A pairing of two bands steeped in traditional music — Cécilia and the Ebony Hillbillies — showed the ways in which having deep roots in a particular musical style can lead to grounded explorations elsewhere, while also getting audiences out of their chairs and onto their dancing feet, during a Sunday afternoon concert on the Green as part of the opening weekend of Arts & Ideas.
Cécilia — Timi Turmel on accordion, Erin Leahy on keyboard, and Louis Schryer on fiddle — began with a flourish from Leahy (and a kick drum) and a burst of melody from Turmel, while Schryer stayed aloft for a time before diving into the melody with Turmel.
Right out of the gate, the band established itself as thoroughly conversant in traditional Celtic and Quebecois music, as they slipped from tune to tune, from tempo to tempo, and from rhythm to rhythm with complete fluidity. On their opening numbers, Turmel and Schryer were a powerhouse duo in carrying the tunes, while Leahy was the rest of the band, providing propulsion, countermelodies, and shifting harmonies and textures.
Soon into the set, however, Leahy remarked that she had grown up in a musical family and her piano playing was informed by jazz and ragtime, a style she promptly deployed with aplomb. Turmel explained that the band had called its first album Accent because it drew from many disparate sources. “We have many accents for you tonight,” he said.
Tasty detours were taken by all three members, into swing, into classical music, and into French song. The musicians showed how elements of all of them could be combined, with deep musicianship and joy in playing; throughout the show, not a minute went by in which the band members didn’t smile at one another while playing.
But in time the band returned to what Schryer called “kitchen-style playing” — the traditional dance music that was their stock in trade. On those tunes, Cécelia could often sound like a much bigger band, thanks to clever arrangements and some quietly virtuosic playing. In time, the relentless dance music was too much for some to sit still to, and a small dance floor opened up in the space in front of the stage.
“Your dancing is lovely,” said Schryer. “We love to see it.” It was the only missing ingredient in the music, and its inclusion brought the set to a lifted close.
The Ebony Hillbillies.
The Ebony Hillbillies, fronted by singer Gloria Thomas Gassaway, began with a blessing of the stage and of the performers. “We do our blessing to our ancestors,” Gassaway explained. “We have to pay respect.” At once her mood and voice changed. “All right! Let’s get this party started.”
And so they did, moving on a swinging rhythmic contraption of two percussionists, a fiddler, two backup musicians who switched among banjos, guitar, and bass, and fellow singer Allanah Salter-Shaker. Early in their set they hit the traditional standard “June Apple,” which was when Gassaway reached out to the audience in no uncertain terms.
“This is dance music,” she yelled, and “I know y’all got some junk in the trunk.” She turned to the side and in front of the audience, demonstrated, to whoops and hollers. It was the instigating moment people needed to get up and dance.
Black musicians playing country has had a high-profile moment this year thanks to Beyoncé’s album Cowboy Carter, but as musician Rhiannon Giddens, founding member of the Black stringband the Carolina Chocolate Drops, has pointed out (among a few others), Black musicians have always been a part of country music.
The historical evidence for the origins of fiddle-banjo music is scanty at best, but It’s reasonable to speculate from what we have that the style was created by Black musicians within the Black community in the 1700s before it entered White culture in the 1800s. Cousins Joe and Odell Thompson were among those who kept the Black fiddle-banjo tradition alive in the 20th century; the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who formed in 2005, learned to play from them.
But bridging that generation gap were the NYC-based Ebony Hillbillies, who started out in the 1990s busking on subway platforms and gradually made it to Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, among many other places. Along the way, they branched out stylistically as well, from fiddle-banjo tunes to hokum, blues, and other adjacent forms. Decades into its career, the band is equally at home in a few different American styles, bringing the same sense of deep rhythm, humor, and engagement to them all.
So Gassaway worked the crowd as few frontpeople do. In one song, the one-line refrain “I’m a dangerous woman” became a reason for Gassaway to leave the stage altogether, wireless mic in hand, to move out across the Green for close to 10 minutes to get as many audience members to sing along and dance with her.
“Are we empowered women?” she shouted from the stage afterward. “Let’s tell the truth and shame together!”
Their sense of swing only deepened with their set. A take on “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho” had an especially deep pocket of rhythm, feeling almost oceanic. But the humor of the hokum blues baked into the band’s DNA was never far before. There was a song about how much better it is to have carnal relations with a man over 350 pounds. Another song with the often repeated line “get my baby out of jail” was sung, down in the audience again, to an actual baby.
Once again a dance floor formed near the stage, and by the end of the set, people were moving to every beat. It was a reminder of the power and strangeness of old American folk music, the stuff lurking in the past of every American genre that has come since. The Ebony Hillbilles brought it roaring into the present.