Impressions

Here we are again at The Ark, Xanthe and I in the dark while the stage is brightly lit. We came for Orpheum Bell, but first onstage are the Red Sea Pedestrians. I've heard their CD, and it was ok, it was nothing better or worse than most of the CDs that come through my hands, but I can't match what I heard before I came and what I am seeing onstage. It's hard to know what to expect-maybe plain, upstanding music; you could call them plain, upstanding people by the way their jeans fit, the way banjo player Ira Cohen wears a full-beard like a miner from long ago, the way the two woman are a little careworn and haven't 'done' their hair.

But then they begin to play, and any comparisons I thought I was going to make seem unfair--the music is fast, complicated, modal--maybe eastern European in influence. I want to call their sound steampunk, though Xanthe says steampunk would probably require more organ, or possibly accordian. They have a fiddler, Cori Somers, although I'm tempted to say she's using more classical technique, fancy fingerwork and no folky double-stops. And the clarinet player, Rachel Flanigan-I've heard worse clarinetist who studied for years in college. They mix together a moment of rock drumming with something more folky. Tarantella. Mazurka. A song about Julius Caesar, and Rome. Another about the seances Houdini's wife would hold on Halloween every year after his death. Still another about The Harrison Act, which banned laudenum, this in Ira Cohen's quavery voice. The tunes had humor, balance, talent. It carried you through the mediocre voices--untrained, maybe unused to singing--and the mildly unfocused and unprofessional--disjointed, even--banter between tunes, through to the hand-clapping, foot-stomping end.