Buy Me A CoffeeIt’s always been a challenge to compress my life into tidy, coherent narratives full of hidden meanings and uniting threads with distinguishable identity signposts that give audiences an obvious sense of who this person is. My artistic identity has, in many ways, been an attempt to seek some form of ‘personal style,’ by tossing together what, at face value, might seem like incongruous interests into a gumbo of my own making. In all this digging in the dark, the ‘ego’s’ quest was to forge some form of authentic artistic voice out of a chaos of unknowing. With no mentors to guide me, and no institutions to mould me, it was all very freeing, very scary and a complete mess.
I’ll begin with the early days of ‘professional’ gigging. London 2004-2005. A young man completing a Masters in history is wondering how to break away from academia, play gigs and earn money from music. Early on in his studies he posts an ad on Craig’s List: ‘American folk musician in London looking to collaborate with any musicians who play guitar, banjo, mandolin, fiddle, percussion, piano, and/or accordion.’
The only response received is from an accordionist. They call each other. All the young man recalls of the conversation is wondering if the person on the other end is on a Witness Protection Program. A strong Long Island accent. They arrange to meet at the Witness’ place in south Wimbledon. They jam and are surprisingly ambitious about developing a professional project around accordion and banjo, as well as a strange percussion stick called the ‘Freedom Boot.’
Looking back, it was at this moment that the Witness, a.k.a. Michael Ward-Bergeman, appeared to me as a clown-roshi-seeker-mentor figure, undergoing the beginning of his own transformation to another life. We started a duo and began touring, sending out millions of emails, knocking on doors and taking every paying gig that came our way. No smartphones, no GPS.
We then recorded our first album with my brother as sound engineer over a span of four nights in the gymnasium of Harefield Hospital outside London, sleeping on chairs, with hospital guards waking us up (one was very surprised to see us when he opened the door at 6am). We printed up a thousand CDs and sold them at all our shows during our insane jaunts around the UK. It was all starting to get exciting, yet also very real. I was starting to wonder: is this my profession?
With the Masters finished I was out of a dorm and started crashing on couches around town, before finally moving in with my future wife to a small apartment in Brooklyn, New York. There I tapped into the folk scene, worked carpentry to pay rent, and taught fingerstyle guitar and banjo at the Jalopy Theatre in Red Hook, regularly hopping over to London for tours with Michael.
After that blip we moved to Paris, France where I soon became an intermittent du spectacle (state-sponsored artist support scheme) playing in all sorts of venues with all sorts of other musicians to get my cachets (declared gigs). During that time, I made my first trip to Africa – an unforgettable three week trip around Mali.
But back to the U.K.. The ‘long strange trip’ continued, touring around England, Scotland, Wales, the U.S. and mainland Europe (although I never made it to Ireland!) with Michael, and the eventual addition of another brilliant, lunatic, Canadian percussionist, performance artist, sound engineer and anarchist called Paul Clifford. We went by the name of The Groanbox Boys, then Groanbox Boys, then just Groanbox. Did we grow up or shrink down? This whole trip lasted about ten years; with peaks and valleys; ebbs and flows; collaborating with classical composers and ensembles, packed out village halls, and played to two people in a pub in the Lake District; big festival crowds; hospital patients, and a wall of chavs in Yeovil not listening to a note we were playing. We made warts-and-all guerrilla records on the fly that contained both unlistenable discordance and mellifluous magic that we could sell DIY by the carloads at all these venues we navigated to with frayed roadmaps in beat up rentals from a used car dealer named Mel in Kent. Sea legs were obtained.
The absurdity of all this is that the music and the whole ‘business’ of it might have been just some cosmic pretext to get the gods – or someone – laughing. In the van (where all the actual stuff happened) we surmised that we were living in a simulation created by a ten-year-old named Benny, who had created us on a lark. Case in point – we had asked Paul to find a tree log to play on stage, since our second album featured percussion that included the sound of logs being struck by axes and other objects. He did so with gusto, locating not just any old piece of wood, but a very strong and gnarly piece of yew. Surely Benny was behind this.
Sacred to the Celts, venerated in Christian traditions, called the world tree Yggdrasil in Norse mythology, we became obsessed with taxus baccata, visiting yew groves and churchyards across Britain, engaging with (manifested as a worship ritual involving deep meditation, musical farting, and general obscenities) ancient yew-god avatars in some strange restorative communion during our gruelling tours (we would block book tours of 30-60 shows, performing once, sometimes twice a day, with occasional days of respite). We were totally burned-out and these yew baths were magical balms for our weary souls.
And you thought this was about music.
Let me jump forward 10 years to Touki, my project with Senegalese artist Amadou Diagne and London producer Oscar Cainer. We had put the project together in 2019, securing Arts Council funding to record an album as a duo at Real World Studios. All our tour dates and album release were planned for March 2020, which imploded with the Covid-19 pandemic. We picked up steam again the following year and got some more funding to record, this time with American cellist and violinist Duncan Wickel, who joined us on the road for a couple of U.K. tours. We then joined forces with Marius Pibarot for a couple of years, who was an excellent addition to the group. Earlier this year, however, Marius wasn’t available to tour with us so we called someone we all knew well. Michael Ward-Bergeman.
Did we even call him, or did Benny make him appear out of thin air? All I know is the laughing gods were back. We were no longer just playing music but visiting ancient standing stones and cairns in remote Scotland at sunrise. Early in the tour we were joined by Little John, a clown puppet sidekick who’s accent and intonation sounds eerily like Michael’s Long Island accent in falsetto. And, always, the pairing of the numinous and the flatulent, an Ancient Monolith – High Street Curry Shop negotiation, with awe being expressed by mouths and sphincters alike.
And you thought this was about music.
But I digress. ‘Normal’ gigs did occur and are projected to continue to happen in my career. I’ve been teaching in music camps around the US and in France, and recorded video lessons for Stefan Grossman’s Guitar Workshop. I released a bunch of solo records, and performed with numerous artists over the years, playing festival stages, theatres, music camps, clubs, pubs, cafés-concerts, village halls, churches, hospitals, prisons, schools, museums…in Europe, North America, Ethiopia.
Ah Ethiopia. Another inflection point. I spent three years there (2013-16) with my wife holding down a ‘real’ job. Learned many of the Ethiopian modes, assisted on rugged and totally manic field recording trips through the highlands, held a weekly gig at Mulatu Astatke’s jazz club, hopped down to Kenya to study with omutibo guitarists, and generally had my mind slowly blown to bits. I miss it all terribly, and getting into it more than this almost seems pointless, at least until I write my memoirs.
These experiences brought me to some realization that going back to school to study ethnomusicology might be promising for my quest. As I write this, I’m sitting in Takoma Park, Maryland and commuting everyday to the University of Maryland – College Park to sit in graduate seminars and teach undergraduates a course on World Music & Identity (this time mainly sans instrument). A new chapter, in my ‘home’ country, which now feels oddly like an alien planet.
As for where I’m headed … who knows? If the music vibrating from within me can help people in various ways, then that’s probably good enough for me. If I can be a good dad to my kids and a decent husband, that’s probably good enough too. A recent conversation with Michael in which he stated he still ‘has no idea what is going on,’ made me think that this is what drew us together in the first place. Alongside him, Oscar, Paul, Amadou and all my other compagnons de route the hidden (and sometimes not so hidden) quest somehow seems to be an exaltation in this very unknowing. Perhaps it feels like the only real, honest thing anyone can say about anything.
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