Editorial Joan Baez


believe that I may have invented ‘the better mousetrap’ in musical terms. In reality I am still at ‘product development’ stage but the prototypes are encouraging.


To go back to Pete Seeger’s view of the future, the technology to connect the printed page to other things is now with us. The challenge is to use that technology to enhance our experience rather than muddying the waters.


If the general message in the magazine is ‘Go out and enjoy some live music’, then information about where and when is important. If the question is ‘why or who?’ then an article, review or advert may inspire you to look in a particular direction.


For those of you with Smart phones and who are interested in the technology try scanning the Q code below relating to the Joan Baez tour. Don’t expect anything too fancy. My ideas for using Qcodes are evolving and at this point are just the first small steps in a process. I think I know what the next steps may be, but at the moment I am concentrating more on the starting point and the destination.


I hope that some of our readers who enjoy a technological challenge may help me work out the details of the process; for the rest of you I hope that you will enjoy the advances as they happen.


With the pace of technological changes, that may be sooner than you think – but remember the challenge is to make the technology work for us rather than tying us to a computer screen. Forget the Euro crisis for a while, go and do something you enjoy!


the years. And I found myself questioning her relevance to our magazine!


J


oan Baez will embark on an extensive UK tour beginning in February. She will be accompanied by multi- instrumentalist Dirk Powell and will feature a repertoire spanning her five-decade career. There are few folk musicians with as much public recognition as Joan Baez and few with a career spanning 50 years. Joan is one of those people who is legendary in this music and is probably a ‘must see’ for most people. I have never seen Joan Baez in a live concert personally but that is my fault not hers and I intend to rectify that omission during this tour.


As far as I can recall Joan Baez has never featured in The Living Tradition. Should I try to change that? This is a question I have pondered over since first hearing about her tour. Although not somebody that I would immediately think of as fitting the exact focus of our magazine, I found myself becoming more intrigued to hear her views on traditional music and find out about her knowledge of the folk revival in the UK and the way it has developed. I know that Joan has tremendous respect for some traditional musicians in Scotland and Ireland and looking at her website I found a link to Eliza Carthy. She clearly has an interest in the current generation of performers and has been particularly careful to encourage younger singer songwriters by including local performers in her tours. Does she appreciate her role in kicking off a generation of music makers in this country? For that matter do we?


Where do we pigeon hole her? Contemporary with the likes of Dylan, many of us would think of her as a sixties icon, perhaps forgetting that on her first album there was a clutch of ballads and a simplicity and directness that has stood her in good stead over


The Living Tradition - Page 5


I spoke to Martin Carthy about this and he recalled going to a pub for a drink with Lonnie Donegan when they were both performing at Sidmouth. When Lonnie found himself in a pub full of session musicians he wanted to move on. Martin said something like “Do you realize that you have some responsibility for starting all of this?” Martin didn’t think that Lonnie appreciated this or wasn’t really interested. I would like to think that Joan could take some satisfaction from seeing how folk music has developed in this country even if she might not fully appreciate her part in so many people’s experiences.


Joan’s choice of accompanist on her tour is also an interesting one. Dirk Powell is an amazing musician with deep-running roots in rural American tradition. He learned banjo and fiddle at the feet


of his grandfather in Kentucky and went on to found the Louisiana Cajun group Balfa Toujours.


Dirk tells of recent experience of some gigs in Ireland. “We’re on our way back from Northern Ireland, where we played at the Ulster American Folk Park Bluegrass Festival, along with Sammy Lind and Caleb Klauder. It was a real pleasure, as always, to play music with these soulful, spirited friends. One of the things I love about what we do together is that the social aspect of the music comes raging through.”


“… when the meals were done, when we weren’t on at the festival, we went to Conways’ Pub in Newtonstewart and played each night until we got kicked out at 3 in the morning, after which we slept for as short a time as possible, woke up, and dove right back into all of it again. One thing I really want people to understand, so that they can find it in their own lives, is that the music grows out of those experiences, not the other way around.” Wise words indeed.


www.joanbaez.com www.dirkpowell.org


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68