Spotlight on Lil' Ed and the Blues Imperials

"Lil' Ed and the Blues Imperials throw down old-style house-rocking shuffles, duck-walking struts and stomping rhythms as if marching down the tabletops at an all-night club...fearsome." Chicago Tribune

Chicago band Lil Ed and the Blues Imperials exploded onto the national blues scene in the mid-1980s with a high-energy, raucous and gloriously raw sound that recalled the heyday of Hound Dog Taylor and the Houserockers, as well as such earlier slide guitarists as Elmore James and J.B. Hutto, the uncle and mentor of Lil Ed Williams. Beginning with Roughhousin' in 1986, Williams has led his band through seven albums of slide guitar boogies, raw-boned Chicago shuffles and deep, deep blues; the band’s latest is Full Tilt, praised by the Washington Post as “contagious wildness.” Catch it at the Cityfolk Festival on Saturday only.

Photo by Paul Natkin

Sound Effects: Anthony B. Mitchell, Jr. & Tony Showa

Two of the craftspeople who are scheduled to take part in Sound Effects: Building Musical Instruments share a name and a passion for drums. Visit them and hear the difference between African and Native American drums at the Cityfolk Festival on Saturday and Sunday.

As the son of two drummers, drummer and drum builder Anthony B. Mitchell, Jr. was exposed to traditional African culture and West African music as a young boy in Pittsburgh. He is proficient in several West African performance styles and has performed with such ensembles as Drums of West Africa in America and SAFARACE African Drum and Dance Company. Mitchell started making drums in his teens, learning the secrets of drum making from family members and local teachers. In 2000, Mitchell traveled to the West African country of Senegal to study with traditional drum makers of the village of Geudiwaye. As a member of Prophecy Music Project, Mitchell has been in Dayton doing artist residencies for Culture Builds Community, Cityfolk’s neighborhood-based arts program.

Drummer, drum maker and educator Tony Showa, a member of the Navajo Nation, was born and raised in Los Angeles and currently lives in Indianapolis. He makes two kinds of hand drums rooted in the traditional and ceremonial life of the Dine (Navajo) people: round, with a frame made of maple (looking something like an Irish bodhrán) and octagonal with a frame made of red oak. The heads of the drums, made from the dried, scraped hides of elk, deer, horse and cow, are stretched tightly over the frames and secured with rawhide laces. Showa’s frame drums, played with a drum stick called a beater, vary in size but are generally two or three inches deep with a diameter between 12 to 17 inches. Showa has drummed with the Las Vegas-based Sacred 4s Drum Group at pow-wows and Native American ceremonial and social events throughout the southwest and is the facilitator of a healing drum circle and drum workshop at the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis.

Spotlight on Harmonia

Based in Cleveland, Harmonia is a seven-member band specializing in the traditional folk music of Eastern Europe. The band plays authentic folk instruments—including taragot, cimbalom and tamburica—and is styled after Eastern European Gypsy bands of the early 1900s, performing Hungarian, Slovak, Ukrainian, Romanian, Croatian and Gypsy songs and tunes. Founded in 1992 by Walt Mahovlich, Harmonia released its first CD, Music of Eastern Europe, in 2003; the album has been praised by NPR as “a musical gem” and Sing Out as “brilliant, lush, dazzling and soulful.” Walt Mahovlich’s solo album, Nova Domovina: Balkan Slavic Music from the Industrial Midwest, won the UNESCO Award for Ethnomusicology. They will be on the Main Stage and the Dance Pavilion on Saturday and Sunday. Eastern European folk dances will be taught during their dance sets.

Snooky Young - A Gentleman and a Giant

Word last week that Dayton-born trumpet great Snooky Young had passed at 92 brought back some strong memories.

One of the first agenda items for the Cityfolk Jazz Committee--the group who helped plan the original jazz initiative for the organization in the mid 1980s--was to bring home and honor Young. He had gone from Chick Carter's Ohio-based big band as a teenager into Jimmie Lunceford's Orchestra, one of swing's mightiest ensembles, and by the '80s was firmly established as lead trumpeter for the Tonight Show band. Young was enthusiastic for a homecoming concert and in the fall of 1988 he brought Tonight Show pianist Ross Tompkins, singer Ernie Andrews and former Stan Kenton tenor saxophonist Bob Cooper. Bassist Lester Bass and drummer Tony Sweet from here in our backyard rounded out the band. Mayor Clay Dixon gave him the key to the city prior to the concert at the Dayton Art Institute. The week of the show, Young passed Johnny Carson the press release for the concert we sent him and I still have a VHS tape of Carson plugging the concert, the camera cutting to Young sitting in the band and the trumpeter beaming and nodding with pride as the host asked for a round of applause.

You would be hard pressed to find a musician with a resume as deep as Snooky Young's. The Band, Steely Dan, B.B. King, and Quincy Jones all turn up on it. His work with Lunceford, Count Basie, The Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Big Band and later the Clayton Hamilton Jazz Orchestra sit at the center of his legacy. But careers like that you will never see again. His Jazz Master award, which was handed out by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2009, was a richly deserved honor for a musician who sat in the middle of some of the finest music of the past 75 years.

Read more about this amazing musician in his New York Times obituary and in an interview done when he won the NEA Jazz Master Award.

Worlds of Sound and New Harmonies

Immerse yourself in worlds of sound on June 1 at 7 pm at the Little Art Theatre. Worlds of Sound: The Ballad of Folkways is an award-winning documentary film explores the history of Folkways Records. Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie (pictured here), Leadbelly and local heroes Red Allen and the Allen Brothers are just a few of the artists who recorded for Folkways. American Folklore Society director Tim Lloyd will introduce the film and discuss the impact of the label, which is still going strong (as Smithsonian Folkways) six decades after being founded by Moses Asch. Live music will be provided by the region's premier string band The Corndrinkers.

Continue the immersion into traditional music by visiting the traveling Smithsonian Institution exhibit New Harmonies: Celebrating American Roots Music, which will be on display at the Heritage Center of Clark County from May 22 - June 22. According to the organizers, "the main beat of the exhibition is the on-going cultural process that has made America the birthplace of more music than any place on earth. The exhibition provides a fascinating, inspiring, and toe-tapping listen to the American story of multi-cultural exchange. The story is full of surprises about familiar songs, histories of instruments, the roles of religion and technology, and the continuity of musical roots from 'Yankee Doodle Dandy' to the latest hip hop CD."

Spotlight on Los Hermanos Lovo

When the celebrated family band Los Hermanos Lovo fled the civil war in its home country of El Salvador, the Lovos settled in northern Virginia and picked up where they had left off. The seven-piece ensemble plays a little-known regional style of Central American traditional music known as chanchona, stringband music made by and for rural Salvadorans. The group also plays cumbias and rancheras and has also appeared at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and the annual Cinco de Mayo Festival on the National Mall in Washington. Enjoy them on Saturday and Sunday of the 2011 Cityfolk Festival.

Announcing the 2011 Ohio Heritage Fellows

This year two artists have been named Ohio Heritage Fellows: Native American painter and storyteller Edwin George and Indian composer Kanniks Kannikeswaran. George will be at the Festival on Saturday and Sunday, telling stories and sharing his art. A "Meet the Artist" session will be scheduled on the Material Culture stage as well.

A member of the Eastern Band of Cherokees, painter and storyteller Edwin George is the recipient of the 2011 Ohio Heritage Fellowship in Material Culture. George was born in North Carolina in 1934 near the town of Cherokee, and has lived in the Kent, Ohio area since the 1980s. Completely self-taught as an artist, he started painting in 1991 to express his dreams and memories; his work has been hailed for its cultural, historical and educational value. In paintings such as Earth Spirit Rising, Medicine Man, When the Bears Wash and Spider Brings the Fire, George depicts in a visually stunning fashion the traditional Cherokee myths and legends he learned as a child, Cherokee iconography and healing herbal medicines, and the written language and history of his tribal ancestors. In addition to painting, George has also worked with wood, carving such items as totem poles, walking sticks, shields, drums and small sculptures. George received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council in 2005 and has had his works displayed at the Riffe Gallery in Columbus, the Museum of the Cherokee Indian in North Carolina, the Akron Art Museum and numerous libraries, schools, colleges, parks and nature centers throughout Ohio.

Kanniks Kannikeswaran, the recipient of the 2011 Ohio Heritage Fellowship in Performing Arts, is an internationally acclaimed musician, recording artist, composer, scholar, choir director, educator, mentor and tireless advocate for the classical music traditions of India for more than 30 years. Born in 1962 in Chennai, India, Kannikeswaran has taught the theory and history of Indian classical music at the College Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati since 1994 and regularly teaches classes and workshops throughout this country and India for both children and adults. He is the founder and director of the American School of Indian Art in Cincinnati. Kannikeswaran began studying music at the age of nine and gave his first public performance at 13. He earned an engineering degree in India and graduate degrees in engineering and business after moving to the U.S. His large-scale theatrical, recording and choral productions include Shanti: A Journey of Peace (which has been staged in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas), Colonial Interlude, Vismaya: An Indo-Celtic Musical Journey and The Silk Road. Kannikeswaran, who lives with his family in Mason, received the Ohio Individual Artists Fellowship in 2002 and has received the Traditional Artist Apprenticeship grant three times from the Ohio Arts Council.

Spotlight on Sierra Hull & Highway 111

How many Cityfolk artists also have a contract with a major makeup manufacturer? To our knowledge, just one: Sierra Hull, who has signed with Revlon. Hull graduated this spring from the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she studied on a full-ride Presidential Award scholarship, the first bluegrass musician to receive such an award. The highly acclaimed young mandolinist, singer and bandleader is one of the fastest rising stars in bluegrass but she started performing so young that she's also a veteran, having appeared on the Grand Ole Opry and at Carnegie Hall, toured with Alison Krauss, performed on A Prairie Home Companion and portrayed evangelist Billy Graham’s sister in the film Billy: The Early Years. Hull and her hard-driving band Highway 111 will be at the Cityfolk Festival on Friday and Saturday.

Sound Effects: Todd Cambio & Doug Unger

In 2011, the material culture area will return its focus to a group of craftspeople that an organization like ours can't live without: musical instrument makers. The artists invited to take part in Sound Effects: Building Musical Instruments are using old techniques coupled with modern know-how to create or repair instruments by hand. Creating musical instruments from raw materials such as wood, animal hide and reeds requires great patience, skill and precision. We will introduce you to these artists in the coming weeks. Visit Sound Effects: Building Musical Instruments on Saturday and Sunday of the Cityfolk Festival in Memorial Hall to see their work, pick their brains and hear them discuss their craft.

In a world of cookie-cutter acoustic guitars, Todd Cambio, a luthier based in Madison, Wisconsin, stands out from the crowd. Cambio’s Fraulini Guitar Company makes 10 different production models, including two 12-strings and a four-string tenor guitar, recreating classic designs from the early 1900s made by such companies as Stella, Stahl, Washburn and Oscar Schmidt. All Fraulini guitars are built entirely by hand, using the highest quality woods (mahogany, birch, maple or white oak for the back and sides and Adirondack spruce for the tops) and traditional building techniques such as a dovetail neck joint, hot hide glue, handmade wood purflings and varnish finishes. Cambio’s instruments possess an undeniable vintage vibe from the 1920s and 1930s that makes them particularly well suited for jazz, ragtime and the pre-war blues sound of seminal guitarists like Lead Belly, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Barbecue Bob. Cambio’s distinctive guitars have been played by such outstanding guitarists as John Miller, Alvin Youngblood Hart, Paul Geremia and the late Mike Seeger.

A resident of the northwestern Ohio town of Peninsula, Doug Unger is a true Renaissance man. Unger is an award-winning painter specializing in Ohio landscapes, a wood carver, a former professor of art at Kent State University, musician and an internationally-acclaimed inlay and engraving artist. Unger is a peerless, self-taught builder of open-back banjos (without a resonator), recreating—any in many cases, improving upon—banjos from the early years of the 20th century made by such companies as Cole and Fairbanks. He’s held in even higher regard for his inlay work on instruments and for engraving intricate designs on the inlaid pieces of mother of pearl, abalone and snail. He stresses “artistic freedom within a traditional framework” in his work, and says he knows a banjo is complete “when there’s no evidence of its doing. It has to look effortless or it’s a mess.” Though he’s better known for his banjos, Unger also makes beautiful mandolins patterned after Gibson models of the 1910s and 1920s. Unger was named an Ohio Heritage Fellow in 2004. Visit Cityfolk's YouTube channel to watch his segment of the Ohio-produced PBS show Our Ohio.

Spotlight on Ricky Nye & The Paris Blues Band

Ricky Nye, Cincinnati's leading practitioner of blues, boogie woogie and New Orleans piano, returns to town on May 12 with this top-flight crew from Paris, France which includes guitarist Anthony Stelmaszack, bassist and harmonica player Thibaut Chopin and drummer Simon "Shuffle" Boyer. The band has shared bandstands and concert stages in Europe and have a tight sound to show for it. They are joining up in southwestern Ohio to celebrate the release of their second (as yet untitled) CD. Hard rockin', blues and boogie woogie at its best! You don't have to believe me...here they are in Paris in January.

Spotlight on Nathan & the Zydeco Cha Chas

Nathan & the Zydeco Cha-Chas have traveled the world for more than 20 years rocking out the fast and furious accordion-driven, R&B-influenced dance music of the French-speaking Creole people of southern Louisiana. The band—called “modern zydeco’s finest group” by All Music Guide—is a family affair led by accordionist Nathan Williams; the Cha-Chas include his son, cousin and brother. Together since 1988, Nathan & the Zydeco Cha-Chas can be seen performing “fiery enjoyable music with a modern sensibility” (All Music Guide) in Rounder Records 40th Anniversary Concert, currently being aired nationwide on PBS. The ensemble’s many honors and awards include a 2010 Big Easy Award for “Best Zydeco Band.”

You'll be able to dance to their zydeco grooves all three days of the Cityfolk Festival.





Catch more by Nathan & the Zydeco Cha Chas on Cityfolk's YouTube Channel.