A New Album with Madison Roots to Check Out

                        Rost and Agner practicing to record Violet Cusp, Lori Citro photo

Last week a new album landed in my lap. It’s by Madison pianist Nancy Rost and Washington, D.C. – based bass player Eric Agner, and title is Violet Cusp. That sounds a lot like the hippie album titles of my youth, and there’s some of that feel in its six original tunes. I rarely write about records any more – the blogosphere ain’t what it used to be – but, full disclosure, Rost, who works out of Madison Music Foundry, is my piano teacher. I started playing again after 60 years, and her intuition for what I need to learn – and what songs I should be playing to learn it – has been absolutely spot-on.  So I figured I’d give her EP a spin. 

In a nutshell, Rost and Agner co-wrote, play, and sing lead on all of Violet Cusp’s six tracks; they’re joined by a slate of Baltimore and Madison musicians (details online), and a lot of the exchange took place across the 850 miles separating the nation’s capital from Wisconsin’s.

You can’t pin a genre on this disc. The title track echoes its hippie name – “the guitar part on that tune has a Byrds vibe,” Rost says. “Give You Everything” is folk-rocky, with Bob Dylan-esque vocals. There’s jazzy keyboard work from Rost on “If You Knew Me,” which has gospel undertones; “Ship that Sailed” is a nicely turned, bossa-leaning piece with haunting lyrics; “See You Again” is straight-up soul with a hint of New Orleans and a rhythm that reminds me a lot of Rufus Thomas’s 1965 R&B hit “Walking the Dog.”

Because arts journalism is so meager in this town – and because to grow the arts in Madison, local artists need more exposure than they usually get – I sat down with Rost to get the scoop on Violet Cusp.

CulturalOyster: How did you hook up with a bass player in DC to make an album?

Rost: Eric’s been in music a long time. He plays in several Baltimore bands including one called The Racket – they’re very active there, and he’s also made a couple of songwriter albums under his own name. We met through the February album writing challenge online – it’s an online community where people write fourteen songs in 28 days – on leap years, fourteen and a half!  In 2008 that half was a collaboration I did with Eric and we really liked that first thing we did so we kept writing together although we didn’t meet till three years later. Over time we built up a body of work and finally decided it would be a good idea to make an EP.

CulturalOyster: What’s the process been like?

Rost: Songwriting is what really brings it together.  When we first started he gave me lyrics he didn’t know what to do with, stuff he was writing on his own – rootsy folk rock he wrote for guitar – and I was giving him tunes that had more jazz to them. But the elements I brought fit what he was writing. We write in different ways but everything we did for this album began with his lyrics and my music, though in the process we added each other’s work, too.

CulturalOyster: Why did you name the album for the third track?

Rost: Honestly, it was the most interesting title. It has a nostalgic feel and the song has a lot of nostalgia – we’re both in our 50s and we like the music of our youth – a lot of that comes out in the music we make.  The story behind it is that I had written a song called “Moonless” that had a line about the indigo cusp of July. Eric liked that and he thought I could write a whole song based on that line. So later, when we were working on new songs for the album I said why don’t we write Indigo Cusp, but it just came out Violet. 

CulturalOyster: What was the hardest part about putting the album together?

Rost: Working long distance had its challenges. We met in Washington to lay down the basic tracks, with Baltimore musicians – we had a couple of days to rehearse and one to record – a twelve hour session. It was very concentrated and tiring, but also very exciting.  And then Eric and I both did overdubs from home – I did some by myself and some with Kenny Koeppler at Sound Garden on Atwood. So there are some Madison musicians on the album – Elise Nims, who helps run the Foundry and who’s played in symphony orchestras around the state, plays oboe on one track, and there are Madison-based backup singers on several tracks –Bootsy La Vox, who fronts a David Bowie tribute band, and John Crossman works with me in our acoustic trio Two Johns and a Nancy, and Stephen Lee Rich, who used to be known as a yodeling cowboy.

To make everything work we had to learn to communicate about music with words – and it can be easy to misinterpret. The song “See You Again” has a call-and-response chorus at the end – I tried to explain in words where it needed to go and it got put in the wrong place. It took five or six passes to get everything the way we wanted it, but we just talked and emailed all the time and despite all the complications the sound is really cohesive.

CulturalOyster: What’s the future of the Rost/Agner collaboration?

Rost: I know we’ll continue to collaborate – there’s more to come, but it’s open-ended right now.  We’ll have to wait and see what happens.
__________________________________ interview by SK

Sweet Honey: Healing for Troubled Times

                                    Howard T. Cash photo, courtesy of SHIR website 

Sweet Honey in the Rock is honest and true in a vanishing universe of honest and true things. Last seen in Madison at the Wisconsin Union Theater a decade ago, the world-famous a capella group of African-American women returns on February 29, Leap Year Day, to Overture Hall, capping Black History Month. The 2020 theme has been African Americans and the Vote, so Sweet Honey’s sweet inspiration is right on time this urgent election year.

                         Carol Maillard. Howard T. Cash photo

  What other musical entity is as deeply enmeshed in our national history as Sweet Honey, whose polyphonic vocal harmonies are born of West Africa, two-plus centuries of Black American music, the Civil Rights Movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s and the bitter edges of current events?  If you’re new to Sweet Honey, please take a minute to read about Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, who founded the group in 1973 and retired in 2004. There’ve been lots of personnel changes over the years, though the current group of four voices includes Carol Maillard and Louise Robinson, who’ve been  there, on and off, since the beginning. I had the good fortune to interview Maillard on the phone last week.

CulturalOyster: Your website says this is your 45^th anniversary tour.  I don’t want to ask about the whole history of the group – that would be a book, or maybe two.  But is there one thing you can say about Sweet Honey that just nails it?

Maillard: Actually we’re in our 46^th-47^th year.  There’ve been lots of changes.  No one has been with the group for its whole history.  I was in it from ’73 through ’77 and then I was doing my acting career in New York, but every now and then when they needed a substitute I’d come back. And then I came back full time in ’92, so about 27-ish years. 

From experiencing what people say I think we keep going because we bring our energy into the community. Lots of artists have booking powerhouses that organize their tours – we don’t have that. Our fans have a need and they may express it to a theater or an organization to get us to appear there. We’re invited. We get around the world because people ask us to come. That has a lot to do with our longevity and with the spiritual need of the communities we visit. Not a lot of artists have that. The music of the group is a mission – we bring people to awareness of their own voice and power – the things they need to make themselves feel whole. It’s about healing – people heal by speaking up. It is really important. People and communities have a voice, and they need to use it. 

CulturalOyster: You often sing lead. Last time you were here you led one of those rafter-raising, soul clapping, call-and-response gospel tunes that epitomize what I need from music, and I’ve been trying to track it down ever since. All I know to call it is “I’m Goin’ Home One Sweet Day.”  It blew me away – I wrote about it in my year-end review. What is that song?

Maillard: Oh, that’s Thomas A. Dorsey. I’m not sure of the right title. I guess it has two. “If You See My Savior” is one; the other is “Standing by the Bedside of a Neighbor.” That may be the official title. Bernice was the original performer; we recorded it, I think you can find a YouTube video with her singing the lead.

I had an incident once – I had taken over the lead for that song and always introduced it as “Standing by the Bedside of a Neighbor.” We were on the Bobby Jones Gospel Hour on BET and we were talking, I did an interview and then he said “and now Sweet Honey’s gonna sing “If You See My Savior” – he started it with those words and I started singing the second verse, which starts like that, and I didn’t know how to get out of it! I was thinking “you’re not on the right verse, the others are answering you but you’re not in the right part!” All this was going on in my head while I was singing and I finally I busted out laughing. I went “hold it everybody, stop!” We stopped the song and the filming and I said “he started with those words and I’m in the wrong place!” The audieuce fell out laughing! 

CulturalOyster: You released an album, Love in Evolution, in 2016 – that’s the newest one I know of. Since then you’ve been working with a bass player – a guy – Romeir Mendez. How does that change the feel of Sweet Honey?

Maillard: That’s nothing, everybody’s on this earth and we love everybody, we love the proper male energy, I’ll put it that way.  It doesn’t really shift the energy of what we do. Romeir is a wonderful young man, he understood right away he was a complimentary voice. He’s grown and we have grown learning to to work with him. He plays on pitch, and that really does have an effect on us, ‘cause we can sing with each other anywhere, above the notes or below, we just have a way of doing that – the voices are very much a unit. It doesn’t matter if we have the right pitch vibration or not. We have a way of going right where the person leading us goes and we have a tendency to veer, or speed up or slow down – the audiences only hear trained musicians, it sounds great, but the main thing with Romeir is he keeps the pitch and rhythm and he keeps things fresh.

CulturalOyster: We’re living in dark times right now – much different than when you were here in 2011. Your music has always been political – sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly, in the uplift you bring to keep us from going down.  So I’m curious – how do the times we’re living in right now influence the repertory you’re working with on this tour?

Maillard: I think a lot of the music the group has done since it’s inception has a timeless feeling. Some of it is very art historical. You call up what you need to help you need to get through and make the next step forward, so sometimes we won’t want to do a particular song, or somebody will say we should bring that song back out because it’s relevant. When you introduce the song, that’s where you can bring it into contemporary times. We are wading in the water right now, and the waters are troubled.

CulturalOyster: I think of your repertory as having two basic threads – there are contemporary, topical songs that address what’s going on in both rhythm / genre and words, and then there’s the deep gospel repertory, as old and primal as dust even when the songs are recent. What unifies these two threads? Or are there more threads, or is there only one?

Maillard:  I think it really is multifaceted. We draw from our culture and our history and we come from people who are resilient and strong. When I think about what our ancestors experienced – that horrifying boat trip – the ones who survived had to learn to protect themselves and we still have to teach our young men and women how to survive in this world, to be aware that anything could happen to you at any time because of who your people are. I think all of us of African descent around the diaspora have come to bless this planet, I’ll just say that. Our struggle inspires our resilience and sometimes we take that for granted but we’re still here and we’re not goin’ nowhere. Everybody needs to calm down and be together and make all that greed and power and racism and sexism and all these things that isolate everyone go away. The world has to become more equal, more tolerable for all people.

CulturalOyster: Is there anything I should have asked but didn’t? 

Maillard: Hmm. We love hearing from fans. Like I said, we really do exist because of the audiences, the people who invite us. We want people to know we’re on social media and we love it when people respond – if they post comments or pictures they take, which we know they’re doing.

And please ask the people of Madison to go out and do something kind, especially for someone they don’t know. Ask a kid at a bus stop how they’re doing.  Tell somebody hey, walk in health. Give a dollar somewhere. It’s a good mantra for us this year, with all this craziness going on.

__________________________________________________ interview by SK