coordinating bold-striped shorts-and-T-shirt ensembles).
Nearly a decade after that post, and more than two decades after the band’s “last show” at Outback Lodge, Ebony Groove gave the fans what they wanted: A reunion show, the day after Thanksgiving 2018, at IX Art Park. Not surprisingly, the show sold out.
After starting in 1987 as an offshoot of Charlottesville High School’s pep band (itself an offshoot of the CHS marching band), Ebony Groove went from playing basketball games to school dances, local parties, and eventually opening for national and regional touring acts at Trax nightclub. “People have a lot of ownership in what we were able to accomplish,” says vocalist and saxophonist Ivan Orr, particularly for black Charlottesvillians. “They’ve always thought of us as ‘their band,’ since we were an outgrowth of school.”
On Saturday night, Ebony Groove will get them going again, this time opening for 100- Proof GoGo Band at the Jefferson Theater.
For the unfamiliar, go-go music is a subgenre of funk unique to the Washington, D.C. area. It developed in the mid 1960s and ‘70s, with large bands comprised of musicians steeped not just in funk, but in Latin, soul, hard bop, and jazz.
In the late 1980s, go-go seemed poised for a breakthrough. Island Records founder Chris Blackwell (who worked with Toots and the Maytals and Bob Marley, and is often credited with bringing reggae to international audiences) took interest in the genre and signed some go-go bands to his label. And the soundtrack to Spike Lee’s 1988 comedy School Daze, featuring D.C. go-go band Experience Unlimited, peaked at number 14 on Billboard’s Top R&B Albums chart. But the genre never took off beyond the Washington, D.C. area, and Orr has a theory as to why: “It’s hard to capture in a three-minute and 30-second song, what the feeling is… It’s a music that you have to experience live. You can get a feel, but it’s nothing like being there.”
Many of the crowd-pleasing aspects of the genre, like call-and-response refrains and “roll call” (band members calling out friends when they sneak in late, for example), don’t have the same effect outside of the live show.
Real to reel: Taping culture, in which fans tape live sets from the floor, or sound engineers capture a performance on the board, is most often associated with jam bands like the Grateful Dead. But it’s just as important to go-go music, explains Ivan Orr, Ebony Groove founding member and saxophonist/vocalist, in large part because it’s difficult to capture the feel of go-go music in a recording studio. Orr remembers the first time he realized the value of these tapes: all-female go-go band Pleasure played Trax in the early 1990s, and at the end of the show, the sound engineer auctioned off the tape he recorded from the board. One opportune fan got the tape, and the band got another hundred bucks.
Recently, go-go has started to focus more on percussion and vocals and less on horn, guitar, and bass, but Ebony Groove has consciously avoided that tendency, says Orr. “[We have] a respect for musicality, and there are some things that we just didn’t, and don’t, want to bend on.”
Ebony Groove’s membership is somewhat flexible, as the band invites guest musicians to sit in with them depending on the show, and who’s available to rehearse. But at the core of the group is Orr; vocalist and trumpeter Jesse “Jay” Turner; percussionists Raymond Brooks, Curtis Kenney, and Kyle Reaves; congas player Larry Johnson; keyboardist Chris Redd; bassist and keyboardist Keith Carter; and guitarist Tom Butler.
Not only are they all seasoned musicians who have been playing together and apart for more than three decades, they’re all rather accomplished in the community outside of the band, says Turner. They’re fathers and husbands, business owners, educators (Turner is principal of Buford Middle School and Orr teaches music at Albemarle High School), barbers (Johnson), police officers (Kenney), and more.
Recent shows have been very nostalgic, says Orr, bringing audience members back to their youth, dancing to music their friends and classmates and neighbors made. The band’s added some contemporary songs into its set (get ready to hear some Adele), and since many of band members compose music for other projects, they’re contemplating writing some E.G. originals, says Orr.
But nostalgia’s not the only reason for Ebony Groove’s reunion. The band wants to bring something positive to the city, to Charlottesville’s black communities in particular, says Turner. “Charlottesville has been through a lot since August 2017…and we felt we had something to offer to bring some healing to our community and to certain individuals in our community,” sort of how funk icon James Brown used music to soothe unrest in Boston, and later Washington, D.C., in the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in April 1968, he says.
“It’s really gratifying, and makes us feel good,” to have started and continued something that black Charlottesvilleians have been proud of for so many years, says Turner. “We’re just excited to be in a position to still do this. Music has a way of bringing communities together.”
It’s also a way of keeping culture alive. Charlottesville has a “very, very rich” musical lineage, says Orr, one that Ebony Groove has benefitted from and contributed to, and it’s brought black music into venues that don’t host black music often enough. “And we want to keep that going.”
Fans of go-go will get their kicks on Saturday night when Ebony Groove delivers it old-school style at the Jefferson Theater.
Electronic pastoral folk-psych duo Heron & Crane (Travis Kokas and Dave Gibson) releases its debut record, Firesides, on Friday, and plays a celebratory show at The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative on Saturday night. Publicity photo
Twenty-two years.
That’s how long Heron & Crane’s first record, Firesides, has been in the works, whether or not Travis Kokas and Dave Gibson were aware of it.
Kokas and Gibson met at a sparsely attended rock show in 1997, while both were students at Ohio State University in Columbus. They got to talking and discovered they shared a myriad of interests: Both were film geeks, and they had “all the same musical obsessions,” says Gibson. (Incidentally, they’d both go on to become librarians.)
They became buds, and soon after that, bandmates, playing in a band called The Cusacks “like John and Joan,” says Gibson, who describes his and Kokas’ first musical collaboration as a “power-poppy, Elephant 6-sounding band” that took inspiration from a recording collective comprised of some of the most notable indie rock bands of the 1990s and 2000s, such as Neutral Milk Hotel, The Olivia Tremor Control, and The Apples in Stereo.
When Gibson moved to Charlottesville, the friends kept in touch, talking often, visiting occasionally, and keeping tabs on one another’s musical projects. Gibson played psychedelic power pop with Borrowed Beams of Light for a while, and founded catchy indie pop band Weird Mob (with Renee Reighart) and kosmische-krautrock-synthwave duo Personal Bandana (with Travis Thatcher), while Kokas pursued a solo psych-pop project, Cryptids After Dark.
Gibson (as well as Reighart and a few other area musicians) helped Kokas record some of those Cryptids After Dark tracks while he was visiting from Columbus, and the two kept working on the songs after the fact and from afar, sending digital music files back and forth.
They discovered it was an exciting way to collaborate on music, and decided to start a new band where they could play the “weird, mellow, instrumental, folky” music they both love, says Gibson. It was “an opportunity to do music that we enjoy, that didn’t exactly sit with our other musical projects.”
Dusty old demos hatched fresh new ideas, and after an initial Charlottesville basement recording session in fall 2017, with just a drum machine and 12-string guitar, Heron & Crane took flight across the internet, with Gibson and Kokas trading off building up a track—a synth part here (Gibson), a guitar part there (Kokas).
Both say that it was exciting to open emails and see that the other one had uploaded a new file to their shared Dropbox, each time an aural surprise that would either confirm the direction they were following, or suggest a new one entirely.
“We built and built, and then we almost had too much stuff,” says Gibson. “Here are all the possible ideas…then for the sake of not totally overburdening people’s ears with different parts, we whittled it down to what it became.”
Firesides became a record in which Gibson and Kokas use a limited palette of analog instruments (no software sounds allowed)—including a 12-string guitar, a variety of MOOG and Yamaha synthesizers (including one that could do everything from sampling to Mellotron mimicry), an Oberheim DX drum machine, and an organelle—to explore the gentle, pastoral topography of electronic music.
Taking flight
The Heron & Crane name is, among other things, a reference to Russian filmmaker Yuri Norstein’s The Heron and The Crane, a 10-minute animated short from 1974 based on a fairy tale about a hapless courtship between the two titular birds. It’s also a nod to Mike Heron, a member of the highly influential British psychedelic folk act The Incredible String Band, founded in the 1960s. Renee Reighart designed the Firesides cover art, capturing the colorful, calming landscapes that Kokas and Gibson kept in mind while composing.
“You can tell we were feeling ourselves out a bit on this record,” says Kokas, pointing to the variety of sounds and feelings stretching across the album’s 10 tracks. Side one of the LP (they pressed 100 copies to red vinyl) is a bit more experimental, with the Electric Light Orchestra-inspired “Stars Over Nara,” the krautrock song “Surf Trials,” and Kokas’ ode to Gibson’s basement, “Cave Cricket Crossing.” Side two is a “bit more cohesive,” says Kokas, with the Gibson-penned Stereolab-y “Space Junk” and the duo’s favorite, the Kokas-written “Companions Of Fish & Turtles,” which they both say best captures the vibe they aimed for from the start.
“It’s very much ready to be played during a Folger’s coffee commercial,” says Gibson with a laugh. “A lot of what influenced this record is weird music from old educational films and stuff.” All that “library music” used in film and television scores, and the British psych-folk that both he and Kokas bonded over more than two decades ago.
Somewhere out there on what Gibson calls the “weird fantasy landscape” of Firesides, they found a new frontier worth exploring together:“It’s probably the funnest record I’ve ever done,” says Kokas. “I feel rejuvenated.”
While Kokas is in town to play a release show for the record, he and Gibson plan on laying down the first tracks for Heron & Crane’s next record. It’s sure to take less time.
Charlottesville resident Roland Wiggins is one of the greatest jazz theoreticians of our time. And while he's shared his knowledge with some of the most famous names in jazz (John Coltrane, Yusef Lateef, to name just a couple), a spirit of self-expression and generosity is what has come to define his storied career. Photo by Amy and Jackson Smith
Roland Wiggins taught his first music lesson when he was in elementaryschool. He was about 10 years old, and his music teacher, Helen Derrick, had written a series of notes and chord intervals on the chalkboard. As the lesson progressed, Wiggins noticed that Derrick had made a mistake.
“Excuse me, Ms. Derrick. You’ve made an error,” the boy said from his desk. “What you told us just doesn’t work, really, musically.”
Derrick replied, “Now, wait a minute. I’m going to check all my theories and check all the books, and if I come back and you’re right, I’ll bring you an ice cream cone.”
Half-reclining on a formal sofa in his Charlottesville living room (which also doubles as his practice studio, with an upright piano and clavinova in one corner), Wiggins, now 87, interlocks his fingers behind his head and looks up toward the ceiling as he remembers the scene. “Ms. Derrick was going to be a better music teacher than most. I wasn’t being mean, that’s just what I felt,” he says, then laughs quietly before ending the story.
Next music class, he says, eyes smiling, everyone got a vanilla ice cream cone.
Wiggins still loves vanilla ice cream best, and he’s built his love for music, and music education, into an astonishing career that’s included teaching everyone from Philadelphia public school students to John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk. A resident of Charlottesville since 1989, Wiggins is one of the foremost music theorists and logicians of our time.
His approach to music and music theory, which he calls the “atonal method,” or, more casually, “the Wiggins,” allows musicians to better express themselves by breaking the rules of Western tonal music. It’s about, among many other things, avoiding clichés, infusing original compositions with more individuality, or giving a singular voice to a standard piece. It’s about communicating honestly.
A young Roland Wiggins (center) poses with his mother, older sister, and older brother. Wiggins, who grew up in Ocean City, New Jersey, was a musical prodigy by age 10. In addition to his many accomplishments, he is one of just a few people authorized to teach the Schillinger System of Musical Composition, a method based on mathematics and encompassing theories of rhythm, harmony, melody, counterpoint, form, and semantics (emotional meaning). Photo courtesy of Roland Wiggins
By the time Wiggins corrected his music teacher’s work, he’d already been playing and studying piano for a few years.
Wiggins says that his mother “played church music very well,” and practiced regularly on the Wiggins’ family piano. It wasn’t a great piano, he recalls—it was missing a few keys, and some of the others didn’t make a sound. But this imperfect instrument may actually have enhanced Wiggins’ innate musical abilities.
One day, Wiggins’ mother told him he’d be playing music at church the following Sunday. “Well, Mom, I would probably make a lot of mistakes,” he said to her, looking over at the flawed piano.
A stern glance from Wiggins’ father said that Wiggins would indeed play music at church the following Sunday. “So what I did was, to learn the pitches that were missing, and put them here,” says Wiggins, pointing to his ear. He played that Sunday, and kept practicing, “And there came a time when the whole keyboard became friends rather than enemies, or matters of ignorance.”
Throughout junior high and high school, he took private lessons as well as classes at the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music, including some from highly regarded classical composer Vincent Persichetti. Wiggins then enrolled in Combs College of Music in Philadelphia, where, about a week or so into classes, he was invited to join the faculty. Over the course of eight years, Wiggins attended Combs part-time, earning undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral degrees while simultaneously teaching music in Philadelphia public schools.
Wiggins then left Philadelphia for New York, where he studied composition and advanced chord theory with Henry Cowell, regarded by many as one of the most innovative composers in 20th century American music. (Cowell is perhaps best known for his development and use of “tone clusters,” in which a pianist plays multiple adjacent keys on the keyboard at once, often with the forearm, to achieve a certain sonorous sound.)
Somewhere in there, he served in the U.S. Air Force and played in a band with famed jazz and R&B trumpeter Donald Byrd (Wiggins says he taught Byrd about embellishments, musical flourishes on a melody or harmony in the form of added notes).
During his stint in the military, Wiggins, seen here at the piano, played in an Air Force band. Among his many bandmates was famed jazz and R&B trumpeter and vocalist Donald Byrd. Photo courtesy of Roland Wiggins
In a distinguished and varied career, Wiggins has been director of the Center for the Study of Aesthetics in Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (1971-1973); a music teacher and choral director for Amherst Regional Junior High School (1976-1979); and an associate professor of music at Hampshire College in Amherst. He later chaired the Luther P. Jackson House for African American Studies at the University of Virginia, and taught a few classes in UVA’s music department while he was at it.
At the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, he conducted grant-funded research into advancements in electronic music production and helped create the Sound to Score translator device, which used computerized analyses of world famous jazz musicians to teach music.
And there were opportunities he did not take: In 1971, for instance, Harvard psychiatrist Chester M. Pierce requested that Wiggins interview for the position of director of the Urban Studies Center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a post that came with a full professorship. The committee felt Wiggins’ approach to digital music education could “serve as a model in numerous institutional programs,” Pierce wrote, adding, “Your own ability as a jazz and classical musician was mentioned to me by Mr. Quincy Jones, a musician of international stature, who praised your handling of the philosophical, educational and research components of the Institute of Black American Music.”
Yes, that Quincy Jones, producer to Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson, and Aretha Franklin, among others. Wiggins got to know him through Jesse Jackson, who tapped Wiggins to serve as a charter member on the board of directors for his Operation P.U.S.H. (People United to Save Humanity). For the record, “Q” wanted to study music with Wiggins, too, but Wiggins’ queue of students was already full.
Wiggins turned down the Harvard interview. It didn’t pay as much as UMass Amherst, and by that time he had a family—his wife, Muriel, and their three daughters—to consider. But he was proud to be asked, and keeps the letter in a plastic sleeve inside a binder alongside some of his most prized photographs and sheet music.
Wiggins’ list of accomplishments goes on and on, and might fill the allotted word count for this story. But in talking with Wiggins for even a few minutes, it’s clear that while he’s accomplished quite a bit in his life—musically, academically, culturally—he’s not doing it for the accolades.
“I’ve got awards and stuff, that I don’t hang on the wall,” he says. His walls are instead full of large-scale abstract paintings by one of his Air Force buddies; a portrait of his three daughters, Rosalyn, Susan, and Carol; a few family photos; and other items close to his heart. Atop his piano are family photographs, lamps, cassette tapes, and small clocks, rather than trophies and citations. When Wiggins talks about what he’s accomplished, he speaks not of his awards, but his students.
“I’ve had a lot of students. Either directly, or indirectly,” he says, smiling. Some of them just happen to be some of the greatest and most influential jazz musicians of all time. Yusef Lateef. Billy Taylor. Archie Shepp via Jimmy Owens. John Coltrane, unhappy with what he’d come up with after the monumental success of both Giant Steps (1960) and A Love Supreme (1965), called Wiggins for guidance.
“I said, ‘first of all, John, give yourself credit for the mastery that you’ve already developed and the contributions you’ve made,’” Wiggins says. Their phone call was cut short, but another of Wiggins’ students, Charlottesville-based musician and restaurateur Jay Pun, says it’s generally understood that that Coltrane-Wiggins phone call influenced much of what Coltrane did on Interstellar Space, recorded in 1967 (the year Coltrane died) and released in 1974.
Wiggins (right) and legendary pop music producer Quincy Jones embrace at a fundraiser for Tandem Friends School in the mid-1990s. Wiggins and Jones met in the 1970s, via Jesse Jackson’s Operation P.U.S.H. (People United to Save Humanity). At the time, Wiggins was running a program at the University of Massachusetts focused on recruiting notable African Americans to advanced degree programs, and “Q” expressed interest in enrolling. Photo courtesy of Roland Wiggins
Charlottesville-based guitarist Jamal Millner saw Wiggins’ influence on these stars firsthand. Millner, perhaps best known as a member of the Corey Harris-led blues band 5×5, studied music at UVA in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was a great era for jazz in Charlottesville, he says, and a lot of jazz greats came to town to play at Old Cabell Hall. Millner, who was playing music professionally even before going to college, would sometimes loiter backstage and listen to the stars discuss technique and theory. Wiggins was usually there, too.
During one show, legendary jazz drummer Max Roach gave Wiggins a shoutout from the stage, and it nearly blew Millner’s mind. “The highest level of jazz musicians were always giving Dr. Wiggins his props,” he says.
So, what exactly are they giving him props for?
Wiggins giggles when he explains what he’s been working on in his decades-long music theory career. “I keep laughing and giggling,” he says, “because I’ve developed a system of atonality. That means, it purposely breaks all the rules of Western tonal music.” (Most music in Western cultures is tonal.)
He gets up from the sofa and goes over to the clavinova (a digital piano) to demonstrate. His system has to do with, among many other things, added tone systems; embellishments; sets of chords and their behaviors; how the end of one musical entity (a chord, or a rhythm, for instance), is immediately or simultaneously the beginning of another one. It’s hard to explain in words, but easy to hear. Wiggins gets on the clavinova and demonstrates how his system of atonality can expand the emotional and intellectual capacity of a composition.
“So, if you’re angry at, say, some of the racism, or some of the more offensive mechanisms that are still around in society, you can’t express that musically and be truthful” when you’re playing something upbeat and proper, he says as he plays a measure. “But if you do the Wiggins atonality,” he says, his fingers floating over the keys, playing that same measure in a different voice, one with more tones, more notes, more variation, and as a result, more feeling. “It’s not easy to sing, but I’m expressing something real, some rage, honestly,” he says.
It’s a way to get to know someone. “Have you heard this one?,” Wiggins asks before launching into “What A Wonderful World,” Wiggins-style. Of course I have; it’s part of the Great American Songbook. But I haven’t heard it like this. Not from the perspective of a black man born in Ocean City, New Jersey, during the Great Depression, who was a musical prodigy by age 10. Who, growing up in a segregated United States, was not allowed to swim in the local public pool except on Fridays, just before it was cleaned for the week.
I haven’t heard “What A Wonderful World” from the perspective of someone whose family was only allowed to buy a home near the railroad tracks. Not from the perspective of a brilliant mind who was told by the dean of UMass that he was being hired “because he was black, and a scholar,” not because he was a scholar who was also black (Wiggins asked him to reverse that statement).
Wiggins (left) with jazz icon Dizzy Gillespie (right). Photo courtesy of Roland Wiggins
Next, he plays Thelonious Monk and, with a wry smile on his face, says that since Monk’s not here to tell him otherwise, “let’s help ourselves” to “‘Round Midnight.” He adds “the Wiggins” to Monk, builds upon his friend’s composition, makes it his own.
He’s had two surgeries on his hands, he tells me as he leaves Monk behind, those very hands still dancing over the black and white keys. But at the time, he’d fallen in love with a piece full of tenths, a piece that required both hands to play. “Ah, Chopin!” he declares. “Takes me back to Combs College! Cadence. Deceptive. All running up and down the keyboard. They’re instrumental forms, and not every musician uses the same ones others do,” he explains.
The Wiggins system is about individual, truthful expression and communication through music. It’s what he aims to share with his students, so that they in turn may share it with their own students and listeners.
It’s an approach to teaching, playing, and writing music that has changed the work, and the lives, of a number of local musicians who’ve worked closely with Wiggins over the years.
I’ll say this about Charlottesville,” says Millner. “There are a lot of great musicians around. But Dr. Wiggins? He’s a person that, for most folks, only exists in theory. But he’s here. Talented, intelligent, and a very nice guy. In all the ways he’s great at music, he’s great as a person.”
For Millner, as well as other area musicians like Morwenna Lasko and her husband and collaborator Jay Pun, living in such close proximity to Wiggins has allowed them to mine the depths of the theorist’s brilliant mind and big heart in ways that folks like John Coltrane simply could not.
Pun first heard of Wiggins through his friend and musical mentor LeRoi Moore, saxophonist and founding member of Dave Matthews Band, who arranged music around Matthews’ song skeletons. Every time Pun visited Moore’s farm outside of town, the two would have the same conversation.
“Do you know Wiggins?,” Moore would ask.
“No, who’s that?,” Pun would say.
“He’s a music theorist, and he will blow your mind!”
“Whatever, Roi,” Pun would reply. Pun graduated from Berklee College of Music, so what more could another music theorist have to teach him?
When Moore died of pneumonia after being seriously injured in an ATV accident in 2008, Wiggins played at his funeral. But still, Pun had his doubts.
After a chance meeting while waiting in line to see Barack Obama at the Sprint Pavilion in 2011, Pun gave Wiggins a call: He was a friend of LeRoi’s, and he wanted to take a lesson. But before Wiggins would accept him as a student, Pun had to pass a test.
“What’s in a C diminished chord?” Wiggins asked.
“C, E flat, G flat, B double flat,” said Pun.
“Is that all?” Wiggins inquired.
Pun paused, tentatively offered up a few more options, and Wiggins told him to call back when he knew for sure. His pride bruised, Pun decided it wasn’t worth it. And yet, he had to know what Wiggins knew about the C diminished chord, that he didn’t.
Pun did his research, called Wiggins back the following day with a better answer: C, E flat, G flat, and B double flat are the consonant tones, but each chord has even more dissonant notes, like ninths, elevenths, and thirteenths. That’s what Wiggins wanted to hear, and so they set up a lesson: One hour, for $50. That hour turned into three, almost four. Then it turned in to another lesson, and another.
Once Pun started learning “this note goes with that note because of this,” and “this note combined with those note sounds like this because of this,” the number of people buying his records and attending his live shows mattered less and less to him. Under Wiggins’ tutelage, Pun says that for him, music transformed into a world worth exploring, rather than just a product to promote.
Roland Wiggins “is a one-in-a-lifetime teacher, and friend,” says Morwenna Lasko, a Charlottesville-based musician who has taken lessons from Wiggins since spring 2013. Over the years, their talks on music and music theory have led to conversations about life and family, a driving force in both their lives. “The Western tonal system of music will only take you so far, as far as expressing things. And that’s why Dr. Wiggins is a genius in certain aspects, because he’s tried to undo it,” says Lasko. Photo by Amy and Jackson Smith
Lasko took her first lesson with Wiggins in spring 2013, a birthday gift from Pun. Lasko started playing violin at age 3, after seeing Itzhak Perlman play on “Sesame Street.” Her musical gifts were evident from the start—she’d often retreat to her room to figure out a “Masterpiece Theater” theme—and she knew early on that music is how she best expresses herself, how she best relates to people.
Lasko is classically trained and highly skilled (she can play Paganini caprices, considered “the ultimate” in technical accomplishment), but she was nervous for her first Wiggins lesson. She arrived early and sat in her car in the driveway to compose herself before ringing the bell.
Once she was inside, though, at the piano with Wiggins, her nerves mostly subsided. She’d gained not just a teacher, but a friend, and the lessons were “magic.” They talked theory and played pieces like Billy Taylor’s “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free,” and Thad Jones’ “A Child Is Born” to get to know one another. As with Pun, Lasko’s one-hour lessons were almost always longer, but Wiggins never charged more than the $50.
Early on in their lessons, Lasko and Wiggins noticed that deer would often come up to the French doors in the living room and listen in on what they were doing on violin and piano, respectively. Lasko’s convinced it’s the late, great jazz artists stopping by to hear what they’re doing, to continue learning from Wiggins.
Wiggins’ theories and methods “[give] you so much more juicy vocabulary to use” when expressing oneself through music, she says.
He’s also helped her to realize her own musical tendencies and clichés. Musicians get comfortable with what they know, says Lasko, and they’ll slip back into the same chord progressions or familiar melodies. But Wiggins helped her see that identifying and recognizing that comfort zone, and then stepping outside of it, is where a musician can grow. While recording The Hollow, her latest release with Pun as MoJa, Lasko wrote her violin solos, listened to them, decided “that sounds so Morwenna,” and then re-wrote them to be almost the opposite of what they were…and they’re now some of her favorite solos.
Many musicians, once they reach a certain point of virtuosity, think there’s nothing more to learn, says Lasko. But there’s always something to discover, and Wiggins leads by example. While recovering from a hip surgery in a rehabilitation facility, Lasko and Pun brought Wiggins a keyboard so that he could play music for his fellow patients (often accompanied by his wife singing), and so that he could work late into the night on his theories.
During their lessons, Lasko and Wiggins usually play violin and piano, respectively. But Wiggins often has Lasko hop on the piano bench with him to do a one-finger melody exercise. Photo by Amy and Jackson Smith
After Berklee, Lasko wondered what she would practice that would continue to inspire her. The answer, it turns out, is music theory, and Wiggins’ atonal method in particular. “That language is so vast and broad,” she says. “The more you know of it, the more you can say, the more you can communicate with others. The more I build my language of music theory, the more powerful I feel. The Western tonal system of music will only take you so far, as far as expressing things. And that’s why Dr. Wiggins is a genius in certain aspects, because he’s tried to undo it.”
“I have notebooks full of stuff that I will literally be digesting for my entire life,” says Lasko. “It’s almost like life is too short, like you need 10 lives, or 25, to really learn all there is to learn.”
But, says Wiggins, Lasko’s doing a pretty fantastic job. “I just adore her. If I were to die tomorrow morning, the person that would know so much of what I’ve taught to do, would be Morwenna.”
And that’s a very good thing: Lasko teaches private lessons to students of all ages here in Charlottesville, sharing some of that Wiggins knowledge with a whole new generation of musicians.
This Saturday night, Wiggins will give a somewhat rare concert during A Night of Black Innovation in Music at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center.
In a Facebook post about the show, Wiggins wrote, “The opportunity to help preserve and extend the life of Afro-American arts, especially music, is tremendously exciting for me.” He’ll perform alongside a slew of local black artists, including pianist and composer Ivan Orr, singer Yolonda Coles Jones, neo-soul artist Nathaniel Star, and others. Some of his beloved students—including Lasko, Pun, and Millner—will perform as well.
Proceeds from ticket sales will benefit the future Eko Ise performance, music theory, and education program at the Jefferson School, something that, of course, is close to Wiggins’ heart.
Lasko and Pun say Wiggins is always talking about ways to get a music theory program, especially one geared toward black children, started here in town. Because music is a language to be used for self-expression, Wiggins is particularly committed to getting that idea into the minds of black children, perhaps, he says, because that was his own experience. Music, and music theory, not only gave him opportunities, it gave him a way to express himself fully, in a world that was, and often still is, not kind to black self expression.
When I ask Wiggins what he hopes his legacy will be, he gets up from the couch for what must be the tenth time in two hours, and walks to the stand up piano. He takes a black plastic cassette player from the top and rifles through a stack of tapes. This one’s Billy Taylor’s, he says, and sets it aside. The next one is Thelonious Monk, working through a piece for him. He sets that one aside, too. The third tape in the stack is the one he’s after, the one with a pink label.
Wiggins sits at the clavinova in his Charlottesville living room. On the wall is a painting by one of his Air Force buddies. Photo by Amy and Jackson Smith
Wiggins returns to the couch, sets the cassette player on the table, pops in the tape, and rewinds it a bit. When he presses play, it’s not Taylor, or Monk, or Coltrane, or Lateef that comes out of the speaker. It’s the children’s choir he directed in Amherst in the 1970s, singing a Billboard No. 1 hit, the “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In” medley from The 5th Dimension.
“Harmony and understanding,/ Sympathy and trust abounding, / No more falsehoods or derisions,” sing the hundred or so voices with nothing but piano accompaniment.
The dozens of children sing with gusto, with soul. Wiggins listens thoughtfully, appreciating the passion with which they sing.
When the song ends, the crowd erupts in applause, and Wiggins lets it play out before pausing the cassette. “The applause was so long. I’ve never had applause, for anything, as long as [I did for] those kids, from their parents, and their community. I just…I felt very good about that,” he says, nodding his head.
He’s influenced some of the greatest jazz musicians to ever play. And yet, it always comes back to children, to those who might choose music for their own journeys, if only they’re given the chance.
Wiggins hopes that those who’ve learned from him “don’t become stingy with the subject matter that I’ve developed. That they want to share. I would like to see that people use their creativity, even in sharing. That’s a generosity that I would like to leave here,” he says, bringing it back to his own first lesson in music, one that’s led him down a lifelong path of musical discovery and truthful self-expression.
If you give someone money to buy some ice cream, “You don’t tell them chocolate, or cherry. You let them choose for themselves.”
Roland Wiggins will give a somewhat rare concert appearance during A Night of Black Innovation in Music at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center this Saturday, September 21. The event, which highlights the importance of black music and honors the contributions black musicians have made to American culture, will also include performances by Jamal Millner, Ivan Orr, Yolonda Coles Jones, and many others, including Wiggins’ longtime students and friends Morwenna Lasko and Jay Pun.
Ruling the roof:Dropping Julia is the culmination of guitarist Emily Kresky’s journey as a musician, which she began in New Jersey at age 19. After developing her chops on the road, Kresky landed in Charlottesville where she formed the four-piece pop rock band. Rootsy Americana graced by jazz and folk is channeled through “Jersey sass and Virginia charm” on the group’s debut album, Wake Up.
Wednesday, August 28. $8-10, 5:30pm. Rooftop Jukebox at Live Arts, 123 E. Water St. 806-7062.
Musician and poet David Cloud Berman died on August 7. Image: Bobbi Fabian
On Friday, July 12, a new David Berman record hit store shelves.
Recorded under the moniker Purple Mountains, it’s an eponymous 10-track offering that marked the end of a decade-long hiatus for Berman, whose Silver Jews lyrics made him an indie rock icon, admired by critics and music fans alike.
But just weeks after he returned, he was gone. Berman died Wednesday, August 7. He was 52.
Berman’s music—that Purple Mountains record; the EPs, singles, and six albums he made with Silver Jews between 1989 and 2009—and his published poetry collection, Actual Air, earned him a devoted following. In local indie rock and radio circles, both past and present, stories about Berman himself loom as large as the music he made.
It was in Charlottesville that Berman started writing songs, when he was a UVA undergraduate in the late 1980s and, legend has it, singing into friends’ answering machines, and creating music with fellow classmates and future indie rock idols Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich of Pavement.
At UVA, Berman was an Echols Scholar who worked hard on his poetry and, according to Nastanovich (who co-founded Silver Jews along with Berman and Malkmus in New York in 1989), garnered the attention of English department professors “who viewed him as a peer.” In addition to his coursework, Berman hosted a show on WTJU and washed dishes at Eastern Standard. “He played hard, too,” says Nastanovich.
Not only was Berman very handsome, he was usually the tallest person in the room, one of the easiest to spot, says his friend and classmate Sandra Wade, and one of the easiest (and most delightful) to talk to.
“He was sharp as a tack, and could really see things in a way nobody else could. Even simple things,” says Wade. It’s what made him a good writer, and it’s what made him a good friend.
“It’s what I’ll remember him most for, his kindness,” says Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone’s pop music critic who lived in Charlottesville in the 1990s and, like Berman, had a show on WTJU.
Berman once brought a magnetic, plastic, balancing bird to a show at Tokyo Rose. It was “the kind of toy grandmas buy at the craft store for a couple of bucks, but it was so cool” in its defiance of gravity, says Sheffield. “All night long, David let anyone take a turn holding this magic plastic bird. He said, ‘Think of all the time and money and energy you could spend on trying to impress somebody—but you could never do as good a job as this cheap little bird!’”
That sums up “a lot of his extravagant, excessive, exhausting benevolence,” says Sheffield. “DCB was kind to me, in a way that seemed extreme and bizarre until I heard more stories about how kind he was to friends and strangers.”
“He was very generous with his time,” says Darius Van Arman, founder of Jagjaguwar Records who was in his young 20s when he met Berman, a few years his elder, here in Charlottesville. “I was trying to figure out my place in the world, and I really looked up to certain labels and artists—they all felt impenetrable to me. And David made me feel like I belonged in it. He was a mentor, and he gave me great confidence at a time when I was trying to figure out where I fit in in the world.”
Berman’s the one who encouraged Van Arman to send a copy of the first Drunk CD to a reviewer at Melody Maker magazine, which resulted in a slew of orders from music distributors. “That was one of the first moments Jagjaguwar got out in the world,” says Van Arman.
Berman was kind and generous, and he was also hilarious. “A wit, a provocateur, a savant, a wise guy and a good friend,” says Gate Pratt, who played noisy, staticky pop songs with Berman in a project called Ectoslavia, and continued collaborating with Berman for years afterward.
David Berman in 1988. Photo courtesy of Aaron Margosis
He doled out monikers like “Sheila Tackya” for fellow WTJU DJs (in this case, Nastanovich’s wife), was a rather talented cartoonist, and had running commentary on everything from bathroom bugs to rats and fornicating cats. Kylie Wright, Berman’s classmate, close friend, and Ectoslavia bandmate, remembers one night when a stray cat walked into the Red House on 14th Street, where Berman lived with Wright and some other friends. The cat “fucked his girlfriend cat,” says Wright, and Berman quipped, “We’re gonna see the results of that.” Weeks later, the cat returned with a litter of kittens behind him.
The Red House was a source of pride for Berman, says Nastanovich. Berman “felt like an outsider [at UVA], which he was,” and at the Red House, full of fellow outsiders, the strongly-opinionated Berman “became the fearless leader of a proper ‘freak scene,'” he adds. “People were drawn to him because he was often captivating.”
Berman’s poetic and songwriting prowess are well-documented, says Pratt, but “lesser known are his many other interests that made him a truly interesting and quixotic character. In true renaissance fashion, David had a deep interest in many other obscure topics: perfumery, food photography, classic country, bric-a-brac, collage, fantasy football, practical jokes, deep internet wormholes, and other incongruous arcana,” including presidential trivia.
“On his trip this week from Chicago, his car broke down on the highway in the middle of the night, the difficulty compounded thanks to his Bush Sr.-era flip phone and lack of the ubiquitous smart phone GPS that the rest of us take for granted,” says Pratt. “After a harrowing night of trekking the highway on foot, finally getting his car towed, finding a hotel and later renting a car, he finally made it to his intended destination of Brooklyn. When I quizzed him about the details, he recounted the hassles of the road, the curse of his flip phone and the guile of the tow truck driver who innocently delivered him to a muffler shop to have his clutch repaired (the nerve!). Despite the headaches and inconvenience, David was inexplicably pleased with the adventure to do the simple fact that he had broken down in the Ohio hometown of Rutherford B. Hayes.”
This week, Berman, backed by most of the band Woods, was to begin a North American Purple Mountains tour. Wade and Wright had tickets to see their friend play in Philadelphia on August 12, and when they told him as much, Berman wrote back in an email: “stick around after the show to say hi. i’ve sworn to / come out after the show and shake hands and say hello / instead of stealing away immediately after which is my wont.”
That was a big deal for him, says Wade, because the self-deprecating artist was also “so shy.” And yet, he spoke openly and candidly of his sadness, of his struggles with drug and alcohol addiction, in so many interviews. “He just lays himself bare for the world to see. He was fearless about wrestling with his demons in his art, and his public conversations,” says Wade, who suspects that was part of Berman’s magnetism.
“As much as he put himself out there, he was a pretty insular guy,” says Chris Hlad, filmmaker, photographer, C&O cook, and longtime friend who occasionally served as Berman’s tour documentarian. Hlad believes that duality is part of why it may have been difficult for David Berman to be David Berman. “He was an individual who channeled true godhead, and that’s a rough place to be, because it’s not a common thing.”
Hlad was set to accompany Berman on a few Purple Mountains tour dates this month, his camera in tow. “The world is a fairly dark place these days,” he says, and in many ways, Berman was “an antidote to so much of what’s out there.” Maybe, says Hlad, because Berman experienced so much darkness—including depression—in his own life.
“His mile-wide frown and his mile-wide smile were coming from the same place and both could be heard in all those songs he wrote,” says Sheffield. “It was inspiring he came back to make his great Purple Mountains record, after so many years away.”
And of that Purple Mountains record, Hlad says, “I don’t think he could have made a greater artistic effort. He wasn’t burned out, in some flophouse, at the end of his rope. He was firing on all cylinders. It’s so personal, and so revealing. It’s like Blood on the Tracks, but a much better record. And I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table and tell him that.” (But for the record, Hlad’s favorite is The Natural Bridge, Berman and Silver Jews’ “Virginia record,” released in 1996 and mostly written during Berman’s stay in Steve Keene’s house in Keswick, where Hlad once DJed a memorable Hanukkah party thrown by Berman.)
“I wish that, if he had had that better view of how much good he did in the world, and how much he lifted each of us up, and how important his words and music were, he’d be happier,” says Van Armen.
Charlottesville-based poet and songwriter Guion Pratt [no relation to Gate Pratt] of Nettles counts Berman among his influences.
“‘All my favorite singers couldn’t sing’ (from Silver Jews’ “We Are Real”) has long been some of the most crucial permission I’ve ever felt as a songwriter,” he says. “I never overlapped with David in Charlottesville. By my calculations, while he was graduating from UVA, I reckon I was just learning to speak. I was learning to speak and he was writing lines like, ‘There’s gonna be a truce / but first you gotta set your horses loose.’ What makes a good singer, anyway? And what does it matter when you can speak like that?”
“Through his creative output he led by example in inspiring us all to embrace and champion a punk rock DIY ethos masked in new wave cool, fearlessly pursuing deep artistic truths delivered in deceptively simple fashion,” says Berman’s onetime bandmate and steadfast friend Gate Pratt. “Despite making it seem effortless, David secretly labored over every note and line, reworking everything to conform to his impossibly exacting standards. And we’re all the better for it.”
Nate Bolling (far right) formed A University of Whales with cello and violin instead of guitar. The band plays one of its rare live shows at Carter’s Mountain on August 1. Image: Ashley travis
By Graham Schiltz
When Nate Bolling started A University of Whales, he wanted the band to be different. After playing music in Charlottesville for 11 years, doing everything from metal to hip-hop, he wanted a change of pace.
A pianist by trade, Bolling, who’s perhaps best known around town as a member of the rock band Astronomers, sought a departure from the guitar-based music he’d spent much of his career entrenched in. He began with the instrumentation: cello and violin fill the void of guitars in fleshing out piano-based songs propelled by Bolling’s vocals. More traditional rock band instruments—bass and drums—comprise the rest of the band.
The result is grandiose chamber pop that swells and rescinds like the habitat of the group’s namesake, building with the gravity of an orchestra before dropping into hushed melodies. “It’s a style I’ve always liked… a lot of orchestral stuff, a lot of piano,” Bolling says. “I played a lot of guitar, I had done the rock band thing, so it was kinda just fun right off the bat to say no guitar.”
Between masonry jobs, live sound gigs, and wedding performances, Bolling was writing A University of Whales songs before the band’s lineup was filled. Bass player Jess Martin, a friend of Bolling’s since moving to Charlottesville, and former Astronomers drummer David Brear were interested, but cello and violin players eluded them. After fortuitously meeting cellist Erin Braswell and violinist Loryn Post in the span of a couple weeks, the pieces fell into place for the nascent band.
Bolling writes the songs, but the other members are involved as well. Even though he handles some of the arrangement, especially in the songs’ early stages, he wants the band to bring their own flair and experience to the writing process.
“They’re the ones that play the instruments. Most of the time, they probably hear something better than what I would hear,” Bolling says. “I try to make it a group effort as much as possible.”
Because of the band members’ respective careers and families, not to mention out-of-town members, full-band practices are limited. Bolling sends demos via email, and the band plays a limited number of shows. Thursday’s gig at Carter Mountain (one of Bolling’s favorite places to play) is one of the band’s only shows of the year.
“We’re not out here trying to be famous or anything,” says Bolling, and he’s happy with how the music turns out. In the age of the internet, when it’s easy to feel like everything has been done before, his aim is “just an attempt to not make the same old music.”
He’s certainly succeeded. A University of Whales’ brand of baroque pop isn’t necessarily in vogue, but Bolling isn’t too bothered. “I’ve always been pretty happy with [our niche],” Bolling says. “The best thing to hear at gigs from people is ‘nobody sounds like that.’”
Bolling says the band recorded its first full length, Everything is Beautiful, last year simply because they could. Three years of making music created an album he considers “more minor key [and] moody,” filled with meditations on death and mortality. Despite the limited time band members spend in the same room, A University of Whales accomplishes exactly what Bolling set out to do: make the music he’s always wanted in a way that no one has before.
