Slide, Trina Hamlin, Mulebone, Ronny Cox perform at Manitou Music Festival
From staff reports
The Manitou Music Festival is celebrating its 22nd season of diverse concerts featuring jazz, classical, blues, folk, country, celtic, bluegrass and world music in some of Michigan’s most idyllic settings. The festival showcases regionally and nationally known artists performing in beautiful Glen Arbor.
On Wednesday, Aug. 1 at 8 p.m. the Irish Music Quintet Slide will perform outdoors at the Studio Stage, located behind Lake Street Studios in Glen Arbor. The rain location is the Glen Arbor Town Hall.
Slide comes direct from Ireland to Traverse City and the quintet features Daire Bracken on fiddle, guitar; Aogan Lynch on concertina, whistle; Mick Rowland on bouzouki, mandolin; Stephen Doherty-flute, keyboard, bodhran; and Dave Curley on vocals, percussion. The Irish Times calls SLIDE “traditional musicians with attitude” and credits the group with bringing drawing room grandeur and high spirits together with it’s diverse songs, which range from soulful and sorrowful to contagiously energetic.
Slide formed in 1999 in the southwest Ireland of Bandon. It was here that the organizers of a local festival invited three Dublin based musicians to play sessions in various pubs over the weekend. Such was the inherent connection of musical approach, style and mindset that the idea of forming some kind of group was borne. A month later, and after much thought and consideration the three-piece became four as the cozy confines of a basement in Monkstown was turned from sitting room to rehearsal room. Following months of forging individual minds into one collective unit, Aogan, Daire, Eamonn and Mick felt the time was right to try out their new sound. On a cold December night “The Cobblestone”, was shaken from rock to rafter, a gig that has since become known as “The Wobble in The Cobble”.
Soon afterwards Slide made their first release with “The Flying Pig” which bought them to many of the main stages and festivals at home and abroad; from the National Concert Hall to the Cambridge Festival, England and from the headline act of the German Folk Festival Tour to the Inter Celtic Festival of L’Orient, France, thus lending a sense of the inevitable to their winning of “The Best Newcomers” award by Irish Music Magazine in 2001.
In the years that followed Slide continued to grow and develop. Unable to rid themselves of a feeling that the tradition was beginning to repeat itself, together with a keen desire for self exploration and collective innovation, a second album “Harmonic Motion” was recorded. No strangers to picking up awards for individual musicianship, Slide have continued in a similar vein as a band with the recent winning of the “Young Musicwide Award 2011”, selected from all competing young bands by a panel of judges including Donal Lunny.
Slide is looking forward to revealing the latest chapter of one of the most interesting Irish traditional bands of modern times.
On Sunday, Aug. 5 at 8 p.m. the singer/songwriter Trina Hamlin will perform, followed by the blues duo Mulebone outdoors at the Studio Stage.
Both Hamlin and Mulebone, the duo of Hugh Pool and John Ragusa, are familiar to Manitou Music Festival audiences, and it is a special treat to have both perform on the same bill. Trina, a master of the blues harmonica, is an inspired songwriter and guitarist; while Mulbone is without question one of the most straight-ahead, hard-driving blues bands that you will meet anywhere, and they do it all with guitar, stomp-board, flutes and conch.
Hamlin combines gentle understanding with raw emotion in a way that is, quite simply, captivating from the first note. With a rich, powerful voice, Hamlin reveals a rare confluence of Midwestern innocence, contemplative focus, and raw passion while adding a disarmingly sharp wit in her stage banter. She seamlessly moves from guitar to piano with self accompaniment on harmonica leaving many who have seen her wondering what she can’t do. Regarded as one of the best harmonica players around, in her performance Hamlin presents a driving, sensuous rhythm reawakening audiences to the art of the instrument. In the current climate of “sounds like” artists and “heard it before” lyrics, Trina offers an intelligent and refreshing musical experience. Her unique combination of ballads, folk-rock and blues has earned her a steady national following. Trina tours full- time throughout the United States and Europe. Additionally, she is a much sought after harmonica player and percussionist, accompanying numerous nationally recognized singer/songwriters in the studio and live on stage. With unapologetic emotional freedom, Trina’s songs have the unique power to mirror and evoke the obvious and unspoken realities of life and being in love.
Mulebone is a partnership comprised of multi-instrumentalist Ragusa and roots music specialist Pool. The launching pad for their musical expression is traditional blues. Together they have recorded a CD which spent 15 weeks in the Top 100 Albums in America. Along with playing live and TV appearances, they won blues artist of the year at radio stations from Seattle to Red Bank, NJ.
Together in Mulebone, Ragusa and Pool play slide guitar boogies, 1-chord trance riffs a la Howlin Wolf, up-tempo rags of Reverend Gary Davis and country blues of all shapes and colors. Sometimes they play close to the source, almost as if tracing the image, and at other moments, they re- examine the source, float above it to take a new look as if seeing one’s home from a distant land.
John Ragusa plays conch shell, Jews harp, cornet, all manner of flutes, tin whistle, and chimes in on the harmony vocals. He is a member of Beth Nielson Chapman’s group as well as his own John Ragusa outfit, and plays regularly in conjunction with Deepak Chopra’s speaking engagements. Amongst dozens of studio credits are contemporary jazz greats: Joe Taylor, Jeremy Wall and world music icon Tom Ze. Hugh says, “One time we were in Lexington, Kentucky sitting at an outdoor cafe and John played me a bunch of melodies sliding a straw up and down in a cup of ice water” … you get the drift.
Hugh Pool plays guitars, harmonica, boot board and sings, all with a mouth full of whiskey and a giant heart. He has played his brand of blues in clubs and at festivals from Jakarta to North Cape, Norway; From Vienna to Ottawa and has been critically lauded by the New York Times, New York Press, Village Voice, Pittsburgh Press, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Blues Revue Magazine … the list goes on. He is also a noted producer who has worked on hundreds of records at his Williamsburg, Brooklyn studio, Excello, working with musicians such as Taj Mahal, Debbie Harry, and Marah to name a few.
On Wednesday, Aug. 8 at 8 p.m. the Country/Folk musician Ronny Cox will perform with his trio outdoors at the Studio Stage.
Cox is an artist who wears a variety of hats –— from actor to musician to family man –– but if there is one common thread that pulls it all together it’s the “real” person that wears each hat and the warmth his craft brings to anyone exposed to his many talents. His musical style is eclectic and he confesses that he has no set-in-stone criteria for picking or writing songs. Ronny grew up in New Mexico listening to Texas Swing tunes, but then played rock & roll in high school, and was eventually drawn to folk music after graduating from college.
Born in Cloudcroft, New Mexico, he’s the son of Lounette (née Rucker) and Bob P. Cox, a carpenter who also worked at a dairy and played guitar for all the local fiddlers when the overhauls were peeled off. Ronny grew up in Portales, New Mexico, and his craft as a singer/songwriter is a testament to his life on the Southwestern desert. The third of five children and a father to two sons of his own, Ronny brings his extraordinarily view of life into a magnetic, likeable, onstage persona.
Ronny’s career that spans over 125 films and television shows, with his first film … his first time acting in front of a camera was as the guitarist in the famous “dueling banjos” scene in the movie Deliverance. His second big film was Bound for Glory, Hal Ashby’s film about Woody Guthrie.
The truth is that Ronny has been writing songs and telling stories for over four decades. Only in the last 10 years has the world seen him evolve from being an “actor who sings” into knowing him as a “singer who happens to have a pretty fair career acting.” “I enjoy all kinds of music and I try to bring that eclectic approach to the music I play”, Ronny says. “I’m interested in weaving a tapestry of songs and stories with an over-all arc that eventually comes together and tells us something about ‘the human condition”. I know that sounds kind of pompous … but that’s what I’m trying to do … and to have a few laughs along the way.”
Says Ronnie, “The truly great thing about music is that it’s like a double-edged sword; songs can be frivolous or sad but they can trigger an almost overwhelming emotion … immediately. What I have found is that if I open up to my audience, they not only accept that, they also help me get through it. It is that sharing … of silliness, or sadness … or mutual understanding that I find to be very compelling. The songs that I write and choose reflect that I pride myself in being able to find great songs and record them, not as covers, but as extensions of what I do as a performer.”
Please visit the Manitou Music Festival’s Website for information and tickets: www.Manitoumusicfestival.com. All Tickets are $15 (Children 18 and under are free). Tickets may be purchased at concert venues or by calling the Glen Arbor Art Association (231) 334-6112 or Lake Street Studios (231) 334-3179. The Manitou Music Festival is a presentation of the Glen Arbor Art Association, a nonprofit (501(c) 3) organization.
