There's no doubt that much of the music pumped out by multinational record companies is crap. It's pre-packaged musical junk food, a steady diet of which has given listeners a sort creative of acid-reflux disease, kind of like what Ashlee Simpson uses as an excuse for lip-synching. If you want good music these days, you're not going to find it on MTV or on one of Clear Channel's innumerable radio stations. You've got to dig around for it, ya dig?

But the eternal search for soulful sounds can often lead to gems right in your own backyard. During the first weekend of the month, the Seacoast Guitar Society will host its second annual guitar festival, featuring performances by some of the country's best talent, including Harvey Reid, Chris Kleeman, Andrew Calhoun and others.

Two weeks later, Larry Simon, Groove Bacteria front man and host of Beat Night at the Press Room, will gather the region's jazz musicians and poets together for Jazzmouth, one of the rare jazz-poetry festivals in the nation. Festival organizers like Reid and Simon aren't putting on these shows for riches or accolades. They're doing it to celebrate local artists, save music from mediocrity and call attention to a pair of art forms that are undeservedly on the fringes of mainstream music.

wizards wanted

the second annual Seacoast Guitar Festival brings the best back home

by Keith Demanche

There are as many ways to play guitar as there are fingers in the world, and almost as many types and incarnations of the stringed instrument: banjo, mandolin, dulcimer, bass, acoustic and electric guitar, harp guitar, lute, dobro and on and on. The Seacoast Guitar Society's second annual festival plays host to eight performers who have played not only their fair share of the many varied guitars, but have also made names for themselves with their distinctive style and skill. It isn't often so many devotees to craft are brought together in Portsmouth for one event. There are well over 200 years of combined guitar mastery and knowledge on display. From the poetic stylings and considerable guitar skills of Andrew Calhoun to the innovative arrangements and lively performances of Mary Flower, there will be guitar wizards of all stripes performing.

"It's hard for people to believe that guitarists who usually play for 100 people in a coffeehouse are often a lot better players than even the best-known popular guitarists," said Reid, a national fingerpicking champion in his own right. "Eric Clapton and John Mayer are good guitarists, for example, but they can't even come close to doing the kinds of things Stephen Bennett does with a guitar. It's just the way it is. There is no merit system in the music business, and the cream does not float to the top."

a guitar society

Harvey Reid wants to use the skills and knowledge he's gained as a musician to make the Seacoast community a better place. "Instead of picking up trash on the beach, I put on concerts and workshops," he said. The Seacoast Guitar Society is his way of reaching out and giving back. And while musicians often gather to support each other and non-profits often put on shows, Reid wants his efforts to "promote and preserve guitar music," as the organization's mission states, not just raise money.

Is guitar music in danger of disappearing? Not really, as a listen to the radio can assure, but "America is a fame-driven place," Reid said, "and things in the mass-merchandised and mass-entertainment world tend to overwhelm things on the fringes. The big entertainment companies spend millions, maybe billions, promoting and selling their music, and it makes sense that some people like me have to drink some strong coffee and beat the drum for the lesser-known but artistically valid forms of music."

As part of the "below the radar" arts scene, Reid and co-producer Joyce Andersen (no slouch on the six-string herself) play festivals and concerts around the country and meet a lot of other artists they figure their friends at home would want to hear. How better to introduce them than by having a two-day guitar party? By really focusing on guitar playing skills as a criteria, they winnowed down a list of exceptional players. Andersen picks the lineup for Friday, which is songwriter night, and Reid chooses the lineup for Saturday, guitar night. To that end, the performers for this year's event are not only people they respect and enjoy seeing perform, but players who have the chops to enthrall an audience from opening note to grand finale.

playing is not just fun and games

"Music is like cooking because it always takes different ingredients to make a particular dish, just like playing a particular song," said Chris Kleeman, the headliner on Saturday night. "Some of my songs like to be served fried, some grilled, some spicy, some oven baked... some slow-cooked, and the ingredients are always a little different." Kleeman has played with legends like Buddy Guy and Koko Taylor, and blues maestro B.B. King produced Kleeman's debut album in 1970. He started playing when he was about 15, learning on a Gretsch electric and moving up to a Martin D-18 when he was 17 and not looking back. Though he's been on hiatus for some time, becoming known for his new role of chef, he found he couldn't resist the pull of the stage.

"I'm never happier than when I'm spanking the hell out of my 12-string or my National steel, and hearing and feeling the harmonic structure and overtones of the music. The acoustic groove is my absolute favorite. I'm drawn by the harmonic nature of the beast," Kleeman said.

All of the festival's performers share that love of craft, and the zealous focus on minutiae that comes from serious immersion. When someone devotes their life to playing guitar, there's nothing too small or too difficult for them to focus on. Everyone has their own specialty, their own "thing," and self-set standards are pretty high.

"I'm a recent fiddle player, maybe 10 years... still in the awkward stage," said Friday night headliner Steve Gillette, a preeminent singer/songwriter whose songs have been recorded by the likes of Garth Brooks, Linda Ronstadt and Waylon Jennings. "I'm fond of saying that I quit the music business to become a songwriter, and I believe there's much more to learn." With his wife, Cindy Mangsen, he tries to push his limits to keep music stimulating, including a musical adaptation of a Mark Twain story, in between practicing the fiddle. "Someday, I hope to own a fine violin," he said, "I suspect that a 200-year-old Italian instrument might have that special voice I could grow into."

For Saturday night headliner Stephen Bennett, mastery of an instrument is not enough. He's won both the fingerpicking and flatpicking national titles on guitar, but is best known for his wizardry on the harp guitar, an asymmetrical beast that has 14 strings and an extra sound hole. The songs that come from his one instrument need to be seen to be believed.

Reid, too, dabbles in a variety of stringed instruments. "Certain songs I like to play on mandolin or banjo or autoharp, but I usually play those instruments for a while and come home to the guitar," he said. "It is versatile and portable, and I can use it to accompany all manner of songs."

For Kleeman, who focuses on guitar, writing is the addiction instead of the instrument, and the instrumental song is the best way to express himself. "A song with lyrics is harder for me, as I'm always too critical of the words. But I always give an instrumental a title you can talk about, make jokes about, or just make conversation about my life and how it relates to the song."

"Writing an instrumental is a whole different animal," agreed Reid. "It can take several hundred hours to write a guitar instrumental work. It can take a while to write a song (with lyrics), but instrumental music is composing, and often involves developing new techniques. It can take months to develop the skills and find the notes in a major work for guitar."

Gillette and co-writer Mangsen spend months in the process of making drafts of songs for each other as well, tweaking and polishing the tunes until they feel just right. "I need to hear from the still, small voice, that faint, internal compass, and that does take some solitude and some time," Gillette said. But as for-hire songwriters, they need to include lyrics for their material and find it works best if both collaborators contribute to the music and the words to find the right atmosphere and emotion, not to mention some good guitar licks.

Look for frenzied fingers, laughs and high-level talent this weekend. With two nights of music and as many varied styles as will be showcased, there really is something for everyone. And for the techie set, there will be a free workshop with Harvey Reid on Thursday demonstrating and comparing the various acoustic instrument amplification technologies available today. The workshop will be held from 6-8 p.m. at Acoustic Outfitters, 72 Portsmouth Ave., Stratham Plaza, Stratham (603-778-9711).

Seacoast Guitar Society Second Annual Seacoast Guitar Festival

Friday, April 1: Songwriter Night

Joyce Andersen hosts performances by Peter and Lou Berryman, Andrew Calhoun and headliner Steve Gillette.

Saturday, April 2: Guitar Night

Seacoast Guitar Society founder Harvey Reid hosts performances by Chris Kleeman in the headline slot, Stephen Bennett, Mary Flower and an opening set by Reid himself.

Music begins at the South Church in Portsmouth at 8 p.m. both nights. Tickets are $15 in advance, $18 at the door, and $12 for students (two-day passes are $25 in advance, $20 for students). Tickets are available at 207-363-1886, www.seacoastguitar.org, and at Tweeter Etc. (Newington), Earcraft (Dover), Acoustic Outfitters (Stratham), and Gravestone Artwear (York), Tulips (Portsmouth) and Red Carpet (Durham). South Church is located at 292 State St. in downtown Portsmouth. Call 207-363-1886 for more information or visit www.seacoastguitar.org.

THE CAPO

The capo is a device used to shorten the neck of a guitar, so to speak, and raise the pitch of what is played. The very first capo was invented in the mid 1700s. "Both the yoke capo with screw and the wooden Spanish capo cejilla were invented in the late 1700s. The yoke capo still looks the same, and the Spanish capo is still in use by Flamenco guitarists," notes the Sterner Capo Museum Web site (web.telia.com/~u86505074/capomuseum).

There are about 130 capo patents on the books, but very few reach the mainstream market. Probably the best capo invention was the W.H. Russel elastic capo, which is still in widespread use today after more than 70 years. Since then, capos have been fashioned out of plastic, held with clamps, screws and even Velcro, and designed for more and more eccentric styles.

There is even at least one capo invented by a Seacoast resident, the one and only Harvey Reid. "The partial capo is a new tool for doing cool things with the guitar. It changes the landscape of what's possible, very much like changing the tuning of the instrument but different." It uses moveable rubber stoppers at each of the string locations to hold down a string or let it ring. Basically, it gives the player an extra hand.

Remember:

?Çó A capo should bend the strings as little as possible over the fret for optimum performance

?Çó Light gauge strings require less pressure to hold in place

?Çó String sets with equal steps between them work better because the capo can apply a more even pressure

?Çó Worn frets will result in having to place the capo too far away from the fret to get reliable tuning

ALTERNATE TUNINGS

"Alternate tuning" is when a guitar is tuned to something other than "standard tuning," which is E A D G B E, from fattest string to thinnest. Alternate tuning is not a new concept. Its use can be documented as far back as the 1700s. Even before guitars had six strings, when they had either four or five, variations on the A D G B E tuning were used. Why is standard tuning standard? Well, because it is, that's why. And it sounds nice.

Alternate tunings range from the somewhat obvious "open tuning," which is when the guitar is tuned to play a chord when strummed, such as Open C, or Open D, to the weird: A A D G C D on Peter Mulvey's "Rapture" for instance. Many, many players use different tunings today to make complex fingering easier or to get a personal sound.

There are also cool regional names for these different tunings: sebastopol, vestapol, sawmill, slack-key and cross-note, to name a few. So the next time you find a tuning you like, name it and tell your friends!

the beat goes on

Jazzmouth celebrates poetry, jazz and all things hep

by Larry Clow

The beat spirit as we know it-smoky Manhattan bars, impromptu jazz riffs and bursts of poetry that seem to spring forth from the ether, perfectly formed and complementary to each other, only to dissipate fully and forever after the last notes and syllables fall into silence-got its official start almost 50 years ago at the Brata Art Gallery in New York. It was October 1957, and for its "founders," musician David Amram and author Jack Kerouac, it wasn't a new movement or genre or anything out of the ordinary. It was music. It was poetry. It just was.

"Phillip Lamntia had the idea of calling it 'jazz poetry trio' because they wanted to call it something. It was just something we did. We didn't want to call it anything," Amram said in a recent interview with The Wire.

That "something" was the fusion of Kerouac's writing and Amram's music. It started out at "parties, park benches, wherever we were," Amram said, and after the performance at the Barta Gallery, it moved to Circle In The Square, a club in downtown New York. With only a few flyers and some word-of-mouth advertisement, the performances at Circle In The Square created such a buzz that it became the "official entertainment" at the club and, shortly after that, a discarded fad.

"(It was) something being done so much that any bar or any place that would have a jazz group... would have someone get up and start screaming into the mike and the band would play 'I've Got Rhythm' or 'Cherokee' as fast as they could," Amram said.

It's been almost a half-century since those first performances in New York. Now jazz-poetry is coming to Portsmouth in a big way with Jazzmouth, the Seacoast's first jazz and poetry festival, April 14-17. Amram will be on hand to perform, along with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic and a host of local talent.

The festival got its start because there is nothing else quite like it in the region, said local musician Larry Simon. He's been producing, hosting and playing at Beat Night at the Press Room every month for the last five years and, in doing so, has met "tons of poets and musicians... that are really sensitive to working" together.

"It seemed like a natural thing to celebrate all this with a festival," said Simon.

While Portsmouth boasts other music events, including a summer blues festival and the annual Tommy Gallant Jazz Festival, Simon said those festivals, while cool, aren't entirely inclusive of the Seacoast's jazz and poetry community.

"There's a lot to celebrate in this community artistically, and this festival does that," he said. "I really wanted to celebrate in a large way...Seacoast jazz and poetry."

Bruce Pingree, general manager of the Press Room and one of the organizers of the Portsmouth Blues Festival, is also a driving force behind Jazzmouth. Apart from the yearly Kerouac celebrations in Lowell, Mass., and Beat Night, there aren't many events in the state, or even the country, which celebrate poetry and jazz.

"There's nothing like this," he said. "It's more of an eclectic sort of thing, which is the reason why we're doing it."

Simon has been a jazz fan since the age of 14, when he started listening to artists like John Coltrane and Miles Davis.

"Even as a young kid, for whatever reason, I would be fascinated by stuff that wasn't in the mainstream pop culture. I was a hippie kid and very proud of that," he said. "A lot of the artists that you heard about that were also anti-establishment were the Beat poets and jazz players."

Simon said jazz is like philosophy and, like the poetry of the Beats, it has serious depth that "resonates with people for mysterious reasons."

"It's pretty complicated stuff," he said. "A lot of pop music offers something else that might not be quite the same...for somebody who's being very philosophical and tearing things apart and digging deep and questioning things."

a jazz legend and Pulitzer poet

To jazz and poetry aficionados, the addition of Amram and Simic to the lineup may seem like a major coup, but for Simon, getting them to perform at the festival started with a few phone calls. Local poet John Grady, a former student of Simic's at the University of New Hampshire, called and asked him to perform. Though he rarely performs locally, the Yugoslavian-born poet, who won the Pulitzer Prize for The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems in 1990, turned out to be happy to oblige.

Simon had met Amram briefly a few years ago. "The amazing thing about Amram is that he's more accessible than your typical schmo walking down the street," Simon said. When it came time to organize the festival, Simon thought of him immediately.

"He is, of course, the guy who worked with the original Beat poets. If you're going to do something like this, he's the guy you want to get."

Simon's not exaggerating when he says Amram is accessible. During his interview with The Wire, Amram discussed the philosophy behind poetry-jazz collaborations, his work with Jack Kerouac and where he thinks the Beat spirit is now while driving to the airport to catch a plane, only stopping the interview to go through security and board the plane.

The amalgamation of jazz and poetry hardly started with the Beats, Amram said.

"We were continuing the bardic tradition, but in the jazz spirit," he said. "It was anybody collaborating with anyone else, always listening, always having respect, and never being aggressive and drowning the other person out. Jazz is all about harmony and spontaneity and surprise and making a situation better than it would be otherwise."

Amram said using that philosophy in collaborating with poets is "the nicest thing you can do," a tradition that he said Simon is upholding.

"They say it makes them feel like they're reading it even better than if they were reading it by themselves," he said.

By far, Amram's favorite collaborator was Jack Kerouac. The two were close friends and performed together frequently, working together on Pull My Daisy, a 1959 film about the Beats that Kerouc narrated and which features a score composed by Amram. Those collaborations were the subject of Amram's 2002 book "Offbeat."

"I had more fun with (Kerouac)," he said. "We were so in tune. We never rehearsed and everything always came out perfectly."

clich??s and the artistic spirit

Although known for their work with jazz musicians, visual artists and other members of the cultural scene, Kerouac and the Beats were also famous for their excesses. But Amram is quick to dismiss the typical Beat stereotypes of excessive drinking and drugging as a means to achieve artistic expression, which he says has dragged down many artists.

"We've been limited by the clich?? of the torture and misery of the life of an artist being the most important thing, rather than the glory of their work," he said. "There's really a misapprehension that somehow...that was going to give you some kind of spirituality."

That kind of intangible artistic high that Amram so often experienced with Kerouac and other collaborators can only be achieved through dedication, creativity and working with other artists, something that he hopes to bring to Jazzmouth.

"It was a remarkable period and a remarkable group of people," he said. "I hope in Portsmouth what we can do is inspire maybe some high school kids and maybe their grandparents to go home and finish making that painting, write that poem, and encourage them to be creative."

Jazzmouth

Thursday, April 14

Jazzmouth kicks off with a screening of Pull My Daisy and Poetry in Motion at 7 p.m. at The Music Hall. David Amram will be on hand to introduce Pull My Daisy, a 1959 film about the Beats that Jack Kerouac wrote the narration for and Amram scored. Poetry in Motion is a 1982 film featuring a range of poets, from William S. Burroughs and Amiri Baraka to Jim Carroll and Tom Waits. Before and between the shows, Larry Simon and Groove Bacteria will perform.

Friday, April 15

The evening starts with poetry sponsored by the Portsmouth Poet Laureate Program. Poets Jennifer Belkus, Walter Butts, Robert Dunn, Diana Durham, Charles Pratt and Maren Tirabassi will read their works at Caf?? Espresso, 800 Islington St., in Portsmouth, from 6 to 8 p.m. Portsmouth Poet Laureate John Perrault will host the event.

Later that night, the Press Room will host the Jazzmouth Jazzfest. Bruce Pingree will host the event, with artists to be announced. The bebop starts at 9 p.m. at the Press Room, 77 Daniel St., Portsmouth.

Saturday, April 16

Saturday is the busiest day of Jazzmouth, with Young Writers' Beat Night at RiverRun Bookstore, 7 Commercial Alley, Portsmouth, from 11 a.m. to noon. Area high school writers will read their own works at the event.

That afternoon, Neil English and the New Hampshire Writers' Project will host the workshop "Performance Poetry: Liberating the Voice Within" at 1 p.m. at the South Church, 292 State St., Portsmouth. There is a $12 workshop fee, payable at the door; for more information, call the New Hampshire Writers' Project at 603-314-7980.

The day will be capped off at 8 p.m. with the Super Beat Night Extravaganza at the South Church. David Amram, Charles Simic, the Larry Simon Quintet and According to My Dream, a unique music-spoken word band will perform, along with 15 of the Seacoast's poets. Admission is $12 at the door, $11 in advance at Bull Moose Music and $10 in advance at the Press Room.

Sunday, April 17

Jazzmouth winds down with an intimate Poetry & Jazz Brunch at 11:30 a.m. at the Library Restaurant, 401 State St., Portsmouth. Larry Simon and Groove Bacteria will provide music while poets Diedre Randall, Mickey Blanchette, Mark DeCarteret, Pat Parnell and others dish out some fresh morsels of poetry.