Sunday, November 23, 2014

Steve Bernstein


New Paltz resident Steve Bernstein is a music teacher and performer with the Bernstein Bard Trio. He teaches chorus and recorder ensemble at Mountain Laurel Waldorf School in New Paltz. He also teaches guitar and mandolin privately and performs as a mandolin / harp duo with me on occasion.


Steve has been playing guitar since he was a teenager. His brother brought a guitar home from college and left it out on the couch for anyone to play. Steve played it and took to it. His brother left his guitar for Steve to play and later bought Steve his own guitar for his birthday. Like many of the musicians I have interviewed, he mostly taught himself how to play. He learned to transcribe music from records to create arrangements for his students to play. He has arranged a four-part tunebook of Celtic Music and original compositions for recorder, which is offered through Waldorf Publications. He has been playing professionally, mostly with his brother Mark, since they were both in their twenties.

 Steve was in his twenties when he started playing the mandolin. When I asked him how he chose the mandolin, he said he was inspired by the sound of David Grisman and his mandolin. He heard Grisman and Jerry Garcia together and wanted to play mandolin in that blue-grass, old timey way. The sound of the mandolin added a different timbre to the music and complimented the other guitars in his band.

 Steve spoke a little about why he loves to play music. He spoke of the moments of magic that are created when musicians come together to play. These moments can be reached through improvisation. Steve describes a moment on The Bernstein Bard Trio's CD during Scarborough Fair], when the trio starts to improvise together and a magical moment is created. It's moments like these, he says, that led him to become and sustain him as a musician.



Monday, November 10, 2014

Maeve Gilchrist

I was lucky to catch Maeve Gilchrist at The Falcon in Marlboro, NY last night. She was sitting in with cellist, singer and songwriter Ben Sollee.



Maeve grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland, in a family of musicians. She has been playing the clasarch (celtic harp as we call it here in the States), for twenty years. By the looks of her, she must've started quite young.


For those of you who don't know, the celtic harp is not a shrunken down version of the large elaborate orchestral harps we've seen, but a traditional instrument. This one is made by Thormahlen Harps. This is the Ceili model. Closer examination of the harp reveals fluorocarbon strings which are more practical for changing weather and the touring musician than traditional gut strings.

Her music goes way beyond the whimsy, etherical music commonly associated with harp music. She played this beautiful song last night, as a solo.


Maeve teaches harp at the Berklee College of Music, the school that gave her a full scholarship to attend when she was 17 years old. She studied jazz, merging her "two worlds of folk and improvisation" (http://www.berklee.edu/people/maeve-gilchrist). She lives in Brooklyn, NY. Check out her website here: http://maevegilchristmusic.com/



Thursday, November 6, 2014

Jimmy Giampa



Jimmy Giampa is a percussionist who lives in West Saugerties, NY. I have had the pleasure of playing with Jimmy a couple times at local venues in Woodstock. He is subtle and steady, and knows when to let go and when to reign it in. These are qualities that make, in the author's humble opinion, an excellent drummer.

Jimmy began playing drums when he was a teenager, in the 1950's. He started with pots and pans, he said. He taught himself how to play. His cousin was a jazz drummer and Jimmy would watch him play. He couldn't play much at home, he says, as he lived in a 6-family apartment house in the Bronx. He would lock himself in the closet at school so he could play without being interrupted. Then he "started playing in the park with the latin guys - you gotta learn that clave," he says. From there, he started playing with latin bands in the 1960's.


In the late 60's, Jimmy came upstate with a friend of his who was working on a demo at Karmic Gardians. Jimmy did carpentry work at the studio. This was somewhat of a sister studio to Micheal Jeffries' Electric Ladyland recording studio in NYC. Jeffries was Jimi Hendrix's manager and in 1971, he asked Jimmy to come down to record on Looking Glass's 1971 hit "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl").

Brandy
Jimmy went to the studio, and without having heard the track before, laid down a conga track in a couple takes.

He reflects that he was playing with some hot latin bands in New Jersey and New York at the time and says that the "Brandy" track was easy and tame in comparison with what he had been accustomed to playing.
He toured with Vassar Clements.
His favorite of all the musicians he played with was American folk and bluegrass songwriter and musician (and former West Saugerties resident) John Herald.