Rock star Matt Jones and Colette Alexander at Take a Chance Tuesday (April 27, 2010) at The Ark on Main Street. (Photos by the writer.)

What would make him a rock star? Say a University of Michigan graduate lifted their gown to reveal the tattooed text of Obama’s complete inaugural address – that’s the kind of thing fans of actual rock stars do.

And by that standard, Ann Arbor’s Matt Jones is a rock star.

The tattoo story was related second hand at The Ark’s Take a Chance Tuesday this week by Colette Alexander. Alexander accompanied Jones on cello for his performance.

A fan somewhere north of here, Alexander reported, had recently tattooed the lyrics of an entire Jones song across her back. She fell short, however, of complete commitment, by not including every repetition of the refrain.

So the May 1, 2010 history of Ann Arbor will record the performances of rock stars and non-rock stars alike. At 11 a.m. Barack Obama (not a rock star) will deliver the University of Michigan commencement address.

Later that same evening, with the Blind Pig’s doors opening at 9:30 p.m., Jones (rock star) and Alexander will play The Pig, along with the headline act, Frontier Ruckus. Frontier Ruckus is also an alum of The Ark’s Take a Chance Tuesday. Jones told The Chronicle that The Blind Pig performance will be an all-electric set.

At The Blind Pig, they’ll be joined by Alexander Silver, who’s also playing the 2 p.m. slot at Ypsilanti’s 2010 edition of Totally Awesome Fest, before playing his Ann Arbor gig.

April 27, 2010: Take a Chance Tuesday

The Chronicle’s attendance at The Ark’s Take a Chance Tuesday performance of Matt Jones, joined by Colette Alexander on cello, is prima facia evidence that fliers posted on telephone poles work.

It was an unexpected extra Tuesday treat to listen to a set by the California duo Coyote Grace – Ingrid Elizabeth and Joe Stevens, who played before Jones and Alexander. Here’s a few photos from their performances.

Colette Alexander dominates the cello.

Ingrid Elizabeth of Coyote Grace. The duo – including Joe Stevens on guitar and banjo – is fresh off a tour with The Indigo Girls.

Shots from Ypsilanti's Elbow Room are sometimes distributed to special performers at The Ark's Take a Chance Tuesdays.

Matt Jones sets up for his recent show at The Ark.

Bill Bynum & Co. Sunday night at the Old Town Tavern. Left to right: Mary Seelhorst on fiddle, Chuck Anderson on bass, Dave Keeney on guitar, Bill Bynum on guitar and vocals. (Photos by the writer.)

They’d come specifically to hear Bill Bynum & Co. play the Old Town Tavern – a neighborhood bar offering free live music every Sunday night. Yes, the Johnstons are fans – they buy a CD every time they see Bill play, says Jim, so they’ll have one to give away to another friend as an introduction to Bynum’s songs.

What kind of songs are those? Bynum announced his Old Town set by saying, “Howdy, folks, we’re here to play some hillbilly music!” And that’s what they did for two 45-minute sets, with a break in between.

The Chronicle didn’t have to drive nearly an hour to get to the Old Town like the Johnstons did – the Old Town is right down the street from us.

But we were there to see Bynum, too, because we wanted to check out one of the acts playing BreakFest 2010 at The Ark on Feb. 26. That’s when Bynum will be joined by Bonnie Rideout, Rev. Robert Jones, Sr. and Duck Baker in a benefit concert at The Ark for The Breakfast at St. Andrew’s, a nonprofit that provides a hot breakfast every day of the year to anyone who shows up at the doorstep of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church on North Division.

Why Not Golf?

Jim Cain, who’s producing the BreakFest fundraiser, told The Chronicle that the idea of organizing a concert as a fundraiser was his attempt “to save Ann Arbor from yet another charity golf outing.”

Cain serves as a member of the board of The Breakfast at St. Andrew’s and works as a volunteer at the breakfast itself – washing dishes. The work of organizing the fundraiser, Cain said, didn’t really seem like work. Recruiting the artists was a combination of cold calling and connections – helped by Cain’s own musical background.

Cain played bass in the Saline High School orchestra with fiddler Bonnie Rideout and took piano lessons from her mom. But when he first tried to contact her, she was in Scotland recording a CD and couldn’t be reached. After finally tracking her down, she was instantly on board.

Cain didn’t have a previous connection to fingerstyle guitarist Duck Baker, so he cold-emailed him asking him to play the benefit. In his email, Cain included the fact that he was learning some Irish fiddle tunes arranged for fingerstyle guitar – using teaching materials created by Baker. Baker said yes, and Cain has helped arrange some shows in Kalamazoo and Lansing to make the trip from New York England worth Baker’s while.

But the first artist to agree to perform for BreakFest was Bynum – on a handshake deal. How did Cain get to know Bynum? Start with Bynum & Co.’s fiddle player, Mary Seelhorst. Her husband is an editor at Car and Driver magazine, which is based in Ann Arbor, and she herself is a photographer who on occasion shoots automobiles. Cain met them at the Rolling Sculpture Car Show in downtown Ann Arbor and got to know the band that way.

The Funding Challenge

Part of the impetus behind the need to ramp up fundraising efforts for The Breakfast at St. Andrew’s program was the end of support from the city of Ann Arbor. When human services allocations were made this current year, a new evaluation metric was implemented, along with a requirement that audited financial statements be provided.

The Breakfast was not able to provide audited statements for this year’s application cycle, so was not allocated any funding. As the city of Ann Arbor faces a challenging budget year – with all programs on the table – it’s not clear if any human services programs will receive funding in the coming year.

All of the $30 ticket price for the show at The Ark goes directly to support The Breakfast. To make a donation directly, call 734-663-0518  or make an online donation to the St. Andrew’s breakfast program.

Bynum at the Old Town: Photos

Meanwhile, here are some photos to document the rest of the evening at the Old Town Tavern.

In the first booth were Jim and Connie Johnston, who'd driven from near Jackson, Mich. to hear Bill Bynum & Co. play Ann Arbor's Old Town Tavern.

Bill Bynum

Dave Keeney

Chuck Anderson (on bass) and Dave Keeney

Bill Bynum

The pitcher is passed.

An Orpheum Bell rehearsal: On bass, Serge van der Voo; vocals sung through a gramophone horn, Aaron Klein.

I’m wedged in the corner of a west side Ann Arbor basement amongst a jumble of musical instrument cases. The cases belong to the six musicians of Orpheum Bell. There’s more than one case per musician – they each play an array of different instruments. During a break in the rehearsal, I have to ask: What is that? It’s a Stroh violin, “spelled like the beer,” explains Annie Crawford.

The rehearsal is geared towards a CD release show at The Ark on Dec. 4. I’m soaking in the sounds of the basement practice mostly because of that CD, the group’s second – “Pearls.”

Serge van der Voo had sent along a review copy of the CD to The Chronicle. In a world of MP3 files flung around the Internet, a physical CD is an awfully clunky way to deliver musical data. But when I unfolded the heavy card stock CD cover into its 16-inch total length, I noticed one of the folds was not exactly uniform and regular – not the way you’d expect if a machine had produced several thousand of them.

An even closer examination revealed that the print quality was not the laser-like rigid perfection that a modern digital printer delivers. Which is not to say it was sloppy. On the contrary. It was more like trace-evidence that human hands had played a role. Who were these people with the apparently handcrafted CD case? To get some insight, I had crammed myself back amongst those instrument cases in the corner of a basement for two hours.

The CD cover was imprinted with artwork and text by a hand-fed cylinder letterpress. And now it’s imprinted with my musical memory of that two hours of rehearsal. It’s upon that physical artifact that I will hang the pleasant recollection of an evening spent listening to live music played by some extraordinarily talented musicians.

Orpheum Bell: Music and Words

The music of Orpheum Bell is self-described as “country and eastern.” The country elements are easy enough to pick out: banjo, bass, mandolin, violin.

But Laurel Premo’s style is not the ostentatious metallic ringing banjo typical of some American country music. Instead, it is an almost muted strum that can still tickle forth individual notes from her open back 5-string. And Annie Crawford’s Stroh violin, with its metal horn, projects a sound a bit different from a country music fiddle.

Merrill Hodnefield (standing) and Laurel Premo, playing the dobro.

The eastern influences come partly from the Stroh violins, but more from Michael Billmire’s accordion. And based on their sound, it’s on occasion easy enough to imagine that Orpheum Bell is a band of gypsies. The tracks that feature Merrill Hodnefield’s musical saw are just a little bit spooky.

Part of what makes it difficult to slot Orpheum Bell into a convenient musical slot is their use of variation in tempo – all driven by van der Voo’s bass, whether he’s bowing it, plucking it, or whacking its body with the palms of his hands.

During rehearsal, at the conclusion of one tune – which included lyrics about the Cayahoga River – Premo remarked that it was “rubato-ish.” It seemed to pull them along, she said.

What Orpheum Bell has achieved musically with this new CD “Pearls” is consistent with the poetry of Aaron Klein, who’s responsible for most of the lyrics and much of the music.  It’s not surprising that songs collected together under the title “Pearls” have water imagery woven throughout.

Take the first track on the CD,”What If No Sparrow Fell,” which includes a line that I would like to imagine was inspired by standing at Argo Dam and looking first south, and then north along the Huron River: “The river’s skinny but the pond’s so wide …” It’s hard not to point out that the Huron connects Orpheum Bell at least indirectly to Ann Arbor’s recent history – van der Voo’s wife, Kirsten Elling, is the daughter of Liz Elling, who swam the length of the river in the summer of 2007.

In “Sparrow,” water also can be found in the tears that flowers “wept by the bandshell as the rain swang wide.”

Starting with the bass at 12 o'clock and going clockwise: Serge van der Voo, Merrill Hodnefield, Laurel Premo, Annie Crawford, Michael Billmire, Aaron Klein. (Photo by the writer.)

And I would again like to imagine a specific local Ann Arbor connection that might have inspired the lyric – the Westpark Bandshell, not so awfully far from the west side basement where Orpheum Bell rehearses. (I was raised on a literary tradition that doesn’t place much stock in author intent or inspiration – Klein’s text is mine now, to hear how I like. You can ask him if you want, but I’m not going to.)

Between the first and the last tracks, fountains, lakes, oceans and harbors populate the landscapes that Klein describes.

And on the last track of the CD, “Don’t Let On,” it’s one of the CD’s numerous flowers that ties into the watery thematic flow: “The rose whispers from the deep well/ Don’t need more water, but I could use some more light.”

But it’s not all flowers on this CD: “Every garden needs a weed” is the wisdom offered by “New Hearse for Hastings.” And it’s that idea, I think, that captures the aesthetic of Klein’s gravelly voice – accentuated in its gravelly glory when he sings through a gramophone horn – contrasted with the pretty vocals of Orpheum Bell’s female singers.

It’s a reminder that actual people, not robots, provide the manual musical labor that makes for the pleasant sounds we’re hearing.

Printing the CD Cover: A Collaboration

Manual labor also produced the CD cover that van der Voo had sent to The Chronicle – labor shared across several shoulders. He and his wife, Kirsten Elling, used an old 1950s-era hand-fed cylinder letterpress to print the designs, using copper plates that Geoff Innis had prepared.

Jim Horton whose hand-fed cylinder letterpress was used to print the CD covers, gets his first look at the results. (Photo by the writer.)

Innis, who works for  Perich Advertising + Design, had the plates made by Owosso Graphics, located in a Owosso, Michigan.

The calligraphy on the old bank check design that forms the back of the CD cover was rendered by Kelly Burke – someone Aaron Klein had randomly met at a local art supply store.

The check itself was designed with help from Bob Hohertz of the American Society of Check Collectors.

The letterpress used for the printing sits in the basement of Jim Horton, along with several other old presses and type-setting gear. Horton teaches studio art and printmaking at Greenhills School and Hollander’s School of Book Arts.

Van der Voo indulged a request from me to see the press. And that meant he drove me out to meet Horton where he lives near Waters and Wagner roads, amongst a woods that boasts some pawpaw trees.

Kirsten Elling and husband Serge van der Voo operated the press during printing of the CD cover. (Photo by Geoff Innis.)

When van der Voo handed him a copy of the CD, Horton was getting his first peek at the finished CD cover. He was clearly satisfied with the output from his press.

He discerned a spot with slightly non-uniform ink distribution – and was delighted. It seemed to be exactly the desired effect.

Horton explained that the 1,000 or so copies of the CD cover that Orpheum Bell had printed were pushing the limits of what the press was designed to do, which was to make proofs of newspaper pages before a proper press run.

Recording the CD: An Ethic of Realism

Orpheum Bell’s CD was recorded, mixed and mastered by Jim Roll at his Ann Arbor studio, Backseat Productions. I phoned him up to ask about the “Pearls” recording, and any special challenges posed by Orpheum Bell’s commitment to less-than-modern instruments – Stroh violins, gramophone horns and the like.

Roll talked about the philosophy of his approach to recording: “The ethic of the studio is realism as opposed to modern production,” he explained, “so, they [Orpheum Bell] were a good match.”

Michael Billmire (trumpet) and Aaron Klein (guitar) take a break during the Orpheum Bell rehearsal. (Photo by the writer.)

Achieving that realism entails backing the musicians off the microphones a little bit, Roll explained, “to make sure you can hear the room.” The idea, he says, is to leave “the grit and the reality” there on the recording.

Roll had mixed, but not recorded, Orpheum Bell’s first CD, “Pretty As You,” which was done live with no isolation of individual tracks. For “Pearls,” Roll explained, the bones of each song – bass, guitar and vocals – were recorded live, with other instruments like violins and accordions added later. But they never record to a click track (a metronome), Roll says, to make sure that variations in tempo can come across.

Towards the end of the basement rehearsal, Orpheum Bell goes through the track from “Pretty As You” that bears the same title as the whole CD – it’s planned as their final number at the CD release show at The Ark on Dec. 4. And the discussion at the rehearsal focuses on the question of tempo – do they want to finish it that way? Van der Voo concludes: “I’m happy to end on that pace.”

Michael Billmire bends the notes of his trumpet to his will. (Photo by the writer.)

Serge van der Voo is a blur on bass. (Photo by the writer.)

"I know your blurry winter roads like the back of the hand that is Michigan."

Matthew Milia of Frontier Ruckus led off Tuesday night’s set at The Ark just the way he started the band – with David Jones sitting by his side. With Jones’ gentle plucking of the banjo and Milia on guitar, Milia eased into Driving Home, Christmas Eve: “The churchyard is frozen, the Salvation Army is closin’, your child is dozin’ asleep …” But the repeated rhyme stopped there and did not become a caricature of itself in the way that a Dylan lyric sometimes does.

As the evening progressed, the pair were joined on stage by the full complement of the band – which added drums, bass, a musical saw, piano, trumpet, trombone – but the constant throughout was the sheer literate quality of Milia’s songwriting. A lot of it is about place, or moving through a place – someplace that could be any old place. But he’s writing about a particular place – even if it’s half made up, which is the case for Orion Town, the title of the band’s new full-length CD release. But it’s real particular places when he sings about I-75, or Rosemont Street. And Milia makes them compelling as stand-ins for a listener’s own places – in the same way that Springsteen does when he sings about driving through his hometown in a big old Buick or when Mellencamp describes another hot one out on Highway 11.

Frontier Ruckus (right to left): John Krohn, bass; Ryan Etzcorn, drums; Anna Burch, vocals; Matthew Milia, vocals; David Jones, banjo. Also, mostly obscured at left: Zach Nichols, saw, trumpet, melodica; Ryan Hay, piano; Jeremy Peters, trombone.

The progression of the performance Tuesday night mirrored in some ways the chapter of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn entitled “I Have a New Name,” from which Frontier Ruckus quotes on their MySpace page under the slot for Sounds Like: “… and there was them kind of faint dronings of bugs and flies in the air that makes it seem so lonesome and like everybody’s dead and gone.”

But the faint dronings soon become the barking of hound dogs as they encircle Huck on the Phelps’ plantation where he’s arrived a stranger. Which is not in any way to compare the full band to the barking of hound dogs.

Especially not the vocals of Anna Burch, who lends the band’s sound a fresh, sweet quality to complement Milia’s not-unpleasant half-creak, which sometimes teeters on the edge of a laugh.

And there were plenty of laughs shared among the band and the audience during the evening, some intentional, some not. “We’re not used to playing formal shows,” Milia said during a minor hitch involving the set list and tuning of their instruments, saying that they were used to playing bars where most of the people were only half listening.

Andy Garris' hand offers a tray of shots to a band he loves.

One of those bars has been The Elbow Room in Ypsilanti, and Andy Garris of The Elbow Room was there at The Ark on Tuesday to offer up a tray of Jameson shots to the band before one of their final songs. After the show, Garris summarized his thoughts on Frontier Ruckus: “I love this band.” They’ll be playing next at Garris’ Elbow Room on Dec. 28 for the third day of a three-day event, Mittenfest.

Standing in the same conversational pod as Garris after the show was Ryan Howard, who plays with the band Canada. Howard confirmed that Canada would be playing the first day of Mittenfest on Dec. 26 along with Creaky Boards, among others. Chris Bathgate was also in the audience for the Tuesday show with Frontier Ruckus, and he confirmed that he’d be at Mittenfest as well (Dec. 28). All three days of Mittenfest are scheduled for The Elbow Room this year, with music starting at 6 p.m. each day.

The show on Tuesday evening at The Ark had the relaxed intimacy of a neighborhood pub with a band comfortable knowing that many of the people there were totally on their side. But bass player John Krohn estimated after the show that two-thirds of the audience skewed away from their usual demographic.

Greeting Take a Chance Tuesday concert goers at the door of The Art are Food Gatherers volunteers May Ping Soo Ho and William Charley, along with Cynthia Dunitz of Fleming Artists.

Those folks at the concert who had never heard Frontier Ruckus before, and might well have never heard of them, either, were at The Ark for Take a Chance Tuesday. The Take a Chance Tuesday series is a free concert on the fourth Tuesday of every month except December, which concluded a full decade with yesterday’s concert. Cynthia Dunitz of Fleming Artists came up with the concept 10 years ago as a way to help develop young and up-and-coming artists. Speaking with Dunitz before the show, she said that she’s turning over the reins to her colleague, Susie Giang.

The concert series also works as a fundraiser for Food Gatherers, which had volunteers on hand to accept and sort the food that concert goers brought in lieu of paying for tickets.

The concert series also enjoys support from DTE’s GreenCurrents program, which has sponsored 110 concerts at The Ark, according to Larry Kaufman of DTE. Kaufman was on hand to highlight DTE’s role in sponsoring the series, as well as to sign folks up for the GreenCurrents program, which DTE promotes as a way for electricity consumers to boost the use of electricity in the grid that comes from wind and other alternative sources.

As The Chronicle left The Ark, Kaufman was on the verge of signing up Andy Garris of The Elbow Room for GreenCurrents.