Airs from the Rock: From chamber choirs to traditional balladeers, Newfoundland musicians are confidently rooted in local culture - Brief Article

WHAT COMES TO MIND WHEN YOU ENCOUNTER THE WORDS NEWFOUNDLAND MUSIC? FIDDLES AND SPOONS?

Nowadays, you don't often hear the spoons, and the fiddle is as likely to be under the chin of a hot young jazz/rock performer like Danette Eddy as on the shoulder of traditional fiddlers like Kelly Russell and Jim Payne. The Newfoundland music scene is striking for the range and diversity emerging from a small population base -- classical, traditional and modem. At one end of the spectrum is the Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra, based in the capital city, which soldiers on with a mix of amateur and professional players. It outdid itself recently by rising to the virtuosity of Anton Kuerti heroically performing all five of Beethoven's piano concertos over two nights.

The classical repertory is also expressed by Cantus Vocum, a five-year old, twenty-voice chamber choir that blends the traditional, the classical and the religious in its program, ranging from "Danny Boy" or the hauntingly beautiful "Let Me Fish Off Cape St. Mary's" to "Ave Maria" and "Shall We Gather at the River". Last year they toured Europe, singing in St. Paul's and Cologne Cathedral. En route, they paid a visit to Beaumont Hamel, that crucible of death and valour, where the Newfoundland Regiment was slaughtered in the First World War. Cantus Vocum saluted the long-dead soldiers with the "Ode to Newfoundland".

If you discount the ubiquitous country-and-western genre, still to be heard in patches, the dominant historical influence in folk and popular modes is traditional Irish folk music, whether imported directly into Newfoundland or emulated in the local idiom. The big names in the field used to be Figgy Duff and The Irish Descendants, the former more innovative and Newfoundland-oriented, the latter more Irish than the Irish. Nowadays, modern arrangements of traditional melodies, or newly composed tunes in the traditional manner are performed by groups like The Masterless Men, Tickle Harbour, The Ennis Sisters, Kilkenny Krew, Atlantic Union, Shanneyganock, or the delightfully styled Snotty Var (something to do with the sap of fir trees).

Distinguishing between originals and modern reproductions of old themes and melodies is sometimes tricky. The co-writer of "The Rocks of Merasheen" confides that a fisherman older than himself recollected fondly that he remembered his father singing it. Instant antiquity, eh?

On weekends, the bars of George Street and Water Street in downtown St. John's are alive with the sound of music, promulgating traditional music by performers like Jim Payne, Anita Best or Pamela Morgan (formerly with Figgy Duff), and pop/rock, alternative, or hard rock groups called Timber, Punters, Impalas, Sun Driver, Gearbox, Lizband, or Skank. Such bands are doubtless to be found, mutatis mutandis, on the bar and club circuit in most urban centres in Canada. They may make a compact disc or two, but few go national.

Currently, the best-known Newfoundland group in other parts of Canada is Great Big Sea, four young guys delivering folk and Celtic-style music with the brash energy and pumped-up volume of a rock band. On New Year's Eve they played in St. John's. But they are more often to be seen and heard on the road in North America and Europe. More power to them.

A less well-known group nationally is Rawlin's Cross. Stealing a march on Nova Scotia, they appropriate traditional Scottish music. Their program includes numbers like the evocative "Macpherson's Lament", performed to the strains of a bagpipe. But they also execute excitingly aggressive rock pieces with traditional instruments, keeping sentiment in their back pocket. True, their bagpiper hails from Nova Scotia, but it is refreshing for Newfoundland to be importing rather than exporting talent.

Perhaps the most inventive and flamboyant musical phenomenon in Newfoundland is one that would be met with groans by the George Street crowd or camp-followers of Great Big Sea. Emanating from central Newfoundland, Buddy Wasisname and the Other Fellers has for years been one of the most commercially successful groups in the province. Kevin Blackmore, Wayne Chaulk and Ray Johnson sell out anywhere they play.

With a low-tech medley of guitars, banjo, fiddle and accordion, they provide a mix of folk songs, ballads, original satirical numbers and standup comedy routines. Like the great music-hall turn, they combine vulgarity and wit, musicality and buffoonery. On the one hand, they offer touching ballads like "Till Early Morning" or "Sarah", and nostalgic pieces such as "By the Glow of the Kerosene Light", featuring the sweet tenor voice of Ray Johnson.

Conversely, Kevin Blackmore performs inspired comic and satirical numbers like "Salt Beef Junkie", "Gotta Get Me Moose", "Gravel Pit Campers" or "Uncle Ernie and the Pet Gull".

Blackmore performs in a sartorial nightmare of clashing colours and incongruous items of clothing. His facial features can shift in a twitch from the innocent blankness of a choirboy during the sermon to the frantic grimaces of an axe-wielding berserker. His vocal mimicry embraces honking horns, shuddering cars, and a variety of percussion instruments. Standing up to unpardonable abuse, the stentorian voice still comes back fresh and bright for ballad renditions.

Rootedness is the key to Buddy Wasisname and the Other Fellers. Confident enough to be by turns sentimental, outrageous and self-parodying, they both celebrate and satirize a whole culture -- gravel-pit camping and moose-hunting, trouting and out-migration, darts and bingo, salt-trucks and chainsaws, children playing shinny on the ice or catching conners off the wharf. They can do it because it is their culture.

This same rootedness is characteristic of many of the bands named above, as well as innumerable unnamed Newfoundland musicians. They know where they are. They know who we were. And their music is deeply embedded in that confluence of times and cultures.

Gordon Jones is a freelance theatre critic in St. John's.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Performing Arts and Entertainment in Canada
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group