Concert Series Turns Goatville Into The Village

It was a night of multitasking in an already multifaceted space this past Saturday, as mActivity — gym by day, and now, thanks to Fernando Pinto and his East Rock Concert Series, concert venue and café by night — hosted Kevin Burt and Dom Flemons in a double feature

Both musicians never seemed to just play one instrument, whether it was Burt’s virtuosic harmonica or Flemons’s quills, bones, or otherwise.

The room was filled with locals, many familiar faces in the East Rock neighborhood, sipping suggested-donation wine or beer, bundled lightly against the harsh November chill and creating a very folky vibe in the room itself. Everyone seemed very excited to see the two musicians. About half the room had been to mActivity for a show before. The other half was in for a treat of transformation.

The front café area of the fitness facility lent itself strikingly well to a coffee shop vibe — something that appealed to Pinto, himself a sometime mActivity gym member and neighbor of the space.

“I saw the monthly parties that they [mActivity] do for their members, and seeing the people talking, and drinking wine, and I thought it would be really great if we had shows here,” Pinto said. That emphasis on community carried through: This felt like a neighborhood venue, as a steady trickle of faces looking in the window demonstrated. The crowd was attentive, tuned in, like one imagines might have been at the Greenwich Village landmark the Gaslight in the ​‘60s. (The music programming is now frequent: Sunday saw a double billing of two more folk singer-songwriters, with many more musicians booked well into the spring.)

The Iowa-based Kevin Burt opened the show, coming off a first place finish at the International Blues Challenge, and he delivered a wall of bluesy sound. It might be easier to view the performance as that of two beings: Burt, and his harmonica. The instrument seemed to have a mind (and lung set) of its own, and operated independently of its player, who crooned with the vocal force of Bill Withers when he wasn’t engaging in peppery banter with the audience. He played a mixture of originals and covers, including a rendering of ​“Eleanor Rigby” that he prefaced with the following note: ​“If the Beatles were born poor and black in Iowa they would have sounded like this.” He ended his set to a standing ovation.

Flemons started his set with a number on harmonica and bones, the first of many musical instrument combinations to be seen through the evening. Flemons, who self-refers as a song interpreter in addition to his moniker as an American songster — player of many types of songs — took the audience on a journey from the Piedmont to the Rio Grande and back, mixing older tunes from the repertoire of the Carolina Chocolate Drops (of which he was a founding member) with many songs from his most recent album, Black Cowboys.

Flemons cares very much about his role as song interpreter: he not only delivered entertaining material, as he said was his priority, but gave it a lot of context, citing, over the course of the show, the real-life Lone Ranger, the role of Pullman porters in the broader African-American diasporic narrative, and for nearly every song, the person who wrote it — often a name (mostly) lost to history.

A native of Phoenix, Ariz., Flemons has been a fan of cowboy music all his life. ​“When I learned that one in four who settled the west were black cowboys, and when I thought about that that isn’t something most of America doesn’t think about or know, that got me started,” he said.

He then took two years to create a ​“comprehensive overview” of the black cowboy tradition, from blues to field songs and beyond. ​“I’ve always tried to put songs as vignettes or soundscapes on my albums,” Flemons said, citing the sheer scope of his most recent record and, in turn, his performance style. Of particular note was his stylistic channeling of Mississippi John Hurt and Elizabeth Cotten in a medley, playing two distinct styles of fingerpicked guitar but tying it all together. One almost felt like one was being guided through a deeply compelling musical history lesson, brought fully to life. It’s no wonder Flemons took a moment to cite the drawings on the gourd of his banjo: there was his family tree and then Sankofa birds, which alluded to the necessity to take the best of the past with you. He certainly does, and it makes for a hell of a show.