“I feel like there are songs in my future, but I’m not particularly in a rush to find them,” he says, although he notes that he’s already been working “slowly and furtively” on a few. And now that he’s gotten comfortable with the microphone, he’s even thinking about writing his own songs-in the grand folk tradition, of course. Smiley’s the de facto frontperson, but everybody sings-including Stone himself, marking a departure from his formerly exclusive role of banjo virtuoso. Joining him will be accordion player Moira Smiley, fiddler Sumaia Jackson, and cellist Tristan Clarridge, of roots experimentalists Crooked Still. It’s economically and logistically impossible to take a cast of 20 on the road, so Stone has assembled a stripped-down quartet to perform a selection of Lomax Project numbers, along with new arrangements of a further dozen tunes culled from Stone’s musical wish list. & amp amp amp amp amp lt a href="."& amp amp amp amp amp gt Jayme Stone& amp amp amp amp amp amp #39 s Lomax Project by Jayme Stone& amp amp amp amp amp lt /a& amp amp amp amp amp gt And then others we radically transformed.” “Nothing needed to be added you just need to sing the living daylights out of the music. “Some of the songs were left practically untouched, especially the a cappella songs from the Sea Islands,” Stone explains. “Like-minded musicians who really have one foot in folk tradition and the other in a more contemporary approach”, he calls them, and that’s borne out by the Lomax Project recording, an uncategorizable blend of lilting Caribbean melodies, deep African grooves, and jazz-informed harmonies. And then, true to the socialist Lomax’s belief that music is the expression of community, he set about assembling a flexible cast of collaborators that eventually included West Virginia roots scholar Tim O’Brien, bluegrass fiddler Brittany Haas, and jazz-guitar wunderkind Julian Lage. It connected all these dots that had been present in my music and my musical imagination.”Īfter trawling through a good chunk of the more than 30,000 recordings in the Lomax archives, Stone settled on approximately a hundred that he wanted to develop.
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But then a few years ago I read John Szwed’s incredible biography, Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World, and all the lights lit up. When I was in Mali, preparing to make the Africa to Appalachia record, I made my own recordings of traditional musicians, and when I made the record called Room of Wonders, many of the songs came from old recordings that I reworked, so it’s been a common thread.
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Field recording has always been a touchstone in my work in different ways. “And the seeds kept sowing all the years that I’ve done other projects. “The seed of it was planted 20 years ago, when I took up the banjo and started listening to field recordings, read one of Alan Lomax’s early books, and began my interest in folk traditions and folk culture,” the Toronto-born Stone explains in a telephone conversation from his Longmont, Colorado, home. Jayme Stone’s Lomax Project is a deep and delicious re-imagining of 19 songs originally captured in the field by pioneering ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, and while it was several years in the making, it had also been simmering in the back of Stone’s mind since the day he first decided to become a musician. Most artists think that their latest release is the culmination of their life’s work, and in the case of Jayme Stone’s new CD there’s no hyperbole in that self-assessment.