Last night we ran amok all up in the Teavolve. It was a very fine open mic that kind of started rough (I think I was on point but if my Comment Card had been laid “critique” side up rather than “friendly host” I think there could’ve been a lot to say. Good lord. Mic technique people. You are HERE TO LEARN MIC TECHNIQUE!
Hrm. Maybe I should teach a damned class? I don’t know that I’ve really got enough knowledge to teach a class.
The feature though – holy crap. Made up of consummate players, a vocalist who was unreal in her range, passion and sheer volume – Chuck the Madd Ox showed up at a key moment like it was planned and we ended the night with a little 80s rap tribute that included some Beastie Boys and Run-D.M.C. and some other stuff I didn’t recognize, and it really felt like a good Baltimore kind of night.
From outside of Baltimore, someone I hadn’t seen in a LONG long LONG time : Reina Williams came through from New Jersey and threw down in a way that I found frankly inspirational. Monstrous voice, elegant flow, precise rhythms – just wow. One Hell of a show.
Good to have a night like that cause I feel like there’s been little good news on that whole coming together front recently.
Charlottesville just continues to simmer. People continue to boil. I pretend like the death of Heather Heyer has lanced it a bit, but who’s to say. My little corner of it all is the “who’s accepted at a folk festival” fight, one that at the moment I’m winning, but not without some angst. I sort of feel like the TPFF put ME in charge of sourcing the music, so they’ve got to accept my definitions of what’s acceptable, but I’m getting some pretty hateful comments, some pushback, and plenty of plain old “I don’t see why you booked that”. Seeing comments like that, acts we HAVE booked are now worried that they won’t go over well, or that we’ve even intentionally pushed them to less visible stages (just for the record, stages act independently of one another – it’s not like we book a pool of artists and then decide where we put them, the stages each book artists THEY want).
Anywho, it was nice to get a shoutout from Heather, a nice thank you from QueenEarth – it was nice to get THANKED for a change in the past couple of days, because generally I really only get the other end of it. We’ll see how the festival goes. If people genuinely aren’t happy with what’s happening at the festival, I’m sure we’ll hear about it. We always do.
