I've been negligent posting here at Nunal, but having the opportunity to play old time tunes for appreciative audiences in and around Seoul made it a necessary and worthwhile sacrifice.
We played a variety of stuff--many fiddle tunes of course, plus a bunch of old time songs, a couple of novelty numbers, a couple of gospel songs. We each did a solo section concentrating on technique and different styles. Everything went over really well.
Our first show was at the Yellow Handkerchief coffee shop, which ended up being a great venue for music and a fun place to play too. The crowd was unexpectedly big, a good mix of expats and Koreans and a good smattering of my students too.
It was quite a new experience to see a large banner with the band name (Five Points Serenaders), Korean information about the concert series, and the embassy logo. I am supposed to be getting the banner. Here is one of the posters the embassy printed, on the elevator on the way up. (unlike the Sogang poster, no harpsichords here)
Here we are playing at the Yellow Towel.
That is our translator over on the right, whose name is Chi Young Kim. In the Korean style, you say the surname first, which means her name is actually Kim Chi.
She was a great translator, unnflappable and very friendly. It was a lot of fun watching it all unfold.
This is looking over my shoulder out into the Yellow Handkerchief. The coffee shop has these large lilly pads that come from the floor with the ceiling made into a bunch of leaves as lights. Quite futuristic in a way.
(by the way, the pictures here were all taken by my buddy Slim Jim Mathews, who came out to Seoul to come along with us and ended up taking a ton of great pictures.)
We had the next day off and went sightseeing after a night of moving squid and soju (Nunal 0, Soju 1 in this instance) and then a show at Sogang. This was in a huge auditorium. The crowd of about 50, which had Koreans, Dutch, Eastern Europeans, and even a few displaced Texans happy to hear some Southern music, was not the gangbuster audience the large hall demanded, but it was a really good sounding show.
The next night was the one I was most excited about, and it turned out wonderfully. We were taken out to Yeojoo University in Gyeonggi Province to play for the music students, about 150-175 of whom showed up. The students are all studying to be session or professional musicians, so it was a great bunch to play music for. Lively and a lot of fun. We played in nice hall with a good sound system and a huge banner behind us as well.
Here are Fiddlin Chuck and Todd playing at the show.
The audience was right there next to the stage too, so even though it was a reasonably large crowd it still had a good intimate vibe.
The best part was at the end of the show when a student asked about the kind of dancing done to old time music. I invited her to grab a partner and come down to dance, which she did by grabbing her professor who set the whole thing up. We cleared the stage and filled it with dancers and had a quick impromptu square dance, it was a lot of fun. This was my first experience calling with Kim Chi translating each call, which went remarkably well and bode well for the following afternoon. She is a tap dancer, so she had a good sense of rhythm with the calls.
After we answered a few more questions about the banjo (which seems to have been a total novelty to everybody and so that was a lot of fun) we went off to a huge traditional Korean spread at a restaurant set, bizarrely, into the middle of a field. That area is famous for a particular kind of rice and that was the central dish. I would have stayed and kept eating all night but we eventually had to leave.
The next day was Friday and amazingly the end of the whole run. We played an afternoon show at the US Embassy Information Resource Center for a crowd of about 80. The whole thing was filmed and recorded by the Embassy and supposed to be streamed online sometime soon and then will be posted here.
The wild thing about that audience besides the fact that it was in Seoul was that the US Ambassador Alexander Vershbow was there. I was quite happy to have the opportunity to play some old time music for an ambassador, sure to be the only time that will happen in my life!
In the evening we played a dance and I called. It was a lot of fun and everybody really learned how to dance well by the end. It was slightly chaotic at the very start, largely because I a bit unclear in introducing some basic concepts clearly, but that all got straightened our quickly. There were a lot of people there and everybody picked up the calls and moves quickly, even started doing a dance like "Wild Goose Chase" without it being called all of the time. I was impressed. Kim Chi was great as a Korean caller too.
I don't yet have any pictures from those Friday shows to post at this point, but will when I get them.
The whole experience of doing these shows in Seoul was surreal and a lot of fun and I was grateful to have it.
Hopefully we turned one some people to what really should be regarded as one of America's greatest cultural exports: old time music and dance. I was not surprised, but still chagrined, to learn that the State Department has a longstanding policy of bringing jazz musicians around the world to highlight American culture, but not traditional American musicians. Maybe this will signal a change in emphasis.
We played a variety of stuff--many fiddle tunes of course, plus a bunch of old time songs, a couple of novelty numbers, a couple of gospel songs. We each did a solo section concentrating on technique and different styles. Everything went over really well.
Our first show was at the Yellow Handkerchief coffee shop, which ended up being a great venue for music and a fun place to play too. The crowd was unexpectedly big, a good mix of expats and Koreans and a good smattering of my students too.
It was quite a new experience to see a large banner with the band name (Five Points Serenaders), Korean information about the concert series, and the embassy logo. I am supposed to be getting the banner. Here is one of the posters the embassy printed, on the elevator on the way up. (unlike the Sogang poster, no harpsichords here)
Here we are playing at the Yellow Towel.
That is our translator over on the right, whose name is Chi Young Kim. In the Korean style, you say the surname first, which means her name is actually Kim Chi.
She was a great translator, unnflappable and very friendly. It was a lot of fun watching it all unfold.
This is looking over my shoulder out into the Yellow Handkerchief. The coffee shop has these large lilly pads that come from the floor with the ceiling made into a bunch of leaves as lights. Quite futuristic in a way.
(by the way, the pictures here were all taken by my buddy Slim Jim Mathews, who came out to Seoul to come along with us and ended up taking a ton of great pictures.)
We had the next day off and went sightseeing after a night of moving squid and soju (Nunal 0, Soju 1 in this instance) and then a show at Sogang. This was in a huge auditorium. The crowd of about 50, which had Koreans, Dutch, Eastern Europeans, and even a few displaced Texans happy to hear some Southern music, was not the gangbuster audience the large hall demanded, but it was a really good sounding show.
The next night was the one I was most excited about, and it turned out wonderfully. We were taken out to Yeojoo University in Gyeonggi Province to play for the music students, about 150-175 of whom showed up. The students are all studying to be session or professional musicians, so it was a great bunch to play music for. Lively and a lot of fun. We played in nice hall with a good sound system and a huge banner behind us as well.
Here are Fiddlin Chuck and Todd playing at the show.
The audience was right there next to the stage too, so even though it was a reasonably large crowd it still had a good intimate vibe.
The best part was at the end of the show when a student asked about the kind of dancing done to old time music. I invited her to grab a partner and come down to dance, which she did by grabbing her professor who set the whole thing up. We cleared the stage and filled it with dancers and had a quick impromptu square dance, it was a lot of fun. This was my first experience calling with Kim Chi translating each call, which went remarkably well and bode well for the following afternoon. She is a tap dancer, so she had a good sense of rhythm with the calls.
After we answered a few more questions about the banjo (which seems to have been a total novelty to everybody and so that was a lot of fun) we went off to a huge traditional Korean spread at a restaurant set, bizarrely, into the middle of a field. That area is famous for a particular kind of rice and that was the central dish. I would have stayed and kept eating all night but we eventually had to leave.
The next day was Friday and amazingly the end of the whole run. We played an afternoon show at the US Embassy Information Resource Center for a crowd of about 80. The whole thing was filmed and recorded by the Embassy and supposed to be streamed online sometime soon and then will be posted here.
The wild thing about that audience besides the fact that it was in Seoul was that the US Ambassador Alexander Vershbow was there. I was quite happy to have the opportunity to play some old time music for an ambassador, sure to be the only time that will happen in my life!
In the evening we played a dance and I called. It was a lot of fun and everybody really learned how to dance well by the end. It was slightly chaotic at the very start, largely because I a bit unclear in introducing some basic concepts clearly, but that all got straightened our quickly. There were a lot of people there and everybody picked up the calls and moves quickly, even started doing a dance like "Wild Goose Chase" without it being called all of the time. I was impressed. Kim Chi was great as a Korean caller too.
I don't yet have any pictures from those Friday shows to post at this point, but will when I get them.
The whole experience of doing these shows in Seoul was surreal and a lot of fun and I was grateful to have it.
Hopefully we turned one some people to what really should be regarded as one of America's greatest cultural exports: old time music and dance. I was not surprised, but still chagrined, to learn that the State Department has a longstanding policy of bringing jazz musicians around the world to highlight American culture, but not traditional American musicians. Maybe this will signal a change in emphasis.
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