Gillian Grassie

Where’s Gubkin?

// July 14th, 2010 // No Comments » // Cool Stuff, Music, News, Performances, Travel

I spent most of June traveling around Russia teaching kids English through traditional American folk music as a part of the ESL Folk Project. The first of its kind, this project (fully titled “Ramblin’ Across Russia: Accessing Culture and Language Through American Folk Music”) was designed by Matthew Nelson and Brendan Mulvihill while they were living abroad in Vladivostock and Tomsk (respectively), working as English Teaching Assistants at Russian universities through the Fulbright Organization. All together, the “Ramblers” were Jordan Stern from San Francisco, CA (guitar), Brendan Mulvihill from Philadelphia, PA (mandolin), Matthew Nelson from Nelson, Oklahoma (banjo), and myself.

I was ridiculously excited when Brendan invited me to join the Ramblers for this adventure, and we traveled countless miles to crisscross Russia and present our program at five summer camps. The following is a post I wrote for the group’s blog about our experience at the Gubkin camp. There are many more stories, pictures, videos, songs, bios, teaching materials, etc available online at www.eslfolk.com. Enjoy!

WHERE’S GUBKIN?

One of the best things about this trip has been getting to see towns in parts of Russia that tourists don’t typically visit. At the camps, people are often curious and ask us about the other cities we’re traveling to on the ESL Folk Tour. Whenever we run down the itinerary, there’s always one place that gets the same response: “Wait, Gubkin? Where’s that?!”

with Elena, our trusty camp leader

I was excited to check out this city that so few people seem to have heard of, and waited with no small amount of anticipation by the door of our train compartment with the Ramblers and our gear. We arrived in the middle of the night and our “train mom” had urged us to be prepared to get off quickly since the train would only be stopping for 2 minutes at the Gubkin station before pressing on. We grabbed our bags and instruments and were bundled off the train, and my harp and I fell directly into the arms of Elena, our camp coordinator.

harp sandwich

Elena and her family helped us lug our stuff over to the hotel where we were booked in four single rooms for the first few nights – an unexpected luxury after so much time spent cramped in platzkart bunks and squashed under my harp in the backseats of taxis. We were each handed a key with an ornate swan chain and ascended some sparkling stone diaz-style steps to the chimes of a thousand fire alarm bells set off by sportsmen surreptitiously smoking in their rooms. After some refreshing showers, we collapsed into our fluffed pillows for a few hours sleep.

David Fay, Sarah, and the Ramblers in front of the biggest hole I've ever seen

In the morning, we took a walk to explore this mysterious city. It turns out that Gubkin is a relatively young city, founded just seventy years ago, and built around an enormous iron mine – a vast, gaping crater seven kilometers wide that we visited with some guides from the camp. The town is beautifully laid out, with charming neighborhood apartment complexes each with their own playground and lots of trees. There was a neat park with a mining display and statues celebrating the town’s history and mining practices.

Matt plays with a handicap

We reviewed some new songs, got our materials ready for the next day’s teaching, and then prepared ourselves for the U.S.A. vs. Slovenia world cup match by playing pick-up soccer in the school fields with some of the campers. It was a “no parents, no rules” game that involved all sorts of inventive goal keeping and ball stealing.

The Ramblers practice the Camp Rainbow dance routine

The next morning, we were treated with a visit from David Fay from the English Language Office of the American Embassy in Moscow and his lovely sister Sarah (We’ve been tossing around the idea of re-naming our group the David Fay Tribute Band). They joined us for a rousing set of morning performances by the Rainbow Summer Camp teams. After being serenaded by the four camp groups, who had rehearsed songs for us, we opened up our introduction to American Folk Music with some songs of our own.

Jordan & Brendan getting their teach on

I thought that performing live song examples as we talked about their background was an nice way to break up the opening lecture, especially since listening to a long block of talk can be super exhausting for students who are learning English as a second language. The kids  seemed to especially enjoy an experimental mash-up of jigs in E minor that Brendan and I tried out when we were discussing immigrants from the British Isles and their influence on American culture and music.

the opening lecture/concert

After our presentation/concert, Matt played some samples of traditional folk music from around the world and the students had to try and guess what country each song came from. Brendan had the chance to visit Tuva with some other Fulbrighters this year and brought back some incredible music from that region. It’s always funny when the Tuvan throat-singing track comes on during this game, because none of the kids ever guess that this music is actually from their own country! I think it’s great to bring up Russia’s cultural diversity in these English camps, because it lets us shift the focus off of all the questions we get about life in America and remind the campers about how cool and interesting and vast their own nation is!

with new friends

One of the most remarkable highlights of this trip for me has been getting to experience Russian hospitality. It seems that every camp we visit adopts us Ramblers, and this was especially true at Gubkin. When we asked Elena for a recommendation of a local restaurant to grab some dinner, she responded by inviting us over to her house for some homemade okroshka, a traditional Russian cold soup made from chopped vegetables and hard-boiled egg with a broth of kvass – a beverage made (as I understand it) by straining water through dark rye bread and allowing it to ferment slightly. This is one of our favorite refreshing drinks, but I’d never had it in a soup before!

our family dinner

After a mere two days in the hotel, we were also invited to stay in Elena’s sister-in-law’s parents’ house, which was a welcome respite for both our budgets and souls. Turns out that after living in such close quarters for so long, those single hotel rooms were starting to feel pretty lonely! We were thrilled to do some laundry and cook a wonderful “family” meal, which we ate beneath the approving (I hope) gaze of an impressive collection of Russian icons.

Ramblers reacting to some local press

On our last night, we were also invited out to a dacha for some sensationally delicious shashlik (Russian bar-b-q)! We enjoyed the evening sun, homemade pickles, samagon, and – in addition to the scrumptious chicken and pork skewers – some of the best grilled carp I’ve ever tasted; a veritable feast! With Masha, Olya, Nastia, and Elena among the guests, the feeling was of a family reunion cook-out. Brendan wrote an experimental shashlik ballad on a makeshift guitar, and we finished off the night with some more crazy, hybrid ball games.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN3l6UW8UMg&hl=en&fs=1]
The morning came too soon, and with it the time for us to leave for Ufa. Our goodbyes were heartfelt and teary, but we took with us many memories – and some sweet camp T-shirts the campers signed!

The next time someone asks me where Gubkin is, I’ll just point to my heart.

-Gillian

Group shot!

Off The Rails

// June 21st, 2010 // 2 Comments » // Cool Stuff, Music, News, Travel

I’ve spent roughly half of the last month on a train, covering over 15,000 kilometers, from Hong Kong to Gubkin, where I’m now sitting in a hotel room in the South Western corner of Russia. I don’t even know how to begin keeping up with the bizarre and wonderful events that have been blurring each passing day – it’s hard to believe that just a few weeks ago I was climbing The Great Wall of China! I’ll be blogging a separate update about that adventure soon, but for now, here’s an excerpt from a letter I wrote to a friend during the four-day trip from Beijing to Krasnoyarsk on the Transsiberian Railroad. If you’re looking for a good soundtrack to this blog post, try spinning Joni Mitchell’s “Just Like This Train” and “Off The Rails” by the Notwist.

my kupé berth on the transmanchurian K19

Excerpts from a letter written on May 24th, 2010

Today I bought a small container of sour cream, thinking it was yoghurt, and ate about half of it before deciding it couldn’t just be that Russian yogurt is funky in a way not unlike how Greek-style yogurt is funky. This reminded me of the time I was making dinner for my host Ralf and his five year-old son Raphael in Berlin – a nice gnocchi dish with sautéed bacon and mushrooms in what I’d intended to be a cream sauce, only I’d bought some weird soft German cheese thinking it was crème fraîche and the whole thing curdled in the most disgusting way; it tasted fine but looked awful. Poor Raphael, who is a picky eater to begin with, had a meltdown at the kitchen table and refused to eat the stuff. I couldn’t really blame him and felt bad because he got in trouble for the tantrum when it was really my fault. Oh the joys of buying dairy products abroad.

The train is remarkably empty. Perhaps because we’re just a week or two shy of tourist season or perhaps because we’re on the less popular transmanchurian line (people like seeing Mongolia more). It’s a good thing too, since it turns out my harp simply will not fit in any convenient way in a kupé class cabin. When I had the cabin to myself for the first two days, I left the harp out and played it some, but I got a bunkmate on the third day and had to store it up to the bunk above me. This train seems to travel in ¾ time.

The view out the window could be Wyoming. Plains and hills with brown, gold, and green (almost) grasses, a bit marshy in parts, with cows and sheep and goats occasionally grazing in clusters, and ill-maintained barbed-wire fences, tiny outpost towns now and again, and even the odd Russian cowboy or two. They gave me a bit of trouble at the border for bringing my harp, but not too much. The weird thing was they had to switch out all the wheels on the train when we crossed over from China – apparently the tracks are set wider apart in Russia, something to do with World War II.

Lake Baikal

Even though it is the end of May, winter is only just beginning to ease its grip on the land here; lake Baikal was a cobweb of floating ice. There are field fires everywhere, blackening the white trunks of the birch trees. The kind German/South African man in the berth next to me, who lives half of each year in rural Siberia, told me that the Russians light these fires to clear the dead leaves and grasses, since the seasonal shift between Summer and Winter is too short to allow proper decomposition. Sometimes at night the glow of the brush fires can be spectacular, and also disturbing, like how I imagine land might look during War Time.

My bunkmate is a kind-faced Chinese man. He doesn’t speak English and I hardly know any Chinese, so we can’t really talk, but we share our bags of nuts and dried fruit and can manage some basic friendly communication via gesticulations and context. I wonder what it will be like when I get back to the United States and can understand everything that is being said around me – snippits of conversations in the park or on the street. I wonder if it will be overwhelming. Not long now. I’ll be back July 30th.

‘The Train’ included on Lebanon soundtrack, to premier at SXSW

// March 10th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Cool Stuff, Music, News

More cool news: “The Train” was chosen for inclusion on the soundtrack of the indie film Lebanon, PA, which has been selected to premier at SXSW this month!

Check out the trailer, and if you’re going to be in Austin, TX for the festival, stop by the premiere on March 14th.

Mumbai Shows & Press

// February 10th, 2010 // No Comments » // Music, News, Performances, Press

Just wanted to let you know about a couple performances happening this week in Bombay. Both are collaborations with incredibly talented artists.

First up, tonight I’ll be joining Ranjit Barot on stage at Blue Frog.

Friday, I’ll be performing with Indian fusion band Mithaavin as a part of the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival.

(Details on the SHOWS page)

The Bombay Elektrik Project gigs at Cafe Goa got some nice coverage in the blogosphere. Check out what folks had to say at desictritics, indiecision, and the Mumbai Mirror.

Serpentine getting spins across the United States!

// December 22nd, 2009 // No Comments » // Cool Stuff, Music, News, Press

Thanks so much to the following AAA stations for giving Serpentine airtime:

KXCI Tucson AZ
KCMV Breckenridge CO
KDNK Carbondale CO
KVNF Paonia CO
WFIT Melbourne FL
KKCR Hanalei HI
KDEC Decorah IA
WFPK Louisville KY
WMKY Moorehead KY
WTMD Baltimore MD
MPBN Bangor ME
WERU E. Orland ME
WNTI Hackettstown NJ
Indie SF Santa Fe NM
WEXT Albany NY
WDST Woodstock NY
WCBE Columbus OH
WXPN Philadelphia PA (these guys have been backing me for years…Thanks XPN!)
WVIA Scranton PA
WETS Johnson City TN
KFAN Fredericksburg TX
KPFT Houston TX
WNRN Charlottesville VA
WRRW Williamsburg VA

Most of these are public radio stations, which means they operate at least in part via member support. Consider making a (typically tax-deductible) donation to help keep your local station up and running and bringing you independent music.

Thanks and happy holidays! (next up: a blog about Mumbai, finally…)

-Gillian

First German Review!

// November 27th, 2009 // 4 Comments » // Cool Stuff, Music, News, Performances, Travel

Many thanks to Das Consortium, the wonderful Musikkneipe in Hamburg/Harburg who hosted me for my last performance in Germany. It was a totally lovely evening playing for you all and I’m completely blown away by these very kind words from the venue:

“Diese Frau ist wirklich Megaklasse. Die Kombination aus filigran gespielter Harfe zu einer Stimme, die sich mit weltklass Stars vergleichen lässt, und einer Titelauswahl, die einem jeden Zuhörer den Mund vor Staunen offen stehen lässt. Musik zu Versinken in seinen schönsten und/oder auch emotional einfühlsamsten Gedanken. Brillant! Danke.”

Can’t wait until our paths cross again (and I promise I’ll have worked more on my German by then)…

Vielen Dank,

Gillian

Recording by the Black Forest

// October 21st, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Cool Stuff, Music, News, Travel

On Sunday night I returned to Mme Claude in Kreuzberg for their open stage and ran into Dorothea, a fantastic German singer-songwriter fresh out of the Jazz & Rock Schulen Freiburg – a contemporary music conservatory that has a popular exchange program with (and similar curriculum to) the Berklee College of Music in Boston. We got all fired up talking about the independent music scene in Germany and closed the bar at Mme Claude, met up the next night at another open stage, Arcanoa – where Doro wrote a new song upstairs in the smoking room on a borrowed guitar – and by Thursday I found myself rolling South on the highway with my harp for a weekend of recording at a studio in Freiburg where Doro’s been working on her debut EP.

Pippi!

We stayed with some old friends of Doro in this awesome student complex with a big mural of Pippi Longstocking on the front wall and an elaborate squatter camp next door, complete with organized art events, political demonstrations, and its own wash-your-dishes-and-it’s-free “Café,” where I had one of the best cups of Chai in my life (ask me again after India). Across the street was a very modern office building powered entirely by solar panels, which, fittingly, housed a group of dedicated environmental organizations. To say that this university town near the French border is preoccupied with saving the planet is an understatement; Freiburg has become one of the de facto capitals of the international Green movement. Environmental issues dominate the daily news in both print and radio, and the city elected Green Party member Dieter Salomon as their mayor. Bikes rule the streets and a short trip outside the city will lead you into the heart of the Black Forest (think Brothers Grimm).

the patio/balcony. a sign hangs above that reads 'Occupied' in German, and a large banner with a quote from Brecht hangs on the fence

I got to see a bit of the Black Forest in all its winter glory on a drive to a town an hour outside Freiburg where we rehearsed with Doro’s guitarist. As the road climbed up into the mountains we suddenly found ourselves pulling out of the thick clouds into a world of white, snow dusting the conifers and fallow fields and trapezoidal barn roofs. I had the best meal of the trip so far that evening, though it’s hard to say if it was the delicious food or the three bottles of wine or the new friends or the fact that whenever I looked outside I felt like I was living in a fairytale gingerbread land. Before we headed back to Freiburg to lay down some tracks, we took a drive out to see an old castle and stood along the banks of the Rhine River, looking across into the Swiss Alps (don’t worry, Watson, I didn’t cross the border!). The water had that gorgeous glacial glow, a sort of blue-green that seems somehow milky, like frosted sea-glass.

Schwein!

Growing up on a farm, animals –lots of them – have basically surrounded me all my life, and one of the few downers of this year of travel so far has been the critter-withdrawal I’ve been going through. So I was elated when Doro got a phone call from another old friend and asked me if I’d be interested in visiting a little farm nearby that afternoon. I think I was probably even more enthusiastic than the two year-old we were with about seeing the piglets, and the goats, and getting kisses from bulls (seriously, these were the sweetest, gentlest bulls I’ve ever met, a whole pen of affectionate Ferdinands).

the Koes in Normandy weren't into Knufflen, but the bulls in Freiburg were all about the kisses

If anyone can identify exactly what kind of pig this poor, unfortunate-looking dear is, I’d be very curious to know. We found two of these guys in a pen, with curled tusks, a big, bristled back, and kind of squashed, pug-like faces with a serious brow-bone.

poor dear, what are you?

Later that night, we went out to a performance by Lindsey Blount, a jazz singer who came over to Freiburg from the U.S. through the Berklee exchange. If you have a chance to see her perform in the U.S. (Philadelphia, I’m talking to you), you really must. She is a total treat.

doro laying down some piano in the studio

The trip to Freiburg finished with an inspiring day in the studio, tracking accordion, piano, and harp for Doro’s songs. I feel really grateful to have had the opportunity to collaborate with Doro, who writes beautiful, interesting, strong songs with both German and English lyrics. As soon as she finishes mixing down a few of the tracks and posts them online, I’ll put up a link here and you can listen for yourself. It was exhilarating to have the good fortune to meet such a cool artist and be able to take her up on such a wonderfully spontaneous offer – all within the span of a week! Serendipity has been on my side lately, and I hope it sticks around, because one of the most incredible things about the Watson Fellowship is that it has freed me to accept fantastic, last-minute opportunities like this one, and granted me a spirit of flexibility that I’m not sure I’ve ever enjoyed before.

setting up mics for the harp

Berlin has been extraordinary, in part, because, despite a long history, it’s still a very young city in many ways (November 9th will mark only the 20th anniversary since the fall of the Berlin Wall). There is an energy here of constant change and reinvention and opportunity; it’s a very creative atmosphere, and this combined with the fact that it’s still an affordable city to live in lends Berlin a gravitational pull for artists of all sorts. The general consensus is that the arts and music scene in Berlin now is comparable to that of New York City in the 1980s. But there is also a sense here that the moment is fleeting – how long will it be before Berlin’s housing market becomes gentrified and beyond the reach of low-income artists? Do we have five years? Ten? Once a city’s rent climbs past a certain point, the creative arts scene invariably changes; artists become less experimental and collaborative and more competitive, accepting the types of commissions and bookings (and day jobs) that pay the bills. The low-rent factor that helps permit Philadelphia’s music scene to be more community-oriented is one of the reasons I prefer it to New York’s.

But this acknowledgment that Berlin’s creative heyday is probably not indefinite lends its own sense of urgency and earnestness. Doro, and I, and the other artists I’ve met so far agree: it’s exciting to be here, now, at this age, in this moment.

Experimental Music at Mme Claude, Berlin

// October 14th, 2009 // 3 Comments » // Music, Travel

Last Monday I headed out to Kreuzberg to check out the experimental music night at Madame Claude – a small, quirky bar and music venue off of Skalitzer Strasse. When I got to the club, I paid a nominal, three euro entrance fee, got my hand stamped and walked down the stairs into a room that had been decorated so that everything was topsy-turvy, with all sorts of objects stuck to the ceiling and walls to give the appearance that you were in some sort of Alice in Wonderland World where everything was upside down. A row of pots and pans hung upright on the wall behind the bar, along with a backwards clock. Elsewhere in the room there were all sorts of things stuck to the ceiling (bolts? Super-dooper glue?), among them a pair of white high-top sneakers, a coffee table set up with chairs, and a David Bowie record.

pots and pans hanging up behind the bar

I bought a delicious bottled beer at the bar (for under 2 Euros – beat that, Paris!) and followed little black signs with “Live Musik” and arrows printed in red type through the lounge/bar area to a tiny, cobblestoned, blackbox basement of a room where a dark-haired, serious woman sat at a table, lit by a single old-fashioned lamp. She was fiddling with two Macs (a laptop and a desktop), a keyboard, and a few other pieces of equipment, making soundscapes of pulsations and fuzz – like deep space radio static, or a pack of hornets at the end of the world. I kept waiting for her to add in other sound elements, but she did so very rarely; a snip-it of a French woman’s voice announcing at the train station, then nothing for at least ten minutes, then an Asian flute, some chanting.

Emmanuelle Gibello performing her electronic soundscapes at Mme Claude's

I’d been exposed to music like this before, during an electro-acoustic composition workshop at the Edinburgh International Harp Festival back in 2001, but the notion of it as a live performance art was new to me. I kept looking around at the other audience members to try and find some cues for how to go about appreciating this sort of performance. Some seemed as baffled as me, our eyes catching across the room. They looked down quickly with embarrassment while others flashed tentative smiles, hoping for someone else to confirm their assessment that “this is really weird.” The wandering eye contact acted as a catalyst for a mass exodus of sorts from the room – people left in groups of two over five minutes.

Listen to \"Bleu\" by Emmanuelle Gibello

But others sat on the floor with their heads between their knees, reverent, or perhaps seasick. This is how I felt – the latter – as though the sound waves reverberating against the fluid in my eardrum were enough to give me motion sickness. Maybe it was. Still, this was not violent sound in the way of some music. I watched one young man in a checkered flannel shirt fold his coat on an overturned wastebasket – a recently vacated seat – and lay his head down on his arms. Another guy in a bright green sweatshirt under a sports coat leaned back in his chair with his head against the wall and seemed to fall asleep. One young man left the room quickly, as though he too was overwhelmed and seasick. In his haste, he knocked my foot quite hard from where it rested, crossed over my knee. He didn’t pause to notice the sudden contact. Others filtered in and took his space.

live musik

I remembered the time a man passed out at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. From the balcony, I saw him slump in his suit in the center of the fifth row during an aching, slow movement (I wish very much I could remember the piece). The woman beside him called his name a few times, each repetition growing in volume and panic, until she cried out for somebody to please, call a doctor! The pomp and circumstance of the classical music world was, however, so ingrained in tradition that neither the orchestra nor the audience was quite sure what to do. The notion of interrupting a performance of the Philadelphia Orchestra was such a taboo that it actually took a long minute for the musicians to stop playing and the audience to start moving to help this man and his frantic date. After the man had been carried out on a stretcher, the conductor seemed stumped as to whether he ought to re-start the movement, skip it, or try to pick up where they’d left off in the score.

In a strange way, sitting on the grimy floor in the basement of Mme Claude’s felt a bit like going to the orchestra. There was a familiar anxiety among much of audience, an earnest desire to do the right thing but not certain what that might entail. The Classical music world can feel rigid to audiences because of its long-steeped tradition, but this experimental music is tense for the opposite reason: it’s so new, with so few rules, that all the freedom can create feelings of awkwardness too. Do we clap between “movements”? Can we leave in the middle of the “set”? Can we enter? Do we have to watch this woman fiddle with her knobs, or can the performance become more of a physical experience? Are we supposed to feel seasick? We all look to each other for indications of appropriate aural consumption behavior, wary like the person unwrapping a cough drop in a concert hall, the miniscule movements of crinkling paper deafening.

musician want-ad on Mme Claude's bulletin board

Le Tennessee video

// October 11th, 2009 // No Comments » // Music, Performances, Travel

Here’s a video of “The Mark” from soundcheck at Le Tennessee Jazz Bar in Paris. Thanks for the link, James!

Zach and Jim’s songs can be found here.

Brotherly Love in the City of Lights

// September 24th, 2009 // No Comments » // Music, Performances, Travel

I managed to squeeze in a show here before I leave for Berlin – and it’s got an ALL PHILLY line-up! Jim Boggia and Zach Djanikian will be joining me for an evening of music in the Latin Quarter (6eme).

If you’re free Tuesday night and in the city of lights, drop by the Tennessee Jazz Bar around 9 PM. I’m hoping to finish some new material over the weekend and test-drive some songs!

Details here and on the Shows page:

September 29th: Paris, France
Tennessee Jazz Club
12 Rue André Mazet
75006 Paris
9 PM (21h)

I’ll miss this town for many reasons, including the fact that THIS happens twice a week:

pari_roller

What you’re watching are several thousand Parisian rollerbladers taking over the streets of Paris Friday night. It’d kind of like that bicycle takeover in Philly, only these guys get an official police escort to help divert traffic – twice a week! If you ever plan on visiting Paris with your rollerblades, visit Pari-Roller.com for the scoop. Suggested listening: Adrien Reju’s rendition of “Brand New Key” from her album A Million Hearts.