A couple of weeks ago I attended my second 50th anniversary
concert of the year – a reunion of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band at Berkeley’s
Freight and Salvage, and it was quite a contrast to the big arena Rolling
Stones show I heard a couple of months earlier. One obvious difference was the
audience, which was - well – mature, in contrast to the Stones crowd, which
seemed peopled by twentysomething Facebook and Google employees. Kweskin band
guitarist Geoff Muldaur had tongue halfway in cheek when he characterized the Freight
audience as “A bunch of old folks and their parents.” Then there was the music
– not an electric instrument in sight, and a repertoire that drew heavily on
traditional tunes and things learned from the Harry Smith Anthology, which
served as the Bible of the folk revival.
Where the Kweskin band held up against the Stones was in
chops and energy. Both leader-guitarist Kweskin and Geoff Muldaur sounded fine both instrumentally
and vocally. The third original band member, vocalist and sometime kazoo player
Maria Muldaur might not have been as lithe as she was in her heyday, but she
sounded just great, and traded witty banter with her reunited colleagues. Genius
banjo player Bill Keith, who essentially invented the complex melodic form of
banjo playing, was an amiable but relatively inconspicuous presence for most of
the show, playing the chords and simple runs he played with Kweskin early in
his career. A fifth original member, fiddle player Richard Greene, was
scheduled to tour, but was sidelined by illness at the last minute, so veteran
bay area fiddler Paul Shelasky stepped in, and did a superb job of filling his
shoes. The rest of the band for this
tour comprised relative youngsters: jug player Meredith Axlerod, bassist Sam
Bevan, and the phenomenal steel guitar player Cindy Cashdollar who, along with
Shelasky, provided the bulk of the melodic leads during the evening.
One person who was not replaced was original Kweskin
washboard and washtub bass player Fritz Richmond, who passed away in 2005.
Geoff Muldaur played Richmond’s wildly customized washboard on a few songs and
the band shared numerous stories about this colorful and influential
musician. In two sets of music the band
mostly revisited familiar material from their heyday, and the sold-out crowd
ate up chestnuts like “I’m a Woman,” “Richmond Woman Blues,“ “Fishin’ Blues,” and “Minglewood Blues.” Despite the new recruits and the decades long
hiatus of the original members sharing a stage, the band was mostly tight and
well rehearsed. Both Kweskin and Geoff Muldaur continue to impress with their
solo and dual fingerpicking, and Keith work from his sideman role late in the
show to show off his dazzling melodic technique on a rousing instrumental
version of “Caravan.”
Reunions like this can often be lackluster affairs,
motivated by money more than artistic concerns. Although I hope the band
members get a decent payday out of this brief tour, it was clear that the
original jug band members, and their younger recruits, were genuinely enjoying
one another’s company again, and bringing quite a bit of their old magic back
in the process.
