f76 From Brazil To Bix
The first of three features this issue on veterans with a blues influence who began recording in the 1960s and are still going strong. We kick off with Dave Peabody listening to Geoff Muldaur.
twenty, backed by Eric von Schmidt, Dave Van Ronk, and Fritz Richmond, he made his first album Sleepy Man Blues for the Prestige label, while already being a member of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band. He married fellow band member Maria D’Amato and together they made Pottery Pie (1968) and Sweet Potatoes (1972), a couple of quirky albums for Warner/Reprise, before going their sepa- rate ways both matrimonially and profes- sionally. In the mid-seventies Warners also issued Geoff’s albums Having a Won- derful Time and Motion. He joined the ranks of Paul Butterfield’s Better Days and then spent time gigging and record- ing with wonder-guitarist Amos Garrett.
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Eventually his lifestyle caused Geoff to take an extended period away from the music scene in order to overcome certain addictions… “I decided to live. I worked hard. I worked in Detroit developing soft- ware for the steel industry, I worked at Carthage/Hannibal Records and ran them for a while. I worked in a record distribu- tor. I did the occasional documentary film music… but I didn’t gig. I might have sat in with a couple of people because I do remember playing Carnegie Hall, but that was maybe just Tom Rush, or someone. But I didn’t want to get hanging out with musicians again and I didn’t want to drink and I didn’t want to use. It worked and it’s been thirty-three years.”
The Secret Handshake (1998) – along with a feature published in fR190, April 1999 – signalled Geoff’s return and then, after a few more solo albums, Private Astronomy: A Vision Of The Music Of Bix Beiderbecke appeared, marking a signifi- cant step in Geoff’s musical evolution. Geoff doesn’t even play guitar on this, but instead, he busies himself with arranging and orchestrating the multi-levelled ensemble while giving much of the vocali- sation to either Loudon Wainwright III or Martha Wainwright. This experience gave Geoff the confidence to tackle his ongoing current epic opus, which he calls The Ams-
ven with a seventeen-year break in his career, Geoff Mul- daur certainly has packed a lot of creative energy into his musical existence. In 1963, age
terdam Project. I’m keen to know if Geoff considers the art of arranging to be the key to his music?
“Totally. That’s what I’m doing in Ams- terdam. Kweskin reminded me that, in the very beginning of the Jug Band, I was the guy who came up with, like, 85% of every- thing for the band. I just took to it and then when the Jug Band broke up I actually did some study, and I did commercial work in New York and advertising and movies which was really boring in a musical sense but really valuable in a craft sense. I’ve never really been very good at reading music. I’d rather write it and have some- body else suffer. I can read music slowly, but I love to write. That’s what I’m just going to write now for the project in Ams- terdam. This has been going on for eight years… a huge project. I have a patron or nobody could afford this. It’s taken so long because I also have to pay the rent and go out and play a few gigs. For most of this I lived in L.A. and it’s a long trip, making it two or three times a year. We’re wrapping it up this winter. It will be a double CD plus a documentary that we’ve been doing for about five or six years.”
“I’m working with various musicians that form a chamber orchestra. It’ll be thir- teen, fourteen musicians on this session. I’m taping a version of Fair And Tender Ladies that Eric von Schmidt did and it sort of inspired me into this way of doing it. A quintet – bassoon, French horn, clarinet, cello, and violin – is the sort of core. On my last trip to Amsterdam I did a Duke Elling- ton piece I’ve been wanting to do for thir- ty, forty years… and I did a solo violin piece that is going to become the bed for a Pablo Neruda poem… like a guy in Chile, on the streets, playing the violin. That was the hardest writing I’ve ever done. That’s solo violin writing, so I’ve had to go into Bach, Paganini and all these guys who really know. And it worked out pretty good.”
“I was saying to my sweetie, when we first met, I said, ‘We’re getting a little on, we’re both septuagenarians, what do you think is the most important quality we could have in these years?’ And she instantly got it and said what I was hoping she’d say: ‘curiosity’. Because as long as
we’re doing that you forget about every- thing else… ‘This hip! I’ve got to go to the doctor, or these teeth… I don’t have enough money for these teeth.’ But if you’re taking three days trying to get the bass clarinet part right… well, you know, I love it. Some of what I’ve done is compose music for Tennessee Williams’ poetry. Nobody else wrote it, I’m not arranging it, I’m writing it… and the first two move- ments we’ve recorded with a soprano and so, it’s evolving. It started out where I’m taking things like Jelly Roll Morton’s Michi- gan Water Blues and doing it for five chamber instruments, or Blind Lemon Jef- ferson, and doing these types of things but then all of a sudden I write this little thing that’s like a new little piece. So, as usual, I’m confused. I guess, I’m lucky that I get to do the next thing.”
didn’t laugh me out of the place… even that trumpet player from Metropolitan Opera who had recorded one of those Bix pieces himself, they all said, man, this stuff’s way better than what we do, and I’m going ‘Gee, I’m just a folk singer from Cambridge, Massachusetts…’ so I’ve had to catch up, thinking I might have some abili- ty or worth in arranging or composing. I’ll hear some things and I’ll go back on the piano, or go on the computer, or scribble it down loosely on some paper and then see if it works. And the singing is just a gift. I try and keep myself in shape. Right now I’m coming off a chest cold. It drives you crazy. I can imagine how these opera singers are just the most neurotic people in the world. If your chest doesn’t feel right, that’s your instrument. It’s like hav- ing a crack in your cello. The gig the other night, I felt so good that I could sing. I did- n’t know if I could. I was scared. And then somehow it came out. So, yes, I love singing. For me, singing is like therapy… and everybody pays for my therapy.”
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“What tripped me into the music were the occasional cuts on anthologies on jazz, like Roots Of Jazz where there are all sorts of jazz and then Blind Willie Johnson! And I
he Bix thing was totally lucky and that embold- ened me because, when I got through the Bix thing and the musicians
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