Tag: local music

Categories
Arts

Literary guidance: Musician Chris Campanelli communes with poetic greats in new song cycle

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.

Categories
Arts

Music in me: Kate Bollinger’s lifelong connection to healing through song

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.”

Kate Bollinger celebrates the vinyl release of her 2019 EP, I Don’t Wanna Lose, at the Southern on November 14.

Categories
Arts Uncategorized

Song stories: Jordan Perry discusses the motivations for his resonant guitar compositions

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.

Categories
Arts

Being there: Ebony Groove revives a highlight of C’ville’s musical past

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.

Categories
Arts

North by southeast: Heron & Crane’s Firesides arrives via online collaboration

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.

Categories
Arts

ARTS Pick: Dropping Julia

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.

Categories
Arts

ARTS Pick: Camp Corduroy

Americana singer and songwriter Will Overman is one of the local artists playing at Camp Corduroy this weekend. Publicity photo

Camp songs: Local performers come together at Camp Corduroy for a two-day festival created to celebrate Charlottesville artists and raise awareness for nonprofits such as The Front Porch, The Nature Conservancy, and Fight Like a Grrrl. Dropping Julia, The Hackensaw Boys, and former “The Voice” contestant Will Overman are included in the lineup, and farm tours, nature walks, and mountain biking add to the outdoor experience. Original electro-pop opera group The Near Misses will close out the weekend.

Saturday, August 24 and Sunday, August 25. Free, times vary. Corduroy Farm, 14103 Louisa Rd., Louisa. 

Categories
Arts

Words, music, and wit: Indie rock icon David Berman touched local lives

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.”

Categories
Arts

Change up: Nate Bolling says no to guitar rock in defining a unique sound

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.

Categories
Arts

Solo spotlight: Frequent collaborator Reagan Riley steps to the front of the stage

After three years of writing and recording her own material, as well as being featured on a slew of local rap tracks, R&B and neo-soul artist Reagan Riley performs her first-ever solo sets this week. Photo by Bua

On the enclosed patio of the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, Reagan Riley reclines into a stack of jewel-toned pillows scattered on the bench behind her as grey-white wisps of fruit-flavored tobacco vapor curl through the afternoon air, dissipating into a thin haze that’s more sunshine than hookah smoke. The room’s hardworking window A/C unit hums while Riley takes a sip of a matcha cooler—a deep, emerald green iced tea with a slight vegetal flavor, recommended by the tea house owner for its ability to take the edge off of a July afternoon in Charlottesville. Riley deems it “so nice.”

The whole scene is chill as fuck and therefore the perfect setting for Riley to discuss her electronic/neo-soul music.

Riley was raised in Charlottesville by musician parents—mom’s a singer and flutist, dad’s an a cappella singer and trumpet player—who encouraged their only child to pursue any and every creative interest: painting, drawing, poetry, singing. She’d always loved singing along to R&B and rap tracks and, in 2016, at age 18, stepped into the recording booth herself. Since then, she’s sung the hook on a slew of local rap tracks and appeared onstage with her collaborators. She’s released a good amount of her own original material, too, including the Summer Complex EP (2016), the Grown Since full-length album (2018), and a number of singles. After three years of writing and recording, Riley will perform her first-ever solo set on Wednesday night at The Garage (and her second on Sunday at IX Art Park). So, what’s taken her so long?

The short answer, says Riley, is fear. But the long answer—the real answer—is that Riley, just 21, has been taking her time finding her sound and herself.

“I’m an introvert,” says Riley. “I’ve always been kind of shy,” a singer who stepped into the booth not necessarily with the intention of sharing her work with others, but to grow confident in her voice and her lyrics.

Music “makes it very easy” for Riley to express whatever she’s thinking or feeling. “I’m always writing about my experiences, so in that sense, it’s always just my truth, however that comes out,” she says.

What comes out, says Riley, is a style that’s “definitely R&B, neo-soul-like. Chill vocals, kind of sensual and sexy. I don’t have a super big voice; my thing is more of a vibe. It’s a mood.” She’s been compared to Syd Tha Kyd (from The Internet) and SZA, and she says she feels a bit of vocal and vibe kinship with local indie folk-pop artist Kate Bollinger.

Riley sings on several local projects including the hook on Sondai’s “Silver Linings,” and on “Shadow,” off CLARKBAR$’ Tasty project. She’s collaborated with Keese a number of times.

“Reagan is dope,” says Keese. “Her style is unique. All you have to do is send her the track, she’ll write and come up with her own ideas. She turns a good song into a great song.”

Riley likes to mix up her process. Sometimes she’ll get a line in her head, write it down, and the next day, incorporate it into a song. Sometimes, she’s in the mood to write poetry instead, but when she looks back on it weeks or months later, it sounds like pretty good lyrics.

“I try not to do it the same way every time,” says Riley. “I think that’s dangerous…being creative is just being in the now, and if you’re caught up on doing something a certain way, you might miss up on an opportunity for something beautiful and organic to happen.”

Sometimes she hears the perfect beat—either given to her by a producer, or sourced from YouTube—and will have a song on the page in 10 minutes, without a change. That’s how it went with “Weekend,” her newest single, recorded after Riley hadn’t sung into a mic for about a year.

“It’s good to be back,” Riley declares at the start of “Weekend,” which is about the aftermath of a relationship that she was ready to end. It’s a song about self-rediscovery, Riley’s realization that she can’t lift people up if someone’s holding her down. It’s the kind of song that you might put on the stereo of a convertible as you drive a little too fast on a beachside highway, experiencing the freedom of movement that’s in your ears.

“The End,” another of Riley’s recent Spotify releases, is about her ability to see through bullshit. “This foamy sticky humidity, I look right past what eyes can see,” she sings at the start of this song. It’s an acknowledgment of how far she’s come already, and how past relationships have shaped her future—as a person and as an artist hoping to connect with her audience.

And right now, that means stepping into the spotlight as a solo artist on stage (with a little help from her rapper friends, at times), fear be damned.

Music “feeds me,” she says, settling deeper into the pillows and taking a sip of the matcha cooler. “It feeds my soul. It makes me happy, in the simplest sense. It’s good for me. And I’m always trying to do things that are good for me.”

Reagan Riley will perform her first solo sets this week: she’s at The Garage Wednesday, July 24, and at IX Art Park Sunday, July 28.

 

UPDATE: Wednesday, July 24, 11:15am. The show at The Garage has been cancelled.