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Moving heaven and earth

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When she was in the fourth grade, my daughter Claire — in response to the question “What Does Your Father Do?” — told her class that I “signed papers and went to meetings.”

Today was not that kind of day.

With two colleagues from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, I joined officials from the Washington National Cathedral on a glorious fall morning to see first hand the extent of the damage from the August 23, 2011 earthquake that hit the east coast.  We were visiting the cathedral as part of ongoing conversations about the restoration and preservation needs of this national landmark.

The cathedral’s website has a gallery of amazing photographs that document the damage — from just after the quake until the present.  I encourage you to view it and more importantly make a donation to help rebuild this unique place.

On our tour, we viewed the damage from outside the building (including the cracks in the flying buttresses at the historic end of the cathedral), and then traveled up to the very top of the central tower.  There we were at the center of the worst damage to the building, where the beautiful pinnacles — weighing several thousand pounds each — had shifted and in one instance fell during the quake.  We saw how the engineers and stone masons have secured the stonework in preparation for the reopening of the building this weekend for the consecration of a new bishop of Washington, The Rev. Dr. Mariann Edgar Budde.

The best description I have heard as to why the damage occurred at the towers is to think of the quake’s impact like the snapping of a whip.  The end of the whip — or the top of the tower — is where the greatest movement takes place.

For readers interested in earthquakes and why one would happen in the eastern United States, I recommend Simon Winchester’s A Crack in the Edge of the World.  Winchester’s account of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake contains a chapter entitled From Plate to Shining Plate that describes the magnitude 7.0 Charleston quake of 1886, explaining why cities in the middle of the North American Plate are still susceptible to the movement of the earth.  It is a fascinating tale (made all the more so as I head out to Charleston tomorrow morning).

So without further ado, here’s my photo update of the ongoing stabilization of the Washington National Cathedral some two months and a few days after that moment in August when the earth moved — and so did a bit of heaven.

More to come…

DJB

Acoustic Music Old and New

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Airline travel has its occasional benefits.

Earlier this week I had a trip to Boston booked on Jet Blue Airlines.  When I sat down in the seat, I glanced at the arm rest and thought, “Hot dog – Jet Blue is the airline with free XM radio!”  I whipped out my ear buds and settled in for 90 minutes of the XM station Bluegrass Junction.

I love to listen to my own iPod playlist, but it also great fun to settle in to an airline seat or a rental car to catch XM radio’s bluegrass station.  Every time that happens I always end up hearing some great new music, and my Boston trip was no exception.

On one leg of the trip, the station was featuring one of its staples:  a program entitled Track By Track where the DJ plays a full album by a featured artist who provides commentary along the way.  This week’s show featured the new Compass Records album Somewhere South of Crazy by the Southern songbird Dale Ann Bradley.

Now I’ve heard Dale Ann Bradley off and on through the years, but to be able to sit and listen to a full album – especially one that features the wonderful banjo playing of Compass Records CEO Alison Brown – was eye (or ear) opening.  What a wonderful bluegrass voice.

That led me to check out the Compass Records web site, which is chock full of music by a treasure trove of acoustic musicians.  I immediately downloaded several Bradley tunes (including the wonderful live solo version of Old Southern Porches).  I also sampled the new work by Bearfoot – a band I’ve loved live and in the studio – and ended up downloading the entire American Story album, which is highly recommended.

Then my eye wandered over to the new Noam Pikelny album Beat the Devil and Carry a Rail on Compass, which I’d seen previewed on the Bluegrass Today blog.  In fact, I’d read the interview with Pikelny in the online version of The Fretboard Journal – my favorite magazine – just the day before.  Pikelny is the banjoist with the Punch Brothers and won the inaugural, $50,000 Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass, an award he was given on the David Letterman show.  Beat the Devil and Carry a Rail is a terrific showcase for Pikelny’s technical prowess and musicianship.  Naturally, I downloaded the entire album!

My bank account (and the fact that I have two children in college) put the brakes on further purchases for the day, but I loved sampling more on the Compass site.  John Doyle – my choice for the best rhythm guitarist in roots music today – has a new record out, and I recently purchased the release from his former Solas band mates Mick McAuley and Winifred Horan.  I continue to believe that the Nashville-based Compass Records has taken over the spot as the best roots music independent label on the scene today.

Besides Alison Brown and the Compass staff, the other person who deserves a great deal of credit for helping to promote and support roots music is none other than comedian – and banjo player – Steve Martin.  Along with his own bluegrass records with The Steep Canyon Rangers (named “Entertainer of the Year” at the 2011 International Bluegrass Music Association awards) and the aforementioned prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass, Martin has worked tirelessly to showcase the tremendous musicians playing bluegrass and acoustic music today.  Just go to You Tube and search for “Steve Martin Banjo” and you’ll see great videos with greats such as Earl Scruggs, Bela Fleck, and Tony Trischka.

There’s so much good acoustic music being played at the moment, and I just want to say thanks to Alison Brown and Steve Martin for following their vision in bringing it to us.

Martin awarded his prize on David Letterman…and did it with his usual wit.  Check out the video below of Dueling Banjos with Martin and Pikelny…great banjo and pretty damn funny comedy as well.

More to come…

DJB

Best Month of Baseball – Ever!

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The period from September 28 – October 28, 2011 is already being proclaimed the  best month of baseball in the history of the game.

But like the Greeks, who add two months that don’t exist to the calendar so they can pay workers higher wages and claim to stay within monthly pay limits, I want to add a few days and take the personal view that September 25th – October 28th is the best month of baseball – ever!

I go back to the 25th of September, because that’s when our Washington Nationals wrapped up their own surprising September and closed out the home season with a thoroughly satisfying win over the Atlanta Braves.  On that day the Nats – rather than playing out the string – took the rubber game of a three game series from the Braves and did their part to help the World Champion St. Louis Cardinals even make it into the playoffs.

Then of course, there was the ridiculous night of September 28th when within minutes of each other the Boston Red Sox and the Braves completed their historic collapses, allowing the Rays and Cards to take the wild card berths.  That night will go down in my mind as the best single day of baseball, with three of the four do-or-die games coming down to implausible, but nonetheless real, endings.

Since then the incredible play has continued.  On the satisfaction scale, the two large-budget teams (Yankees and Phillies) took early leave from the playoffs, turning the stage over to cities that have struggled in so many ways in recent years but which have proud baseball traditions (Detroit, St. Louis, and Milwaukee).  We got to watch Ron Washington – the hardest working man in a baseball dugout – do the “Wash” night after night as Texas rolled through the American League playoffs to return to the World Series.  Cardinal Ace – and grizzled veteran – Chris Carpenter beat his best friend in baseball with a classic 1-0 win over Doc Halladay and the 102-win Phillies in the elimination game of the National League Division Series.  The racing sausages in Milwaukee took their act deep into the playoffs.

After all that we were treated to an amazing World Series.  After Texas took Game 2 in St. Louis the pundits were certain that the Cardinals were toast.  Then Albert Pujols put on a hitting clinic with his three home-runs, and the Cards reclaimed home-field advantage…which they would desperately need.  Who can forget NAP-O-LI, NAP-O-LI!  You thought Texas Stadium had been transformed into a World Cup site.  This series was terrific in part because of the show put on by the two great catchers:  by the end of Game 7 Mike Napoli and Yadier Molina couldn’t have a healthy bone in their bodies.  Tony (the genius) LaRussa goes brain-dead and Phone-gate results in Game 5.  Again the pundits on ESPN declared the series all but over.  Why even bother to play Game 6?  Let’s just give Texas the trophy.

Oh, but we’re so glad they did.  David Freese lives out every kid’s dream – playing for his hometown team in the World Series, getting 21 RBIs and saving the Cards in that classic Game 6.  I almost went to bed with the score 7-4 Texas.  But Allen Craig’s solo home run – after replacing an injured Matt Holliday – convinced me that the Cardinals weren’t dead just yet.  Watching the 9th and 10th innings – where Texas was one strike away in each instance from pouring the champagne – was worth only getting four hours of sleep that night.  Then Freese sends the crowd into a frenzy with a dead centerfield walk-off home run in the bottom of the 11th.  You can’t make this stuff up.

Game 7 didn’t have the same dramatic ending, but Texas showed some resilience by jumping out 2-0 in the first.  But, in a fashion so typical of this season, the Cardinals score two runs and essentially rip the heart out of Texas in the fifth.  Here’s how Tom Boswell described it:

In the fifth inning of this final game, when Texas trailed only 3-2, various Rangers pitchers, now perhaps headed to witness protection, handed the Cards a walk, a hit batter, an intentional walk, a walk and another hit batter, for two gift runs without so much as a single hit.

You can’t make this stuff up.

So we head into the long dark period of no baseball (it is cold and rainy here in DC – which is as it should be).  But we have enough from this last month – that period from September 25th to October 28th – to more than last the winter.

And remember:  pitchers and catchers report in February!

More to come…

DJB

Lowering the ole’ blood pressure

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We’ve had a great deal of focus on doctors and health in our family over the past two months.  I’ll spare you the details.  But in recent weeks, I’ve taken to wondering if I should ask the doctors taking care of my wife to give me a blood pressure test while they’re handy.

Sligo Creek
Sligo Creek Bridge

The knowledge that Candice was the focus of these visits kept me from going that far, but I have taken to sticking my arm into the testing machine at the local pharmacy, just to keep tabs.

Blood pressure isn’t something I’ve had to worry about very much.  When I go in for physicals, the nurse will generally take my blood pressure, look at me, and say something like, “You’ve got terrific blood pressure.”  While not the picture of health, I’ve always been pleased I could rely on that number to turn out right where it should be.

Candice, however, has begun to worry about my stress levels…adding to my worries that she’s now worrying.  And when I took a test at Rite Aid about 10 days ago and my blood pressure was higher than it should have been, then I got to worry a bit more.  Yikes!

The good news is that I stopped in today for another prescription for Candice, took the test, and I was back to normal.  But I realize that I can’t rely on good genes forever.

So on a day off from work I took the DJB cure for high blood pressure and walked through beautiful Sligo Creek park this afternoon.  Washingtonians go bonkers over Rock Creek Park, but here in Silver Spring our own Sligo Creek is pretty wonderful in its own way.  And when the leaves are changing, oh my!  Beautiful is too pedestrian a description.

I took some pictures while out working on my health.  I hope they help you relax as well.

More to come…

DJB

World Series Game - October 25, 2019

Church of baseball: Part three

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This post…to follow-on the last two and last evening’s crazy night of baseball…will be even shorter.

Joe Posnanski wrote one of the best columns about last evening’s games, baseball and life, that I’ve read in a long time.  Do yourself a favor — pull up a chair and read it.*

It begins with this thought:

“Baseball, like life, revolves around anticlimax. That, in many ways, is the beauty of it. I realize that’s a hard thing to explain to someone who doesn’t love baseball. No, more than hard, it’s an impossible thing to explain, because many people want sports to be more than life. They follow sports to jolt them out of the steady rhythms of the shriek of alarm clocks, the monotony of morning meetings, the rush to get the kids to soccer practice by 4 p.m. They want sports to be bigger than life. What’s the point, otherwise? There is nothing in baseball as jarring as a blind-side hit, as jaw-dropping as a perfect alley-oop, as tense and heart-pounding as a breakaway.

And the hard thing to explain, the impossible thing, is that many of us love baseball not in spite of these failings, but because of them.“

Then Posnanski has one wonderful line, one wonderful thought, after another.  I’ll just pull out this one:

“I never argue with people who say that baseball is boring, because baseball is boring. And then, suddenly, it isn’t. And that’s what makes it great.“

And then his final paragraph:

“The Braves failed to score. Papelbon blew the lead. Longoria homered in the 12th. Elation. Sadness. Mayhem. Champagne. Sleepless fury. Never been a night like it. Funny, if I was trying to explain baseball to someone who had never heard of it, I wouldn’t tell them about Wednesday night. No, it seems to me that Wednesday night isn’t what makes baseball great. It’s all the years you spend waiting for Wednesday night that makes baseball great.“

More to come…

DJB

*Posnanski has since changed his blogging platform a couple of times, and the link no longer works (and he’s usually behind a paywall). So my excerpt will probably have to do. Ah…the joys of the internet.

Image: A much later image at my own church: Nats parks during game 3 of the 2019 World Series

Church of Baseball – Part Two

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The River Styx and one chance in 278 million.  Baseball writers are amazing, but they go to a whole ‘nother level when you have nights like last evening.

The baseball gods must have loved my last post, because we were all rewarded with the most improbable and dramatic final day of the season.  It was so incredible even Bud Selig couldn’t screw it up.  Three of the four games critical to the wild card races in each league were on our local cable system – conveniently located on channels 41, 42, and 43.  The only one we couldn’t watch was the least dramatic:  the Cards drubbing of the Astros.  But for five delicious hours, Candice and I sat by the television, switching between games almost on a pitch-by-pitch basis in the last two hours, to watch the monumental collapse of not one, but two proud franchises (Boston and Atlanta), and the incredible comeback of the Tampa Bay Rays from too many near-death experiences to count.

Baseball writers will opine about this evening for some time to come.  But out of the gate, I loved Tom Boswell who – in true Boswell form – went back to the classics:

Red Sox, report to the River Styx at dawn.

Then, as is appropriate in the week when the movie Moneyball hit the theatres, Nate Silver takes a break from politics to tell us that the odds of all the things happening that did happen were – well, just read below:

The following is not mathematically rigorous, since the events of yesterday evening were contingent upon one another in various ways. But just for fun, let’s put all of them together in sequence:

  • The Red Sox had just a 0.3 percent chance of failing to make the playoffs on Sept. 3.
  • The Rays had just a 0.3 percent chance of coming back after trailing 7-0 with two innings to play.
  • The Red Sox had only about a 2 percent chance of losing their game against Baltimore, when the Orioles were down to their last strike.
  • The Rays had about a 2 percent chance of winning in the bottom of the 9th, with Johnson also down to his last strike.

Multiply those four probabilities together, and you get a combined probability of about one chance in 278 million of all these events coming together in quite this way.

The Church of Baseball…it does feed the soul.

More to come…

DJB

The Church of Baseball

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“I believe in the Church of Baseball.”

So begins Annie Savoy’s opening monologue in the movie Bull Durham.  And after going through all the religions she has tried, comparing baseball to sex, and talking about bad trades (“Who can forget Frank Robinson for Milt Pappas for God’s sake”) she ends up with:

It’s a long season and you gotta trust. I’ve tried ’em all, I really have, and the only church that truly feeds the soul, day in, day out, is the Church of Baseball.

Today I needed the Church of Baseball, and it didn’t fail me.  Oh, I did get up and go to the 8 a.m. service at my other church…especially since we were meeting our new rector after an interminable period of transition.  But I’ll freely admit that I went to the cathedral at Nationals Park today to feed the soul.

The Nationals have been on a tear.  Heading in to the home finale, they had won 11 of 14, including sweeps on the road of the Mets and the Phillies.  Tom Boswell had a column in today’s paper warning readers “not to trust September baseball.”  But then he goes on to talk about why this is the most hopeful September in the short history of the franchise.

Today shows why.

Candice sent me off to the game with her blessing, saying, “Don’t think of my concussion or anything else…..just savor the game.”  I stepped off the train at 11:30 a.m. – a full two hours before game time – picked up a good seat, grabbed my free “Strasburg Strikes Again” t-shirt, and stopped to watch some batting practice.  I thought it might be a good omen when only two Braves were able to reach the seats.  I lingered over lunch watching the season’s highlights on the big screen and settled in to my seat about 15 minutes before the game began: just enough time to set up my score card.

Score cards are my prayer book in the Church of Baseball.  The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin once told my daughter and me at a book signing that scoring baseball – and then retelling the game each night to her father – was how she learned to be both a historian and a story-teller.  A fan saw my iPad today (I had brought it to read the New York Times while riding on the train) and asked if I was scoring the game there.  “Nope,” I replied.  “I do it the old-fashioned way – with paper and pencil.”

Today’s game was simply sublime – a fact I can recount by looking at my score card.  There was a big crowd – close to 40,000.  The Braves needed this game to hang on to their slim and diminishing lead in the wild card race.  The Nats were starting yet another of what now seems like an endless supply of good young pitchers:  Ross Detwiler.  It was the rubber game of the series.  The sky was overcast yet never threatened.  The crowd was “into it” right from the beginning.

Detwiler was untouchable until the third, when the Braves first hit rattled him and he proceeded to lose the plate.  When you throw four balls to the pitcher who is trying to give you an out by bunting, you’ve lost control.  But after filling up the bases, he got a short pop fly out in foul territory, a short fly to right where Jonny Gomes showed off his arm and kept the runner at third, and then he got future Hall-of-Famer Chipper Jones to bounce to his counterpart at third, Ryan Zimmerman, who tossed to second to get out of the inning.

I decided about this time that I needed some peanuts to go with my coke, and soon I had shells all over my score card.  But I cleared them off when Wilson Ramos – who will one day tell his kids that he replaced future Hall-of-Famer Pudge Rodriquez as the Nats starting catcher – hit a solo shot in the fourth that jumped over the left field fence (just to the right of where I’d been sitting for batting practice).  1-0 Nats.  I’d gone about 3 hours and was starting to breathe.

1-0 was all Detwiler would need.  He finished six strong innings and the bullpen was lights out.  Henry Rodriquez was the most electric, touching 100 and 101 on the radar gun with regularity, as he made short work of three Braves in a three-up, three-down inning featuring three strikeouts (one being by a fouled third strike bunt when David Ross realized he couldn’t get his bat around to keep up with that fastball.)  The bottom of the seventh featured more fireworks.  After a Zimmerman single, Michael “The Beast” Morse – who may be the cheapest steal in recent history when he was acquired for chump change from Seattle – hit a blast over the right center field scoreboard to make it 3-0.  The fans – in a classy “thank you” for Michael’s fabulous season – screamed for a curtain call.

The Braves looked over-matched all day,  but never so much as in those last three innings.  Rodriquez finished off his last victim with an 84 mph change up.  How do you deal with that after 101?!  Tyler Clipper came in for a very tidy 1-2-3 top of the 8th.  And then in the ninth, rookie closer Drew Storen did the same – with a little help from an incredible pick, turn, and throw by Zimmerman against Dan Uggla.  About time to give that guy another Gold Glove.

As Storen headed in from the bullpen to pitch the ninth, the sun came out.  I knew I was in church.

After Danny Espinosa threw to Chris Marrero (two more youngsters)  for the final out, we all reveled in what we’d just seen.  If the Nats can win their final series against the Marlins, they’ll finish with their first winning season since coming to DC.  And they are now playing consistently like a big-league club that’s on its way up.

I wanted the soul to take in all it could.  I stayed and finished filling out my score card (and another fan stopped by and said, “That was a fun game to score.”)   I talked to the usher for our section.  I watched about 10,000 kids run the bases in the last of that Sunday ritual for 2011.  I lingered.

And then I joined what was left of my fellow congregants on the metro, all of us dressed in our Sunday finest. (Mine is a red t-shirt with a curly “W” on the front and “Strasburg #37” on the back.)

I returned home to hear about Candice’s afternoon, where two sets of friends stopped by.  The Pearsons – our very good friends from Staunton – came by to check up on the patient.  And the Eucharistic minister from church came by to give Candice communion.  I know Candice enjoyed that, and I was pleased to be at a  hopeful St. Albans this morning.  But it is hard – day in and day out – to beat the Church of Baseball for at least some parts of my soul.  Today there was simply no comparison.

“Wait Till Next Year” indeed!

More to come…

DJB

So How Did Your Summer Go?

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Shortly after Memorial Day I wrote a post entitled Got Plans for the Summer? where I outlined ten things I hoped to accomplish during the Summer of 2011.  Well, Labor Day is here – and we’ve reached the moment of reckoning.

While I was not a perfect ten-for-ten, I can explain.

1.  Play more music with friends – It is bad when you come up short right out of the box, but this was one item where I failed miserably.  We had a very busy summer, and this one just got away from me.  Luckily, playing music with friends isn’t bound by season…so I’ll try and schedule some fall play dates.

2.  Summer in New England – Technically, this was completed.  I did spend two days in Portland, Maine in early June and I’ve just spent 8 days in New England…but it wasn’t the vacation we planned.  To cut to the chase, Candice fell when we came here to Providence to drop Andrew off at school and she’s been in the hospital this week dealing with a severe concussion.  So I’ve had a great view of the water this week…but it is the Providence Bay as seen from her hospital room and not the view from a Nantucket deck that we envisioned.  Oh well, at least Candice is on her way to a full recovery and that trumps all plans!

3.  Savor the last year of summer swim team – This was a ten strike!  We had a great last year with the Gators, and Candice and I enjoyed being the parents of the older swimmers.  Claire and Andrew enjoyed their final year, Andrew swam on a relay team that set a new Gators record in the All-Star meet, and Candice and I were awarded one of the Volunteer of the Year medals at the swim team banquet.  It was great fun…and now Claire is continuing on by swimming for her college swim team.  (Andrew is at a Division I school where the competition is much harder, so he’s planning on swimming on club teams.)

4.  Take at least three friends to a wooden-bat baseball league game – I made it to a couple of wooden-bat league games, but unfortunately without friends in tow.  The good news:  the winner of our Cal Ripken League playoff – the Bethesda Big Train – was just named the #1 ranked summer league team for 2011.  The Big Train were an awesome team this year and they were  fun to watch.

5.  Reread The Last Best League and watch Bull Durham – Check and check!  As I’ve said before, I don’t believe in heavy reading over the summer when I can get away from it (work-related reading not included), so I also read These Guys Have All the Fun – an oral history of ESPN.  But to show that fall is just around the corner, I’m halfway through Nixonland.

6.  Ride my bike – This one didn’t get done.  Bummer.  No (real) excuses.

7.  Balance, balance, balance – I’d give myself about a 5 on a scale of 10 on this one.  Work has been pretty demanding, but I’ve tried to ensure that family also got its fair share of time.  One example:  Claire and I did get to see the last movie installment of the Harry Potter series this summer.  We loved it!  Last week, I also saw my favorite move – O Brother, Where Art Thou? – on the big screen at AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring.  For someone who doesn’t watch movies regularly, this has the makings of a film festival.

8.  Connect with a friend every day – Here I was probably 75% successful.  It was great to be purposeful on this point, and I plan to continue into the fall.

9.  Learn how to play an alternating-bass pattern on the guitar – I’ve been working on this, but haven’t succeeded.  I’ll keep working to nail that pattern before Thanksgiving.

10.  Try not to cry when we drop Claire and Andrew off for college – I had a 50% success rate on this…but truth be told I probably will fail miserably when all is said and done.  Our college drop-offs all began as planned, as the four of us went to California two weeks ago for Claire’s launch.  We had a great couple of days, met and spent time with wonderful folks (students and parents – including a work colleague whose son is a freshman at the same school), and got Claire settled in to her dorm (see the picture below of her room – still a work in progress when this was taken).  I cried just a bit when we said our goodbyes, but I had a harder cry when we got home and I went up to her room and found the stuffed dog and baby blanket she slept with every night until leaving for college.  Andrew’s drop-off was not at all as planned, given Candice’s fall and our focus on making sure she was safe.  Andrew was a true champ and really helped me manage everything that was going on.  But that meant that he and I dropped all his stuff off in his dorm room, made his bed, and then left to go right back to the INCU.  But as you can see below, a week later Andrew is settled in and managed very well by himself.  Once I have the chance to reflect, I may shed a few more tears for Andrew’s departure into the next phase of his life as well.

All in all, a great final summer before college.  And now Candice and I get to explore the empty nest.

More to come…

DJB

Say Something Nice

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Greater Greater Washington is one of the best blogs in – and about – the DC region.  Andrew turned me on to them as he became interested in urban studies, and I check them out every day because I know they’ll have something smart to say.  Topics can range from why Amtrak tickets cost more than the Bolt and Mega bus services, to issues around design, planning, and historic preservation.

Yesterday, GGW founder David Alpert posted a video and short piece entitled Ask, and people will say something nice.  As Alpert notes, little touches can make a difference in how people feel about urban spaces.  This little touch is from New York City, and it reminded me of our experience last March (see photo below) as we chanced upon a piano player in Greenwich Village.  The video is a fun way to spend three minutes of your time and  I’ve reposted it below.  Enjoy.

More to come…

DJB

The (Musical) Circle Never Ends

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This is a post about music.  But it begins with swimming.

Earlier this summer, I wrote that I was going to savor the last swim team season.  And I did just that, up to and including adding an extra meet onto the calendar to watch Andrew and his relay mates set a new team record in the All-Star meet.  We were thrilled he got to compete in that best-of-the-best meet in a hotbed of swimming!

But this past Saturday got off to a great start, helped by the fact that I didn’t have to be at the pool at 7 a.m. for the first time this summer!

So here are a few remembrances from a nice summer weekend that kept bringing thoughts (and connections) back to music.

Candice and I were at the local farmer’s market on Saturday, looking to get some great Evensong Farm eggs from our friend Julie.  (Quick aside:  I didn’t realize how tasteless store-bought eggs are until we missed our Evensong eggs for six straight weeks!)  Julie’s father is bluegrass bass and Seldom Scene legend Tom Gray – and he’s also her regular helper at the market.  When I saw Tom, I went and struck up a conversation about his recent pairing with Eddie and Martha Adcock.  Tom told me about their music and upcoming plans (including a November DC-area show on the 21st with the Institute of Musical Tradition).  He joined the Adcocks in time to play on their recent CD featuring original Country Gentlemen songs.  (Tom and Eddie are the two surviving members of that seminal band.)  I told Tom that my very first bluegrass festival was Mac Wiseman’s Renfro Valley Festival – where Martha and Eddie handled the sound and also were one of the featured acts.  It was a great way to spend 10 minutes with a real gentleman (not to mention a terrific bassist) and hear some of his stories from the road.

Later that afternoon, I was over at the House of Musical Traditions buying strings for my guitars (see photo at the top), when they pointed me next door where Suzy Bogguss was signing autographs and selling copies of her CD.  I wandered over and chatted for 5 minutes or so with this wonderful singer, who was appearing that night at the Birchmere.  Suzy’s new project is a great album and book of American folk songs, called the American Folk Songbook.  Check out her YouTube video singing Shenandoah.  Simply beautiful.

And speaking of beautiful voices…on Sunday night (after restringing those guitars), Candice and I traveled out to Wolf Trap to catch Alison Krauss and Union Station featuring Jerry Douglas.  It was a muggy night (humidity at least 120 percent!), but it didn’t matter…it was a great night for music.  Candice had never heard Alison live, so when she started singing Paper Airplane, Candice turned to me and said, “My goodness, what a voice!”

Yep.

It was a pretty flawless AKUS performance, as you would expect from these world class musicians.  They handled the instrumentals well, including a nice version early in the concert of Jerry Douglas’ paean to Uncle Josh Graves:  Who’s Your Uncle.  They played for two straight hours without a break, squeezing in just about all of Alison’s greatest hits – and Dan Tyminski’s as well.

And the weekend came full circle when Jerry Douglas spoke from the stage about moving to Washington early in his career to play bluegrass with none other than – The Country Gentlemen.  He joined the band about a decade after Tom Gray left the “classic” Country Gentlemen lineup, but the connections are real and never-ending.

The encore featured the band gathered round a single mic, singing beautiful harmonies in the old style.  You can catch a sample of the evening’s concert with the video below of AKUS singing Down to the River to Pray, from the O Brother soundtrack.

A wonderful way to end a nice summer weekend.

More to come…

DJB