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We did the first concert tonight, and I’m too exhausted to blog about it. But here’s (most of)  the schedule: 

10/10 – Mahaiwe Theater, Great Barrington, MA
10/11 –Narrows Arts Center, Fall River, MA
10/12 – Acoustic Café, Bridgeport, CT
10/13 – Sullivan Hall, NYC
10/14 – IOTA, Washington, DC
10/15 – The Grey Eagle, Asheville, NC
10/16 – The Handle Bar, Greenville, SC
10/17 – Local 506, Chapel Hill, NC
10/18 – Smith’s Olde Bar (Atlanta Room), Atlanta, GA
10/ 19 – The Basement, Nashville, TN
10/20 – Tractor Tavern, Seattle, WA
10/21 – White Eagle Pub, Portland, OR
10/22 – Axe and Fiddle, Cottage Grove, OR
10/23 – Somewhere in CA, TBA
10/24 – Starry Plough, Berkeley, CA
10/25 – Somewhere in CA, TBA
10/ 26 – Hotel Café, Los Angeles, CA

For updates, check www.fodfest.org.

And if you live in one of those cities, get yourself there! It’s free, and you won’t be wasting your time.

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A little interruption in the teaching series here. Check back later in the week — well, more likely next week — for more articles on artists who teach. This weekend, we’ve got some other stuff taking center stage — namely, us. David and I are playing at Sheffield’s Dewey hall on Saturday night. And NEXT week, we’re playing at FOD Fest (see below). So for the next couple of days, I’ll be talking about rehearsing and performing and jamming.  In between rehearsing and performing and jamming. And cooking for everyone. And vacuuming. Yup, it’s a life full of glamor….

Yesterday, sometime between a morning of writing and an afternoon of teaching, David and I got a call from Todd Mack, who is the motivating force behind the whole FOD Fest tour. http://createworklive.com/2008/09/24/fod-fest/

Todd was going to be on our local radio station, WBCR, www.BerkshireRadio.org, promoting the first concert in the 14-city 17-day tour. Could we come and join him? 

FOD Fest honors the memory of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter (and former Berkshire County resident and musician) who was killed by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002. The tour kicks off here in Great Barrington. MA, at the gorgeous Mahaiwe Theatre  on October 10. Todd was looking for musicians to play along with him during the radio interview, to deomonstrate what we’ll be doing at the concert.  So we showed our last students out the door, threw the piano and guitar and resonator and Tahitian ukelele into the car, and headed over to WBCR’s new digs.

Okay, so let me be clear about how FOD Fest works.

A whole bunch of musicians who have never met before, let alone ever heard each other’s songs, meet on stage. Mostly it’s songwriters doing original material, although a few people choose to do covers. Anyway, they take turns playing their songs, while the rest of the musicians back them up, add fills and leads, or just sit and listen. 

Soooooo….. how do you play along with a song where a) you have no sheet music or charts and b) you’ve never even HEARD the song before? 

OK, I’m going to reveal some secrets here: Sometimes it isn’t all that hard. Here’s why: Songs very often (although certainly not always) follow formulas or fall into predictable patterns. So, for example, your basic country tune is pretty much going to have the same three chords in it, and after playing a thousand country tunes, musicians learn to hear which of those three goes where. Blues is another predictable form: There are some variations, but if someone says “This is a blues in E,”  you’ve got enough information to jam all night. In other musical forms, the same patterns simply repeat in the song over and over again. Dylan’s “You Ain’t Goimg Nowhere” is an example. So is pretty much any song with a “stray cat” walking bass line. One of the most timeworn chord progressions is the one you’ll find in “Heart and Soul” (that’s the duet you may have banged out on the piano back in fourth grade). “Heart and Soul” is (mostly) the same is “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” which is the same as “Today While the Blossoms Still Cling to the Vine” which is the same as  a thousand other songs.

But sometimes playing along without a chord sheet (read: safety net) IS hard. It can be especially tricky when you’re  dealing with singer-songwriters who are pretty accomplished musicians — but who want to throw their whole bag of tricks into every song they write. That’s when you find yourself scrambling to change keys because a tune that was happily sitting in C Major has morphed into F sharp minor, and believe me, you don’t want to be pounding out a C chord when that happens.

Sometimes you have no idea what’s going to happen, like when someone gets up and says “I don’t know what key this is in….maybe A? Oh wait,  I’ve got the capo on… so maybe it’s in B? Well…. I don’t know, but there’s a lot of chords in it. It goes sorta like this… You all play along. ”  And then they play a sequence of chords that would have left Bach scratching his head.  

Fortunately, tonight fell much more into category A.  There were four of us there: In addition to Todd, David, and me, Seth Rogovoy, the editor of our regional magazine, Berkshire Living (www.BerkshireLiving.com) brought his guitar. Seth’s passion is music– he writes about it in the magazine – and he also plays guitar and sings. I’ve played with Todd before a few times, and of course, I know David’s songs. But I didn’t know what Seth would be pulling out of his hat.  

Before we played, Todd spent some time talking about Daniel Pearl, who was as talented a musician as he was a reporter.  (You can read about him at  http://www..danielpearl.org/about_us/danielpearl_bio.html)  The inspiration behind FOD Fest comes from Danny’s love of music, and the whole idea that music is a way for people to communicate from the heart: It brings people together. And at FOD Fest, boy, does it ever.

In between parts of the interview, we played a bit: Todd chose a song I’d heard a couple of times before, and invited us to join in,  but I got my signals crossed and started in the wrong key. Once I found my way to E flat, all was well, but I, ooh, baby, talk about some interesting dissonance there at the beginning. Seth did the Dylan song “I Shall be Released,” which is fortunately a Category A song (repeating chord pattern). And David led all of us in one of his songs, “Man in Black Blues,” which you can hear at David’s Sound Clicks page. http://www.soundclick.com/bands/default.cfm?bandID=306627 (Another Category A song, since it’s a blues). And we ended with “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” (repeating chords).

I think we gave our listeners a bit of a taste of what is to come next week, wrong notes and all. Except next week, we’re playing in a 675-seat hall, and something like 20 – 30 musicians are expected. Plus, I’m quite sure that some of the songs are going to be in the less formulaic category.

It’s playing without a safety net. It’s music from the heart. It’s totally unpredictable. It’s a lot of fun. And you can come and share in it. David and I will only be at the Great Barrington Show, but FOD Fest’s schedule is taking it to fourteen East and West Coast Cities: Check the schedule at http://fodfest.org/Home.html.

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