Volume I, Number 1
Barry and Shelley Phillips and Bill Coulter, aka the Shaker ensemble, completed their 2nd annual east coast tour, including performances at several Shaker villages, including Watervliet and Hancock, along with gigs on Cape Cod and Bar Harbor. They're already looking forward to next summer's musical travels, and, needless to say, are eager to hear from anyone out there who'd like to book them or knows someone who would.
In the coming year, Shelley and Barry will again help coordinate the Santa Cruz Shape Note Society, who meet every Tuesday evening to sing and socialize.
Shelley continues as head of the Community Music School of Santa Cruz, which functions primarily as a valuable local musical matchmaking service for students and teachers. Shelley has a roster of dozens instructors who offer lessons in just about every instrument you can think of, folk and classical; to students of all ages.The Community Music School is also serving as umbrella for an ambitious project for First Night Santa Cruz, the city's annual New Year's celebration: Shelley and friends are putting together an orchestra and choir to perform the final movement of the Symphony No. 9 by Beethoven, featuring a sing-along Ode To Joy -- a high note indeed on which to end the old year and begin the new.
Barry, as always, is in various stages of production on numerous new Gourd projects (including a third Shaker album, to complete the trilogy begun with Simple Gifts and Tree of Life; and others which are still too tied to the drawing board to start talking about).
Barry's also in demand as always by just about every musician in town to assist as producer, cellist, arranger and advisor in the studio and on the concert stage. With Martin Simpson's Band of Angels, he recently played a folk festival in Kerrville, Texas.
Martin, meanwhile, is about to ascend the brightest heaven of rock 'n' roll: he'll be on tour in with the Steve Miller Blues Revue, playing November 3 & 4 at the Wilton Theater in Los Angeles; November 5 at the Performing Arts Center in Thousand Oaks; and November 8, 9, 10 & 11 at San Francisco's renowned Fillmore West Auditorium. As always, dates may change: contact the venues for confirmation.
Martin will treat his home town fans to a solo show on Saturday, October 21 at Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz; after the gigs with Steve Miller, he and wife Jessica Ruby Simpson will be off to tour England for about a month. If we can ascertain any dates, you'll find them here.
Bill Coulter will return to the University of California, Santa Cruz, again this year to teach guitar. He, of course, is working closely with Barry on the new Shaker album, and is already starting to contemplate doing an album to follow up on his wonderful Celtic Crossing.
Neal Hellman played a festival in Houston in August, where besides sweltering, he taught four workshops and headlined the Saturday night concert; he just returned from the first annual Harvest Festival of Dulcimers in Dana Point at the end of September, joining old friends including Mark Nelson, Ruth Barrett, Cyntia Smith and others.
Neal had a rough year in 94 with no World Series, and actually plumbed the depths of his emotions to compose a poem about it. He submitted it to his favorite journal, the Elysian Fields Quarterly, a wonderful little magazine devoted to baseball, which seems to go in and out of existence on a random basis. Imagine his delight when EFQ wrote accepting his opus -- and his disappointment when, as far as we can tell, from the fact that no issue has appeared in our mailbox for the last six months or so, the mag has gone under for one of its periodic hibernations ... So, in lieu of actual publication, Neal has decided to share it with his friends in cyberspace:
Another night without Baseball
Another day without a game
Another morning without box score
And life is no longer the samePraise be to Fenway, the monster of green
On that crisp October night of '75
When the mighty red legs of of Ohio
Battled the hapless red socks of Boston ...
In my vision I see a stout backstop
His arms toward the heavens
Appealing, praying, beseeching
Supplicating, imploring, entreating
"It's fair!
There'll be a seventh game!
There'll be a seventh game!"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
A damsel with a dulcimer
Oops..wrong poem...wrong poemSurely the muses inspired this game
Its mathematical beauty worthy of
Pythagoras' praise:
The Elysian diamond field...
3 strikes and you're out
9 men on a team
27 outs a game
90 feet between each baseO, bard of Greece, in whose name
We take our baseball hearts' delight:
O, Homer!
He'll touch 'em all tonight.When I became a man,
I put away childish fantasies: Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny;
but baseball's harvest was always part of God's autumn plan...
Now greed has eaten the classic
And bats are silent throughout the land.Pull the tarp over my heart
And dim down the stadium lights
Take the hot dogs off the grill
There'll be no game tonight.
Joe Weed has just released a new album called The Vultures, a collection of vintage California surf music, including Pipeline, Apache, Walk Don't Run, Rebel Rouser, Green Onions, and more, played by bluegrass giants including David Grisman, Norton Buffalo, Todd Phillips and Rob Ickes.
Robin Petrie and Danny Carhahan are about to tour England, where their album Cut and Run (released on Red House Records in the US and Fledg'ling in the UK) has been universally raved about in all the folk magazines.
Kim Robertson's new album for Dargason Music, Treasures of the Celtic Harp, is of course available from Gourd, along with Kim's other recordings.
Early alert! A GALA GOURD EVENING is planned for Saturday evening, December 16 at Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz, featuring our usual fun-filled all-acoustic line-up of the usual Gourd suspects and their friends.
Email us at Gourd:
neal@gourd.comReturn to Gourd Music Home Page.
Last update: October 2, 1995.