The Backstory

River Songs of America

Fri, 7 Aug 2015 15:00:05 -0400

I grew up near the Platte River, about 70 miles from where it flows into the Missouri River, south of Omaha, Nebraska. I was always fascinated by this wide, slow-moving waterway, which is about three feet deep most of the year and close to 30 feet deep in the springtime. It isn't navigable by anything but a canoe or small, flat-bottom boat, but it plays a significant role in our nation's history. Early pioneers used the river to guide them west from Omaha. In fact, the wagon ruts of the Oregon Trail run within sight of the Platte across Nebraska and Wyoming, as do modern semi-trailers and Rocky-Mountain-bound tourists on Interstate 80 today.

The role this little trickle of a river played in American history exemplifies how important our nation's waterways have been and still are. I recently heard on NPR how, with flooding on the Mississippi slowing barge traffic, the global wheat market is being disrupted and people in Egypt and Algeria will be feeling the effects. As the North American continent was settled, its agriculture, and its industry all centered around the rivers. It is no wonder American culture has so many references to rivers and waterways. The men and women who worked on the river, washed in the river, and drank from the river couldn't help but make it a part of their artistic expression.

The need those everyday working people had to express their lives through music is manifest in the many river songs that have become a part of the American canon of folk music. I have decided to plumb the depths of this tradition through the New-Trad Quartet by presenting a concert entitled "River Songs of America." We were able to partner with Brooklyn's Waterfront Museum and Showboat Barge as a venue and were fortunate to receive a grant from the Brooklyn Arts Council to help us present the program.

To research the music, I looked in several key places. One amazing resource is the recordings Pete Seeger has done for Smithsonian Folkways. His scholarship of American folk music continues to amaze me and is certainly a national treasure. I also turned to one of my favorite founts of folk music, the field recordings of Alan Lomax. I'm so thankful to the WPA for having started him off in the 1930's. Add to that recordings by folks like Doc Watson and my collections of dusty old hymnals and we were on our way.

As I researched the music, I found several themes the songs seemed to fall into. One theme was songs about work—which were based on the hard labor and associated hard drinking of river folk. Other themes included the strength and power associated with the unstoppable movement of water and a longing for the perceived peacefulness of a river—or a home along the river. One of the most fascinating to me is the cleansing power of the water--often associated with baptism and the river as a sacred place to meet with God.

Working with these songs, I had a lot of fun pairing different melodies with interesting new rhythmic and harmonic settings. Of course, Louisiana and backwater Cajun rhythmic feels had to be in the mix, as well as some spirited marches and high-stepping African Highlife. I also indulged myself in some of the dramatic bombast associated with the romanticism of the powerful river. It was particularly interesting to work at getting these emotions across within the parameters of the New-Trad Quartet, with three melodic voices—sax, trombone, and tuba—and a drum set.

I am thrilled to be presenting this concert on the Waterfront Museum and Showboat Barge as it floats on the East River in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The Museum is a unique and wonderful gem, founded by David Sharps, an amazing performer and visionary. The fact that we'll be sitting smack in the delta of the Hudson River, one of the greatest river systems in the U.S., should also be noted. It was the Hudson River's connection to Lake Erie by the Erie Canal in 1825 that gave New York City access to the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River, and the nation's breadbasket. This access helped the city to grow into the financial and cultural capitol it has been for well over a century.

The day of our performance, Saturday, October 3, promises to be a great time. The Waterfront Museum and Showboat Barge is moored at 290 Conover Street @ Pier 44 in Red Hook, Brooklyn, near the giant Fairway Store. We'll be playing from 2:00 to 4:00 P.M., in an informal setting that allows people to listen and enjoy the museum. Be sure to join us. The afternoon will be full of BIG FUN!

Q & A with Jeff Newell about Sousa and the New-Trad

Fri, 5 Aug 2011 11:37:17 -0400

What Does “New-Trad” Mean?
Trad is a slang term that musicians have used for decades to refer to traditional New Orleans jazz. I incorporated it into our name to represent taking something old and distinctly American and making it fresh and up-to-date, i.e., new. I guess you could say it’s another way of saying “Neoclassic.” Our music is to Trad music what Stravinsky is to Mozart. We’re not trying to recreate the past here, we refer to historic American music within a modern rhythmic and harmonic context.

Why John Philip Sousa?
I’m surprised how few people on the street today have any idea who John Philip Sousa was (wasn’t he a baseball player?). A hundred years ago, Sousa and his band members were the pop stars of their day, among the first in America, along with Mark Twain. As such, they had a huge influence on our culture and on the music that came after them. At the same time, Sousa was constantly being influenced by the music of the masses, using the syncopation of ragtime and early jazz as well as the music of early immigrant groups. This is part of what we demonstrate to students in our school social studies residency, “Sousa, Music of All Americans,” how the music of the people, especially people of color, influenced the “March King,” a darling of the upper class.

What have you done to our grandfather’s Sousa?
The All-American Sousa was a first generation American, his father being from Spain, of Portuguese descent, and his mother from the Bavarian region of Germany. In our New-Trad arrangements, we’ve taken the music of this son of immigrants and added the rhythms of more recent waves of immigration—primarily Haitian and other Caribbean music—as well as a more modern harmonic and melodic approach. The goal of this approach is to highlight Sousa’s relevance to modern American culture with its global outlook. It’s meant to honor our nation’s history and the millions of Americans, immigrants all—in one way or another, who have contributed to our culture.

How did you go about creating these arrangements?
I was really looking to recreate a cultural process. As Sousa’s musical influence spread across the continent during the brass band era, many small local bands were amateur groups made up of musicians who did not read music. They learned everything by ear and by rote. In early New Orleans, these were called “routine” bands. They would catch pieces of the melodies they heard other bands play, or on early recordings, and teach them to each other. In this process, the music was also being filtered through the musician’s own cultural and musical experience to bring forth a unique version of the piece. I could have easily found the published scores of these pieces and worked from them, but I decided to work from a CD of old wax cylinder recordings of Sousa’s band. As I listened to and transcribed the marches from these scratchy old recordings, the same ones many late 19th-century musicians got Sousa’s music from, I purposely filtered these original versions of the pieces through my own cultural experience as a jazz musician, a descendant of subsistence farmers in the rural Midwest, and a sax player in Brooklyn who had been spending a lot of late nights playing in Haitian “Kompa” bands.

Is that why you brought in the Haitian influence?
Yes. At one point, I had been listening to these recordings a lot during the day and playing all night with Haitian bands. As I was experiencing these two, seemingly divergent, styles of music day and night, I began to sense the commonality between them—the pulse that has to do with being alive, being human, and needing to keep moving. I love working with Haitian bands! The pay is never that great but, rhythmically and from a cultural perspective, I feel it is some of the hippest—and most African—music I’ve ever gotten to play. I was especially fascinated by some of the “Kona” groups I would hear at Haitian festivals. There would be choirs of homemade trumpets, made out of tin and looking like traffic cones, playing these rhythmic patterns. Each trumpet can only play two or three notes—like the root, the fifth, and maybe the third—but the sound and the grooves are incredible. I tried to recreate that in our arrangement of “The Manhattan Beach March,” where the horns set up a drone-like rhythmic setting and the rhythms section plays the melody.

How did the New-Trad Octet get its start?
It started out as a trio of sax, tuba, and drums. I became interested in the role of the tuba…it’s a very versatile instrument with an incredible range. The New-Trad Octet evolved as I began to conceive of a New Orleans brass band melded with a modern jazz group. After a few initial gigs with my buddies in Chicago, I moved to Brooklyn and began looking for the right musical personalities to fit the concept. It took about seven or eight years, and I’m really excited about the musicians I play with and the way the East Coast Band has evolved. At the same time, I’ve been able to keep things going with the musicians in Chicago—I call it the Middle Coast Band. Though we play the same book, the musical personalities involved give it a different feel. It’s a delightful experience for me as a composer-arranger and bandleader, getting to work with these two groups of amazing musicians. Thanks to them, I’m continually discovering new things in the music I’ve written. It’s really exciting!

Tricia Woods June 2, 1966 - January 11, 2011

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 14:13:07 -0500

It is with the deepest regret we share the news that Tricia Woods has gone to be with our Lord following a four-year battle against breast cancer. Tricia was a true friend, a great encourager, and a fine musician who has blessed the New-Trad Octet with her keyboard skills since 1999. Being a musical comrade and Jeff’s piano instructor, as well as the New York band’s pianist, Tricia brought to bear a major influence on the sound and direction of the New-Trad Octet. Her presence will be missed more than words can express. The music you hear is Tricia playing the fourth movement of “Hymn Pan Alley,” based on the hymn “Close to Thee.”

Hymn Pan Alley

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 00:32:11 -0400

In late 1999 I read an article in "The Hill," a neighborhood publication that comes out every few months in the Fort Greene/Clinton Hill area of Brooklyn. The article—"Hymn Pan Alley," by Ed Moran, a local writer, hymnist, and historian—told how a number of very influential hymnists had lived and worked in the neighborhood during the late 19th century. These folks, living here as the neighborhood was developing in the midst of a world-wide religious revival, wrote music that became mainstays of church hymnals for generations. Songs by Robert Lowry (Shall We Gather at the River), Fanny Crosby (Blessed Assurance), Cleland McAfee (Near to the Heart of God), and Ira Sankey (The Ninety and Nine, Marching to Zion) were sung in churches, black and white, throughout the 20th century. I immediately thought of how many musicians, especially jazz and R&B artists of color, credited the church as being integral to their musical development. I remembered an interview with the great jazz vibraphonist, Milt Jackson, who said that throughout his career he'd been playing basically what he grew up in church. It hit me that this neighborhood, where I had lived after moving from Chicago in 1994, was an integral part of American music history.
With the help of both Ed Moran and the Rev. David Dyson of Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, as well as Art Norregaard of the Baptist Temple, I spent a couple of years looking through dusty, old hymnals and reading about the Fort Greene hymn composers. Eventually I decided that I wanted to write a piece for my New-Trad Octet ensemble that would honor these composers and my neighborhood's influence on American history.
The resulting “Hymn Pan Alley”—Ed gave me permission to use his term for the title—is a suite of movements incorporating melodic material gleaned from the Gospel hymns written by these historic composers in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood. Although Robert Lowry, Fanny Crosby, Ira Sankey, and the others represented in this work did not all live in Fort Greene concurrently, I tried to imagine what I would hear if they were working on their most famous tunes as I strolled outside on a warm summer day, listening through open windows. The work is based on nine different hymns written by five different composers. The piece has been presented twice, for its premiere in 2003 at Brooklyn's Baptist Temple, where Fanny Crosby wrote a hymn for its centennial, and was played in a concert 2004 at the Hanson Place Seventh Day Adventist Church, the same building where Robert Lowry wrote "Shall We Gather at the River" in 1853 when it was the First Baptist Church. The piece will be presented a third time by Jeff Newell's New-Trad Octet at 3:00 P.M. this Sunday, October 17, at Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church—tickets are $15 for adults and free for children 12 & under. This church was pastored by hymnist Cleland McAfee and had hymnist Ira Sankey as one of its members. Members of Jeff Newell's New-Trad Octet will also be presenting a brass band workshop at the church on Saturday, October 16 from 10:00 to noon. Workshop tickets are $10 for adults and $5 for young people 17 and under.