Meticulously written down spontaneous folk music

Is prog a dirty word for you?

Ok, I will try not to bore you with childhood reminiscences again. But here we have one more guy who meant a lot to me when I was little. My favorite record is Gravity from 1980, and as I’ve made you buy no more than four or five records while writing this blog, get that and we’re cool.

Since then, Fred Frith has done a lot of stuff. He has become a legit composer. He is the one out of the whole festival roster whom I will have heard most often: he once lived near Stuttgart, where I grew up. Whoever has seen the rather popular film Step across the Border will know that he had no trouble mixing with the natives there.

Today’s music actually harkens back to Gravity times. You have all the melody that would come with a Breton folk-rock combo (I actually heard one on a summer holiday many years ago, so this is not just something I made up). You have wildly uneven measures. The band are great, Shahzad Ismaily, the brooding drummer, is on electric bass and hesitant percussion today, Zeena Parkins on accordeon and synth, but the real frontman is Carla Kihlstedt on violin. And she has a tough fight, one foot pedal going belly up and starting to do its own hum in mid-concert …

She’s at the center of the pic above. You can see that everybody has a music stand before them, and that is actually where things do not quite gel, since not everybody manages to translate notes meticulously written down into spontaneous folk music as well as Kihlstedt does. Now and then stuff is a little on the mechanistic side.

But I love that Frith revisits my favorite music from him for me, I love his Frenchified cap, and really this is the last concert before I go back into hibernation mode, with less concerts per year than I’ve now enjoyed over four days, so I don’t want it to stop …