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am: “We became so obsessed with this fiddle playing from the States that during breaks from the dancing, while the caller was teaching the dance, we’d be off playing an American tune. As soon as that band stopped we just continued our playing together. It seemed a natural thing to start a band.”
And so, touring as a duo for many years, they’ve fine honed their highly entertaining vaudevillian show (all sharing a love for The Little Rascals, Laurel & Hardy, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, The Marx Brothers) with a solid base of old-time fiddle tunes, rag- time, early jazz and hokum blues primarily on fiddle and banjo, plus harmonicas, jaw-harps, gourd banjos and fiddles. They are joined these days by Brian (aka ‘Sonny’) Sanderson on sousaphone.
“Our line-up is unusual…fiddle, banjo and a horn, rather than a bass. It makes us more similar to the jug band kind of thing. It creates a sonic-scape that is very familiar to the human body I think. The instruments kind of vibrate with the human voice and rhythm. The tenor banjo with the sousaphone and the high- pitched fiddle. It’s an exciting position. People are excited to hear this new old sound!”
Whilst much of their playing these days is still on the street, in festivals, for education projects, in concert halls, they do host quarterly dances themselves: Sam’s wife is a caller.
Teilhard: “We recently played as a trio for a prestigious dance down in the States, in Greenfield. We don’t often sit down as a trio and just play tunes for three hours and develop that groove. And the distance between instruments is quite broad…”
Brian: “It’s really interesting to be put in the position, the three of us, using instrumentation that is perhaps a little uncon- ventional, and doing something that we’ve all done a million times… but we’ve not done it together. A danger in playing music for contra dances is that if you do it for a number of years with the same group of people, you can get into a rut. It can become very robotic and automated. There was an element of that edge, that vibrancy when we were playing at Greenfield. People playing in real time!”
Perhaps most strikingly in their real time live and recorded sound, Sheesham & Lotus & Son have an arsenal of home-spun methods of sound projection. The contra-bass harmoniphoneum is a big horn that Lotus wears on a chest-harness, housing the bass har- monica. But their trademark is the centrepiece sepiaphonicmono- phone, a horn-based contraption into which Sheesham and Lotus both sing (and play harmonica), one at each side, so that the sound comes out of a central phonograph-style horn. This ‘little dog, big horn’ sonic effect is a unique identifying feature of the band.
Sam: “There’s an old picture that Teilhard had shown me that inspired the idea of a singing horn. A picture of an old time har- monica player called DeFord Bailey. He was holding a little sheet metal horn on to his harmonica and we looked at it and just thought …’Woah!’ You can sing in an old style and that’s great, but once you start singing through an object like a horn it com- pletely changes the voices and it changes the way that the har- monies sound together. Some people might call us revisionists… old time music is not an unusual phenomenon but everything that we’re doing within old time music is done in an unusual way.”
Teilhard: “We’d seen these old photographs of singers in the ’20s with their horns… and I went to the Czech Republic and saw a man singing through a horn, playing saxophone and singing
Photo: Eric Lovin
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