Ramblers being silly

Before we take off for Ecuador, I wanted to give you all some highlights of our amazing week in Colombia.

BUCARAMANGA

We began our journey in Bucaramanga, where we were met by our effervescent cultural co-ordinater from Bi-National Center, Juliana. We hit the ground running with a workshop at the Escuela Normal Superior with two big classes of enthusiastic (and energetic!) students. We worked off some of that energy by having them jump, walk, run, swim, drive, & ride around the verbs of motion in Old Joe Clark, & then learned some interesting noises for animals in both Colombia & the United States during Old MacDonald. I especially liked learning about the Chiguiro! Also, I’m always excited for the opportunity to showcase my super-realistic chicken sound, cultivated over many afternoons of serious practice as a child. In between the classes, we were offered a refreshing carbonated beverage called Malta that looked for all the world like cola, but tasted like a dead ringer for the milk in your bowl post-Lucky Charms. Brendan, Matt, Jordan, I were reminded of our time in Russia at the end of the class when all the kids rushed us for autographs & facebook contact info.

Jordan strikes a teacherly pose...

We were delighted to discover that the venue for our first public concert was the stunning Casa del Libro Total Museum & were well-received by the audience there. Our program ranged from rousing songs about Union scabbers (“Casey Jones”), to ballads about the hardships of growing up in poverty in the Appalachian Mountains (Ola Bella Reed’s “I’ve Endured” & Gillian Welch’s “Red Clay Halo”), to songs about the railroad (“John Henry”) and the range (“Home on the Range”) and heartache (“East Virginia”), to silly children’s songs (“The Fox”), and examples of “contemporary American folk music” when Brendan, Jordan, & I each take a turn playing original compositions. I also like to throw in a traditional Irish song called “The Blackbird,” which provides a good opportunity to introduce the idea of The United States as a nation of immigrants & talk about the relationship between some of the traditional music in America & that of the British Isles.

sound check at the museum

One of the main ideas behind this project is that, in addition to being a fun way for ESL students to learn through music, we feel that traditional American folk music is a terrific way to share another side of American culture that is perhaps not very well represented by our most pervasive cultural exports (Hollywood films, pop music, MTV, etc). The United States is a vast & complex nation filled with many different people with rich & varied heritage. The stories told in Folk songs are stories about real people, ordinary people, about hardship & joy & suffering & history, & we are as excited about sharing these narratives of American culture with other parts of the world as we are about learning more about the lives & history of our hosts & the students & teachers we encounter.

Matt & Gillian ramble through the streets of Bucaramanga

One of the ways that we like to explore new cultures is through food! Brendan in particular has made it his mission to taste every local specialty cuisine he encounters, which is how we came to sit around a small plastic table, contemplating a bag of fried ants. The ants were much larger than any I’d ever seen – each abdomen section about the size of a small pea – and (I can personally report) are crunchy, salty, & not altogether unpleasant save for the disturbingly tangible legs, which got stuck between my teeth.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dvFXwcT4uo&w=425&h=349]

After two wonderful, busy days that ended too soon, we packed our bags once again & caught a flight back to Bogota & then to Pereira (interesting fact: we will pass through the Bogota airport three times on this trip without ever actually seeing the capital city itself! Guess that means we’ll have to come back soon for a proper visit). Next update: Pereira!

revisiting a favorite Russian card game

Thank you all so much for supporting independent music & the dreams of one little harpist/singer-songwriter.

I am so full of gratitude for each & every one of the 179 incredibly generous backers who pledged to bring this project into the world. Feeling very infinite & small tonight. What an amazing journey this has been!

Tomorrow morning, I catch an early plane bound for Bogota, marking the start of another adventure as I tour with the ESL Folk Project through Colombia, Peru, & Ecuador. Keep an eye on my blog for updates from my travels abroad. I’ll be posting more updates through Kickstarter to keep my backers abreast of the album’s progress over the next few months. I think that by the end of all this, we will have created together something very fine indeed.

But for now, it’s time to finally exhale. And perhaps have a glass of wine on the front door steps. And maybe write a new song.

With love,

Gillian

morning run by the golden gate bridge

I’ve been staying with some friends in Outer Richmond this past week to rehearse with the ESL Folk Project in preparation for our tour in South America. I met Matt, Brendan, & Jordan last summer in Tomsk where we began our first tour, bringing a special program using American Folk music as a cultural supplement for students learning English in Russia. The U.S. State Department loved the project so much, they decided to fund us again for a month-long tour in Colombia, Peru, & Ecuador. It’s the first time that we’ve all been together since Ufa last summer & the reunion has been sweet indeed. Tomorrow morning we’ll catch an early flight to Bogata the adventure begins! We expect to be doing some blogging updates from the road, but I don’t know how regular our internet access will be, so I wanted to write a little post sharing some of the highlights of my past couple weeks in California.

Oh, hey there, Hollywood

I flew to Los Angeles on April 29th to visit my dear friend Rosy, who had generously offered to host a house concert for me. We spent the weekend cooking & then celebrated May Day with music, a feast featuring dishes from all the countries I’ll be visiting on the ESL Folk tour, & over a hundred guests.

That there's 70lbs of onions. I cried.

On Monday, fellow Fellow Ted & I visited the Caltech campus to talk about our recent experiences as Thomas J. Watson Fellows on a panel for prospective applicants. Here’s hoping one of their many intriguing proposal ideas gets funded next year! We drove down to San Diego & spent a couple days learning ridiculous covers on harp & guitar, playing them for dear distant friends on Skype, & sampling the finest fish taco stands in the city. Ted also treated me with a breakfast of matzo brie, which is kind of like Jewish French toast (and totally delicious).

Ted! You made Matzo Brie!

I took the train up from SD back to LA (and, as always when traveling public transit with my harp, talked to lots of curious strangers) & then caught a rideshare to San Francisco with a woman who managed to fit me, my harp (in flight crate), & a young australian woman fresh from the airport into her Prius! I was dropped off in the Lower Pacific Heights neighborhood just in time to play another house concert for a super fun audience featuring a surprising number of AmeriCorps volunteers. By midnight, I’d made my weary way to Outer Richmond where the ESL Folk Project has been living & rehearsing this past week.

Brendan, Matt, & Jordan

We’ve been working hard, logging several 9 hour days of solid rehearsal, learning lots of new material & lesson plans for the students we are *super* excited to meet in Peru, Colombia, & Ecuador. This time around, the U.S. State Department is organizing several large public concerts in addition to our schedule with the schools, so we’ve put together an entirely new program! Some of my favorites to learn have been John Henry, Red Clay Halo, Old Joe Clark, In the Pines, & Casey Jones.

lots of lyrics-learning...

In our spare time, we’ve managed to share several delicious meals (Jordan’s a wizard with a cast iron skillet) & visit the Sutro Baths, a 19th Century swimming facility that now lies in ruins on the Pacific Coast, not far from the house where we’ve been staying. When not making a hootenanny in the living room with the guys, I’ve also been learning cover song requests from a kickstarter campaign for my next solo album, locking myself in the (acoustically pleasing & quiet) bathroom to make iMovie recordings, & posting them on YouTube. One of the covers, a version of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind Theme on harp, was picked up by the online gaming community & went viral, making this one of the most viewed bathrooms in San Francisco! Big love & thanks to Reddit.com, RipTen.com, Kotaku.com, The Elder Scrolls facebook & twitter feeds, bit-tech.net, & thousands of individuals for spreading the video like wildfire. I stayed up late last night learning the Ultima Online Theme (which was one of the earliest follow-up requests from Reddit.com) & posted it on YouTube this morning as a gesture of my deep gratitude for the outpouring of support that’s come from the gaming community over the past few days.

over 42,000 people have seen this bathroom!

We’ve already started getting some press coverage in South America, like this article: Ramblin’ Across the Andes.. Time to get back to packing – looking forward to sharing our stories from the road!

Much love,
-Gillian

sorry, Pickles, you can't come...

P.S. My next concerts in the U.S. will be on Monday, June 13th at the Rockwood Music Hall in NYC & Saturday, June 18th at the Tin Angel in Philadelphia. The Tin Angel shows have been selling out, so if you’re interested in coming, be sure to reserve your tickets in advance!

Here’s a nifty google map marking the stops on my journey:

(You can view a larger version of this map with all the cities listed & twitter excerpts narrating each location!)

I thought it’d be fun to break down all that travel by modes of transport. The mile estimates, especially in terms car travel, err on the modest end of the spectrum. I actually put 16,000 miles on my car during the three months of the North American tour, but for the purposes of this blog post I was only calculating direct distances between cities. I didn’t feel that I could accurately track the miles I logged by autorickshaw in India, so, sadly, the long, hot, stinky, noisy, fume-filled hours I spent squashed under my harp & fearing for my imminent demise in those three-wheeled, two-stroke wonders of modern transport are not included.

miles traveled in various modes of transport. Notably, most of those bus miles were logged in Indonesia.

While my carbon-guilt is great for having flown over 13,000 miles, I was slightly mollified to learn that I actually logged MORE miles by public transport (those 600+ miles spent on boats & ferry’s really sealed the deal). The grand total for miles travelled in 2010? 39,155

Other Facts & Figures

Continents Visited: 3
Countries Visited: 9
Cities Visited: 79
U.S. States Visited: 28
Languages Spoken (mostly very badly): 8
Currencies Held: 8
Hospital Visits: 2 (one for rabies post-exposure treatment in Indonesia, the other for a mystery virus in India)
Passports Stolen: 2
Consular Interventions on My Behalf: 1 (Thanks for getting me out of Russia, Wilma!)
Human-sized Hampster Balls oggled in Tyumen: 1

Now, I know this is a far cry from the wizardry of an OkCupid Trends post, but cut me some slack, okay? I was a Comparative Literature major! That said, if there are other calculations you’d like me to try and approximate, I’m open to giving it all of my XKCD-loving spirit.

Happy New Year!
-Gillian

From September through November, I’ll be driving all over this great land, from coast to coast, to play for you in venues, coffee shops, bookstores, cafés, art collectives, basements and living rooms.

I’ve booked part of this beast, but there is much that remains to be confirmed. Anyone enthusiastic enough to organize a concert in their town/college/home, put me and my harp up for the night, or help with promotion will have my everlasting adoration. Also, I make excellent gratitude-omelettes.

Here’s my itinerary (details for confirmed dates are under the SHOWS tab):

SEPTEMBER

9/5 New York, NY – Joe’s Pub – 7 PM
9/6 Cambridge, MA – Club Passim (Campfire Festival!) 4: 15 PM
9/7 North Kingstown, RI – Beach Concert! – 6 PM
9/8 Danbury, CT – Cousin Larry’s Café – 9 PM
9/11 Montpelier, VT – Langdon Street Café – 7 PM
9/12 Burlington, VT – Parima – 7:30 PM
9/19 Toronto, Canada – Tranzac – 10:30 PM

OCTOBER
*updated

10/1 Philadelphia, PA – House Concert – 7 PM
10/3 Washington, DC – IOTA Club & Cafe – 8:30 PM
10/5 Lynchburg, VA – The White Hart – 7 PM
10/7 Greensboro, NC – The Greenleaf @ Guilford college – 8PM
10/9 Lexington, KY – Common Grounds – 7 PM
10/11 Nashville, TN – The Bluebird Café open mic – 7 PM
10/13 Gainesville, FL – The Civic Media Center – 9:30 PM
10/14 New Orleans, LA – Neutral Grounds – 11 PM
10/16 New Orleans, LA – House Concert – 7 PM
10/18 Austin, TX – House Concert – e-mail for details
10/19 Norman, OK – House Concert – e-mail for details
10/23 Los Angeles, CA – Genghis Cohen – 7:30 PM
10/28 San Francisco, CA – The Red Poppy Art Center – 7 PM

NOVEMBER

11/2 Portland, OR – The Knife – 9 PM
11/3 Victoria, BC, Canada – opening for Kuba Oms – details TBA
11/4 Seattle, WA – Hibdo – 8 PM
11/10 Aspen, CO – House Concert – e-mail for details
11/10 Boulder, CO – Cafe Sole – 5-7 PM
11/14 Chicago, IL – Northwestern University Masterclass & Concert – 5 PM
*****11/17 Philadelphia, PA – World Café Live NYSC Showcase – 7 PM*****
**UPDATE! Due to extenuating personal circumstances, I will NOT be hosting the SongCircle showcase on November 17th, but Suzie Brown will be covering for me and the show is definitely still on. I’ll return to host the next showcase on January 12th**

As you can see, there is much of my itinerary that is still, shall we say, malleable? Take a look at the accompanying Google Maps and if you’ve got an idea that fits the general trajectory, I’d love to discuss it! Please share this with your friends and family and help spread the word. This is an independent, grassroots, fan-fueled (ad)venture, and I can’t do it without you.

fill my heart, fill my gas tank, fill my belly… I’ll see you on the road!

Love,
Gillian

* *Europe! I’m coming for you in the Spring, darling. I plan to pass some of those long hours on the highway this fall spinning German tapes and trying to learn the language of Rilke and Marlene Dietrech (hence the tour title). Quiz me when I’m back!

September

October

November

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.

Sorry I’ve been so terrible about updating this blog – I’ve been on trains for thousands of miles with little internet access this past month. I promise I’ll post more later, but I just wanted to put up a quick note letting you know what I’m up to for the month of June!

I’m currently traveling with a group of musicians to summer camps in Russia, teaching kids English through American folk music! This is our schedule:

June 5th – 8th: Elista
June 9th -14th: Rostov-na-donu
June 16th -19th: Gubkin
June 20th-23rd: Ufa
June 25th-28th: Samara

I stole this expert map from the eslfolk.com site 8)

I’ll have pretty limited web access, but we’re keeping a group blog up on the project’s website: www.eslfolk.com It’s been a really exciting trip so far – can’t wait to share more pics, vids, news with you next time I’ve got wifi

Much love,
Gillian

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.

audience view of the Marina Stage

First off, the band sounded just fantastic and I was so proud to be sharing the stage with such fine musicians. Ross Bellenoit, Matt Scarano, Ryan Kuhns and I have been working together as a quartet for nearly a year now and I was very sorry to have to leave my Idling Ferraris behind, but very proud of how far we’ve come as a group. I sorely miss their support and creativity when I play over here, but am excited to come back with a bunch of new songs to throw at them when I get back!

There was some exceptional, above-and-beyond fan lovin’ that took place at the festival. Francesca and Erika had me do sharpie body-art (see photo documentation). Special thanks also goes out to Adam, Dorothy, and Elliot – the cool kids from Lancaster who chatted a while and made me feel like a million bucks.

Erika getting inked!

I was just delighted that my longtime harp teacher and dear friend, Janet Witman, was able to make my last State-side performance, and was tickled later to see someone tweeted about the shout-out moment.

There are some more pictures up on my flickr account if you’re interested, and Bekah Larson also wrote a very nice review of the performance for the XPN All About the Music Blog, which you should check out here.

Thanks to everyone who came out and tuned in to share this very special afternoon with me!

Set List: July 26th, Wiggins Park, Camden Waterfront, NJ
Pulse
Silken String
Summer
The Canonization of Margot Price
No Answer
The Mark
August

Frencesca