He says "Do they know we're not playing guitars?"
She says "I don't think they've noticed."
Like many people from a classical music background I rather looked down on the banjo. All of that inbred hillbilly stuff, that movie, and that tune. Then I dated a banjo player. It turns out they're heavier and more resilient than they appear and, treated carefully, they're capable of a very subtle and musical response. That goes for the banjo as well.Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn appeared at the Adelaide Town Hall as part of this year's Festival.
Béla Fleck, named by his father after the great Béla Bartok, his middle names are Anton Leos after Dvo?ák and Janá?ek, wasn't unknown to me. He's a multiple Grammy award winner, has been to Australia five times with his own band and working with a marvellous range of musicians.
Abigail Washburn was a surprise. She was a great surprise. She was worth the price of admission on her own. She plays banjo. She sings, with incredible breath control, and writes fine songs to show it off. One of those songs was in Chinese. "She speaks fluent mandolin", Béla remarked.
They opened with that old railroad song about Dinah blowing her horn, and wove in some other familiar tunes, then came Banjo Banjo, just fantastic, and the show took off from there.
There were moments of jazz, lots of blues and bluegrass and, in a song like Northridge Mountain, some real down home hillbilly magic. Basically, they played what they loved and their onstage, and I guess offstage rapport, silly jokes included, really bound the whole evening together. There's a strong political conscience underscoring so much of what they do. Theirs are the songs of the poor, the underdogs, the workers.
One of the songs, sung a capella, was a lament by a coal miner's wife from the Appalachians, whose husband and father died of black lung. The woman singles out the capitalist system as the cause of all their pain and, among her own songs, was Shotgun Blues. Abigail had noticed that her favourite old murder ballads invariably involved the death of the young woman, so she wrote a revenge number, aimed at the men. She sings murder ballads around the house when she's feeling angry. That's when Béla goes down to the cellar workshop to "polish his sprockets". Life in that house must be fun. What are they Doing in Heaven Today, one of eighteen gospel hymns by Washington Phillips, and the most moving of them in Abigail's estimation was just heart-stoppingly beautiful and Whatcha Goin' To Do had real gospel fervour.
Separately they are stunning instrumentalists but, together, they are unstoppable, and hearing the sound of two banjos, one a banjolele borrowed from their three year old son and the other the 'cello banjo, the slightly larger and deeper toned member of the family I'm hoping they get round to recording an album of baroque harpsichord music starting with Les Barricades Misterieuses of Couperin. They showed off mightily in an arrangement for two players of the New South Africa anthem that Béla wrote for his band The Flecktones on their tour to South Africa to celebrate the election of Nelson Mandela.
They received two standing ovations, one before and one after the encore. The couple directly behind us had driven over from the York Peninsula and was driving home straight after the concert. I think they felt that Béla and Abigail were worth the journey.
Adelaide's Thom West began the evening with a handful of his own songs and, while the young Adelaide singer songwriters are a group I hardly know, unless they turn up at Radio Adelaide, I'd happily sit in a quiet corner of a wood fire heated pub and hear the songs again.
