Digging The Scene

It was somewhere around the middle of my time at Greenwood this August that I found myself sitting in the middle of a crowd of around 150 people squeezed into a tiny church on a lonesome dirt road in the little town of Whately, Massachusetts. I'd been brought by a longtime friend, with whom I often trade favorite songs and artists, to hear a rare performance by a quartet of singer-songwriters who call themselves Redbird. To call the foursome a band would be a reach - they only play together once or twice a year, they quite clearly don't spend a lot of time rehearsing together before they take the stage as a group, and they each have solo careers that consume the bulk of their time and energy.

But they're also all amazing artists who obviously love working together, and the show I saw that night in the hills of Western Massachusetts (made all the more engaging by the space, a room so small that the performers weren't miked at all) immediately ranked among my favorite live music experiences of all time. What's more, it brought home a reality that should have been obvious to me a long time ago: my deep and abiding affection for rural New England, where I've spent at least a few weeks of just about every year of my life, is based almost entirely on the incredible diversity and quality of musical life I've enjoyed there.

I know. This sort of thing shouldn't qualify as a revelation coming from someone who makes his living playing music and evangelizing from the stage about it. But for whatever reason, it wasn't something I'd ever really thought about before. I've always been someone who goes looking for the characteristics that make a town, city, or state unique, and the best way to get me started on a foam-at-the-mouth rant is to bring up suburban sprawl, with its attendant homogenization of local American culture. So my assumption, I guess, had always been that the places I've loved to live, work and play have earned my affection through characteristics that go well beyond music.

But as I sat listening to Redbird, it occurred to me that I can pretty much divide the US (and the world, I suppose,) into areas that I care deeply about, and others I don't, and in every instance, the ones I love are the ones that have introduced me to a unique musical culture. And the places I've lived, even for long periods of time, that didn't inspire me musically are the places I don't tend to think a lot about after I've left, regardless of what other positive qualities they boasted.

Birmingham, Alabama may be a redneck joke to most Americans, but to me, it's where I learned to really understand both bluegrass and gospel music, and where I had the honor of being a part of a life-altering MLK Day concert at the famous 16th Street Baptist Church where four little girls were tragically murdered by the KKK in 1963.

Helsinki, Finland will always have a special place in my heart, not just because of the famous Finnish love for classical music, but because of the almost unbelievable diversity and enthusiasm of the city's buskers and street musicians. Cologne, Germany had me hooked for life after I heard the children's choir sing a Catholic mass at the looming cathedral that dominates the city center, and then surprised me again during Karneval with polka bands so good that they almost made me like polkas.

It was a local music scene, too, that convinced me to stop taking orchestra auditions once I landed in Minneapolis. There are many things I like about Minnesota living, but the fact that, on any given night of any given week, I can have my pick of ten or twenty great local bands playing in bars, clubs, and concert venues across the Cities goes right at the top of the list. It's not just that there is a local music scene - it's that there's a damn good music scene that is immediately identifiable as Minnesotan to anyone who's spent time in it.

Western Massachusetts may seem like a collection of hippie-infested colleges and small, cloistered hilltowns to those who pass through on their way to New York or Boston, but I know it as the only place in America where, over the course of a single week, I can hear the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra play Kurt Weill, the boys of Kronos play an utterly stunning new work for string quartet and tape by a young woman from Serbia, a brilliant 19-year-old cellist (who I guarantee will be familiar to you within a decade) playing a solo Kodaly sonata for 50 wide-eyed 12-year-olds, a coloratura soprano premiering a set of three new songs written as payment for a landscape painting, and, of course, Redbird, and all the other musicians who make up Western Mass's enviable acoustic music scene.

I don't really have a larger point in any of this, I don't think, and you may still be rolling your eyes at the absurdity of a musician having a revelation that music is important to him. But I've found myself wondering, since that night in Whately, whether music is this big a tug on everyone's affections for a given place. Can you be happy living in a city or town without a decent live music scene? In the age of the iPod, do you still need a diverse, thriving collection of clubs and concert halls to make you happy? These aren't rhetorical questions - the comment button awaits you...