Hearkening to the days when their grand pappies were runnin’ whiskey and gypsy jazz musician Django Reinhardt was still chain smoking, the members of Molasses fuse back porch pickin’ with high-falutin’ musical institutions.
On Saturday, the local band invites students to get down just like their ancestors did to old-time jazz and blues at Square Dance with Molasses. Sponsored by the Cultural Forum, the event features square dance instruction with dance caller Bill Martin who has helped revive an old-time music and dance movement in Portland.
Molasses features carpenter and bassist Seth Kimmel, sociology graduate student and banjo player Brandon Olszewski, and University senior and fiddle player Kristen Harris.
“The whole MTV, video game and pop music scene is dying out,” said Harris, a 22-year-old music education major. “(Young people) want more human interaction. It’s fun to look out when we’re playing – everyone has a giddy look on their faces. It’s like poetry.”
Square Dance with Molasses
WHAT: | Get down just like your great-great granny did to the sound of old time jazz and blues with Molasses and dance caller Bill Martin. Square dance instruction included. |
WHERE: | EMU Fir Room |
WHEN: | 8 p.m. Saturday |
COST: | Students $3, general admission $5 |
WEB SITES: | bubbaguitar.com, myspace.com/ molassesband |
FOR MORE INFORMATION: | molassesstringband @gmail.com. Molasses also performs tonight at 9 p.m. at Sam Bond’s Garage. |
Harris said a resurgence in old-time music’s popularity among college students may be attributed to soundtracks such as “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Essential to old-time music, a sense of community brought the three Molasses musicians together after a series of jam sessions 18 months ago.
“It’s not a performance-style music,” Kimmel said. “It’s really about people coming together on the porch with various instruments and the same tune. It has a fun, trance effect.”
Foundational to jazz, swing, old blues and country, the North American old-time sound combines European and African folk music and dance.
“I feel like a lot of people are down on America, but this is something about our country that makes you proud,” Olszewski said. “It’s getting to see where American culture came from. We’re a country of immigrants. We’ve got the combo of the banjo from Africa and the fiddle from Ireland. It’s a cool example of how music symbolizes changing ideas to fit a variety of people in America.”
All long-time musicians, Molasses band members spoke about their early influences and their segue into playing old-time tunes.
Growing up in Eugene, Kimmel’s father, a biology professor, taught him to play the mandolin “before (he) was old enough to play anything.” Always a guitar player and once a member of a basement mandolin band, Kimmel began playing the upright bass five years ago when his old friends invited him to play in a band. His wife plays the banjo.
“There’s way more interest (in old-time music) now than when I was 20,” Kimmel said. “It really is the earliest American music. People were ripped from their homelands or left them purposefully; this music is unique to them and America.”
Now a carpenter who owns a small construction shop, Kimmel designs instruments and has won a silver medal from the Violin Society of America for his upright bass.
Kimmel emphasizes old-time music’s history lessons. Often, he believes, old-time music is mistaken for bluegrass.
Now finishing her degree at the University’s School of Music and Dance, Harris began playing classical violin when she was five. During summers, she traveled to music festivals where she experienced Celtic, bluegrass and old-time music.
Square dancing for Harris has always been a “fun and social kind of thing.” Mistakes don’t matter, she said; it’s very low pressure with the dance caller shouting out “rhyme-y and goofy stuff.”
“It’s a lot of energy, a lot of fun and you don’t have to know what you’re doing,” she said. “A lot of people wear whatever – cowboy boots, flannels, these cute calico dresses.”
Trained in jazz performance with a hint of bluegrass background, Olszewski has been playing old-time tunes with Kimmel for years. Just two years ago, Olsezewski learned the banjo. He also plays the guitar, mandolin, fiddle and a little bass.
Because Kimmel creates half of the band’s instruments, Olsezewski said the band has another way to connect to its music. He encourages University students and community members interested in old-time music and dance to attend monthly jam sessions and house parties.
Before Molasses, Kimmel collaborated with other musicians in a group called Mole in the Ground. A joke about moles in the ground inspired Kimmel, Harris and Olsezewski to call themselves Molasses. Read the joke below.
There was a mamma mole, a papa mole and a baby mole. They lived in a hole outside of a farm house out in the country.
One spring morning, the papa mole reached his head out of the hole and said, “I smell sausage.”
The mama mole reached her head outside of the hole and said, “No, you dummy! That’s tulips.”
As the baby mole tried to stick his head out of the hole to get a whiff, the two bigger moles were in the way.
The baby mole mumbled, “The only thing I can smell is molasses.”
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