Sheffield — The third annual Down County Jump, produced in partnership with Brooklyn’s Jalopy Theatre, promises to be the biggest ever, with even more music from old-time heritage bands that dwell in the spaces between genres. Eleven acts bridging folk, roots, jazz, and global traditions will convene at Race Brook Lodge for a raucous and magical two-day festival on June 13 and 14.
New this year, Friday night will feature three full acts performing in the main Barn space, kicking off with the newly formed Hudson Valley-based Driftwood Chorus. The 30-person polyphonic ensemble, led by renowned Romani vocalist Eva Salina, performs a mountain-village style of singing from the Carpathian Mountains and Eastern Europe. It is a perfect start, says Race Brook Lodge music programmer Alex Harvey, for a festival that is trying to connect to community and heritage. “The way in which the polyphonies work, the types of sonic textures of the intervals that they sing in that part of the world,” he continued, “really evoke some of the natural sounds in the mountains. You get a real feeling of crickets, or running water, and that can be very transportive for an audience who’s not heard that type of singing before.”
Harvey’s own group, the Berkshire-based trio Flophouse Follies, will play again Friday, invoking the mischief of vaudeville and parlor songs of the ragtime era.
Then, they will sweep away the chairs, said Harvey, for Jesse Lége, whom he calls “a celebrated elder in the world of Cajun music and a very primal example of Acadian singing.” Harvey marvels that within Lége’s festive dance music sound, “you can also hear the pain of the story of the Acadian forced migration from Cape Breton, the story of where Cajun music and the French Acadians came from and why they ended up in Louisiana.” As Cajun music moves farther away from that, “the pain gets slightly dulled, and you can’t hear the raw quality of it in the same way,” said Harvey, but Lége, who speaks Cajun, represents old-school Cajun musicians “who still carry with them some of the original feeling.”
Saturday will see several repeat performers from previous years, which Harvey feels creates some continuity and helps define the tone of the festival. In addition to The Lucky 5, the Hudson Valley-based favorite playing early vintage jazz, Moonshine Holler returns, led by Paula Bradley, whom Harvey calls “a torchbearer of old-time music in our area.” The popular Kingston, N.Y.-based Pulso de Barro returns with their “strong, prominent energy” for a dance set based in Latin American folk traditions.
Slowey and the Boats also return with their blend of, as Harvey describes, a niche vernacular style of Hawaiian steel guitar with Western swing from the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. But given their steel player’s boundless energy, repertoire, and propensity to spearhead the end-of-night jam sessions, this year they will play after the rugs have been rolled up for dancing. “So it’ll be a slightly different energy in terms of the audience relationship,” said Harvey.
Saturday’s headliner, and perhaps one reason the festival is on its way to selling out, is the configuration of three renowned roots and bluegrass pioneers: Tony Trischka, Bruce Molsky, and Michael Daves. Harvey loves when these Grammy Award nominees come together, as they combine the best of the old-time and bluegrass ends of the string music spectrum for a truly integrative, wide range of fiddle music. Molsky occupies more the old-time, traditional space. “He’s a really amazing preservationist of a lot of Appalachian-style songs and fiddle styles.” Sometimes the traditional sort of “hot, athletic, instrumental bluegrass” can be lacking in soulfulness, said Harvey.
Trischka has been pushing the boundaries of bluegrass since the 1970s on his chosen instrument, the five-string banjo, which, he said, “found me; I had no choice in the matter.” When he met Daves, another bluegrass innovator, in Brooklyn around 2010, he was bummed, he recounted to The Berkshire Edge. “I could’ve been playing music with you all these years, and I’m just discovering you!” Of the trio of him, Molsky, and Daves, he said, “We don’t do it very often, so it’s very special.”
Two duos will play before them on Saturday. Matt Schreiber was a Balkan-style accordionist; his good friend Ben Russell was, explained Harvey, a neoclassical Appalachian-influenced kind of violin player. Hinterlands is “greater than the sum of their parts; it’s improvisational and structured, sometimes I call it trans-folk; I don’t really know exactly what to call it.” Harvey is awed by “the way they listen to each other … you get to see what it’s like when two musicians are listening that fully to each other.”
The other duo is Tamar Korn and Mamie Minch. Harvey describes the tension between Korn’s “very classic ‘20s, ‘30s radio voice and a hyperenergetic, awake, modern sensibility. She’s very subversive, and performative, and funny,” he continued, “and Mamie is this amazing counterpoint; she’s got this guttural barrelhouse voice.” He also praised Minch’s instrument repair shop, the Brooklyn Lutherie. “There aren’t a lot of women in the industry. She and [her business partner] Chloe just exploded on the scene of vintage instruments. Nobody knows as much about that stuff as she does.”
Korn, a celebrated jazz vocalist in New York, recounted to The Berkshire Edge the first time she encountered Minch, when Korn was busking in Williamsburg around 2007. Korn was having trouble singing “Bill Bailey” for its anti-feminist sentiments, and her clarinet player suggested she sing it into a payphone, a moment that Minch happened to catch and remember when they later met and collaborated through the Jalopy Theatre.
They do a mixture of early- to mid-20th-century folk, country, and ragtime songs, and some of Minch’s originals, the through line, said Korn, being Minch’s instrumentation. “She plays the hell out of her guitar.” Another through line that draws her into this music, Korn said, is “how [her] body feels in the different rhythmic grooves of these songs.” Much of it, she says, “is old dance music, so there’s a lot of buoyancy. I love a languid ballad, but there’s something about a lot of traditional music that gives a sort of drive and momentum to the body that feels soothing to me.”
Korn played the opening night two years ago and improvised the next day with various musicians she knew slightly. Festivals like this, she said, provide a “sense of camaraderie and a place where you have this kind of spiritual element, where you can all be present together, but be absorbed into this thing that’s beyond our analytical realms, and we can just kind of bounce and feel resonance and vibration, and it’s a thing that helps us feel OK and good.”
The festival will end with a brass band, Dingonek, which Harvey describes as a “global brass group,” a wild fusion of elements of African, South American, and Balkan traditions as well as some New Orleans influence. “It’s very danceable and people are going to love it.” Tickets are moving fast and are available on Race Brook Lodge’s website.
