Alan
Jabbour Visits Providence Nov 2, 2005
Alan Jabbour
has been visiting for a few days at Brown University's Music Department
- this visit was instigated and organized by Brown Graduate student
James Ruchala with the support of Professor Jeff Titon -- thanks are
certainly due to James for arranging the visit and for generously sharing
Alan with the community in a public lecture, workshop and concert. I've
been told that about 50 people attended the afternoon lecture, and when
I attended the workshop it was full, mostly with enthusiastic Brown
students. The concert was also well attended; to my knowledge, at least
20 fiddlers were in the concert audience, from beginners to long-time
fiddlers to symphony level violinists.
At heart,
Alan is not a virtuoso fiddler in the mold of a Bruce Molsky, Natalie
McMaster or Mark O'Connor, and the concert had only one piece - Mony
Musk -- which could in any sense be seen as a tour de force. Most of
the tunes Alan played were just ordinary fiddle tunes such as any good
fiddler would play, yet the audience listened with rapt attention. There
were clearly many to whom tunes such as Over the Waterfall, Dinah, Ebenezer
or Texas were carrying a profound extra level of meaning when coming
from this revered figure. Without him, these tunes, and many others
widely played such as Kitchen Girl, Frosty Morning, Quince Dillon's
High D, Santa Anna's Retreat, Shoes and Stockings, etc would be only
names in an old book, or not even that. Watching and hearing him was
not just listening to a good fiddler, it was being immersed in the most
authentic fiddle sound that exists. I glanced around the hall and saw
several of the fiddlers consciously or unconsciously bowing along with
him as he ran through the tunes.... it was sipping at the true vine.
Typical of Alan, he was accompanied in the concert by two young students,
Charlie Hunter and Scott Linford, who very attentively and sensitively
supported him with banjo and guitar.
Alan's
knowledge of tunes and the history of fiddle playing in America is unmatched,
and he personally owns a great deal of the credit for sparking the nation-wide
revival of interest in old time music that has secured its future from
Seattle to the Crooked Road, from San Diego to Portland. As he describes
it, the history of this music is like the figure of an hourglass --
in the 1960s the once widespread fiddle music of Appalachia was disappearing.
Many tunes were known to only a handful of fiddlers, or in many cases,
only a single fiddler. The 19th century's rich store of tunes had constricted
to a tiny trickle, a few grains of sand hardly managing to pass on.
Then young enthusiasts caught those last few grains and multiplied them
across the nation.
As a grad
student at Duke University in 1965, he met the 81 year old Virginia
fiddler Henry Reed. In the three years before Henry's death Alan recorded
and eagerly learned hundreds of tunes which he then issued on LP from
his Hollow Rock String Band. The tunes resonated in a subconscious chord
for hundreds of young musicians, rapidly spreading far and wide. Almost
immediately they helped inspire the dramatic expansion of this music
as more new bands emerged - Highwoods, Fuzzy Mountain, Deseret, Fennig's,
Sweets Mill and others that explored this tradition and then their own
local fiddle traditions. Heading off to UCLA as a newly fledged professor
in 1968, Alan found that his album had preceded him - Topanga Canyon
was already echoing to the sound of Henry Reed's tunes! Alan quickly
did an about-face. Instead of following a routine academic career, he
returned east and joined the staff of the Library of Congress where
for the next thirty years he was a hugely successful advocate for fiddling
and all genres of folk music and crafts. During those years he was able
to meet hundreds of fiddlers from all the American music traditions,
as well as carry on scholarly research into the history of fiddling.
Now retired,
Alan has been travelling widely and has been an artist-instructor at
many fiddle workshops, fiddle camps and festivals around the country,
and he continues to explore the world of traditional fiddling, just
recently releasing a CD with the highly respected northern banjo player
Ken Perlman. He is a wonderful teacher, as many of us in Rhode Island
know from first hand experience. The great sense of humor, warm charm
and profound mastery of the music that he showed at the concert is even
more engaging when you have a chance to spend a few days with him. It's
not just learning tunes - there are lots of good players who can teach
you tunes - but there are very few who can explain exactly what happens
in your right arm to separate that hornpipe from a breakdown, or what
those Scots snaps are doing in the middle of that Ragtime! Often we
listen to the music and suspect that for every bowstroke there is a
reason - almost uniquely, Alan knows the exact reason.
In the
next few years there will probably be many opportunities to hear Alan,
play tunes with him, learn from him. I intend to take advantage of as
many of those as I can.
Matt McConeghy
