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Our most recent mailing sent February 2, 2022:
The Pasadena Folk Music Society continues to wait for the stars to align for booking concerts, so no real news yet on that score. However, there is some exciting news. Our hope had been to present Scotland’s Jim and Susie Malcolm last month as our return to live music. You may have caught one of Jim’s solo shows in our series, an Old Blind Dogs show, when he was their lead singer/guitarist, or more recently his first California tour with his wife, Susie, in January 2020, just before the lights went out for performances. After the first year of closure, we had a cautious plan for them to re-open our series in January 2022. They were willing, we were willing, and we waited hopefully as the months went by, but the COVID virus was not willing to allow a January show. They ended up canceling their 10-city California tour.
The good news is that Jim and Susie will be doing a special live show on Zoom this Saturday, February 5, at 7PM aimed specially at their California audience! Email Susie at [email protected] to receive links to make a $15 donation and attend the Zoom program. They will be performing songs from their brand-new recording, Auld Toon Shuffle. We don’t have access to their new album, but listen to their song Pad the Road and click here to see what we wrote about them two years ago. See their own listing of this and other online shows here. Get in touch with Susie right away so that you can join us for this very special concert!
We are also investigating the possibility of co-presenting one or several online shows featuring John McCutcheon, the amazing singer, musician, songwriter and keeper of the flame of folk music. We hope to be able to make some announcements about that soon, so stay tuned!
We just sadly learned that renowned singer, Norma Waterson, whom Billy Bragg called “one of the defining voices of traditional English music,” died this past Sunday. Find out more from this remembrance by Jude Rogers of the Guardian. Listen to her sing the Movin’ On Song with her husband, Martin Carthy, and their daughter, Eliza. Eliza Carthy had recently appealed for financial help for Norma’s illness and the family’s hardships. As we write this, you can still make a donation to the family here. Norma and Martin (Martin Carthy and the Watersons) performed in our series way back in 1987. Whether singing solo or with the various combinations of Carthys and Watersons, she had a commanding voice.
And a tip of the hat to Marie Poll (later known as Marie Kaufman), one of the important LA area folk music promoters, who started a house concert series in her West LA home in 1982, a little before the Folk Music Society’s beginnings at Caltech. She brought many very fine performers to Southern Californians in a very intimate, casual and friendly environment. Marie passed away earlier in January, and you can read Monika White’s tribute here. A child Holocaust survivor herself, Marie helped preserve the stories of other survivors, as well as being a social worker and social activist.
Caltech’s Public Programming / Caltech Live! has some fine events scheduled, including Movies That Matter: 100 Years From Mississippi on Friday, February 11, and Roving with Perseverance: Findings from One Year on Mars, on Thursday, February 17 (both in evenings, online). Several tentative live Coleman Chamber Music Society shows have even been tentatively scheduled! See the full schedule here.
Tunes from ’22
U.S. copyrights on music recorded before 1923 expired last month. About 400,000 recordings entered public domain, according to a tally by Duke University’s Law School. Figuring that no artists on those recordings are still earning any benefit from the copyrights, this can be seen as a good thing if the music is truly available to the public. Work by preservationists has made it so. Thousands of music recordings released in 1922 are online at the Internet Archive. You can listen at leisure from a diversity of musical styles, including lots of jazz fox trots and opera arias. Some century-old samples that might be of particular interest to fans of acoustic folk music include fiddling, Hawaiian guitar, blues, Irish hornpipes, solo accordion, twin fiddles, Irish reels, bluesy ragtime, oom-pah polka, gospel, Irish jigs, Cuban bolero, and a classic Wobbly-style bum song. For us Pasadenans, a tune or two by the California Ramblers would seem to add a local touch, except that the band was actually from Ohio. The delightful Home in Pasadena record by Billy Murray and Ed Smalle wasn’t released until 1924, so to hear that one free, you might still need to tolerate an opening ad on YouTube.
A wide variety of concerts are available this month in the Los Angeles area. To find a last minute event, or to plan ahead, use BandsInTown and search by city and musical genre. BandsInTown has a broad definition of Folk music, with ~120 concerts currently listed just for February.