GLOBAL ROOTS, GLOBAL REACH
International folk music community coming to city
The Folk Alliance International Conference is not a music festival. It is a conference. The distinction is important. The international folk music community is converging on downtown Montreal for five days, starting Wednesday, but unless you’re a paid-up FAI member, you won’t be seeing any of the almost 200 showcased artists. Fair enough — it’s a music-industry event. But it does provide a handy opportunity to assess folk music’s current state of health.
“It’s the world’s largest conference for the folk music community,” said FAI executive director Aengus Finnan, speaking from the organization’s head office in Kansas City. “It’s the big annual opportunity for agents, managers, media, record labels, promoters, producers and presenters to network, do professional development, have peer sessions and mentorship. For the musicians, you could almost call it an audition — a showcasing event where export-ready artists can present themselves to the bookers who might hire them.”
“The word ‘folk’ in the context of something like Folk Alliance International is a very broad term, an umbrella term,” said Mike Regenstreif when asked the broodiest of questions: What is folk in 2019? A longtime Montrealer who hosted the popular self-created program Folk Roots/ Folk Branches on CKUT, he now lives in Ottawa, where he hosts a similar show on CKCU. He has attended multiple FAI conferences in places as far-flung as Washington, D.C. and Memphis, and he covered the event extensively for the Gazette in 2005, the last time it was held in Montreal.
“It’s not a guy in a coffee house singing his own songs with an acoustic guitar, although that’s certainly part of it. It envelops all of that, plus various ethnic and international styles, from klezmer to Arabic music, to Celtic music, African music. New Orleans brass-band music is a folk tradition, although you might commonly think of it as jazz or funk.”
Scanning this year’s list of showcased artists, Regenstreif saw “a lot of what I would call old-guard folkies — David Bromberg, Eliza Gilkyson. But also a lot of new names, a lot of Québécois music, all sorts of things.”
When FAI was founded in 1989 as the North American Folk Music and Dance Alliance, it was an opportune moment to begin a more inclusive definition of what most Americans and Canadians had thought of as folk. The ’80s and early ’90s saw a dramatic increase in the visibility of a whole array of traditional and modern international sounds — for the first time, a person could step into a good record store and be presented with a choice of music that was truly global. Some crucial albums helped spread the word: The Indestructible Beat of Soweto introduced international listeners to South African music, making stars of Ladysmith Black Mambazo; David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label did something similar for Brazilian music; Peter Gabriel’s Real World imprint brought artists from all over the world to record and collaborate in the star’s studio in rural England.
It was a time that saw frequent use of the buzz phrase “world music,” a lazy tag that has thankfully fallen into disuse as the forms to which it referred have been more and more drawn into a global folk embrace.
“There isn’t really a difference between the two,” Finnan stressed. “‘World music’ is only a term if we’re using it from here in North America or the Anglo-Saxon music industry and scene. But if you’re in a band in a community in Madagascar or Colombia, playing your folk music, then using that same paradigm, bluegrass is world music if you don’t understand the music and the language and it’s from a different place. It’s an industry-contrived term. We’ve opted to use the term ‘global roots,’ as it relates to a fusion of sounds.”
The relationship between the North American and international styles and cultures has become increasingly nuanced with awareness that the traffic is two-way. Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré was embraced by North American audiences in the ’80s as a living link to the wellspring of the blues tradition, even though he was happy to admit that he himself had been influenced by John Lee Hooker. It’s helpful to remember, too, that there was a time when folk, quite literally, was pop.
“In 1950, when the Weavers put out Goodnight Irene, it became a monster pop hit,” said Regenstreif. “Dylan did the same in ’65 with Like a Rolling Stone. The Lovin’ Spoonful guys were all Greenwich Village folkies. The Byrds … I could go on. The relationship has always been very fluid.”
But not always completely fluid, one could argue.
“Sure, there’s always been a certain amount of policing (of genre borders),” Regenstreif said. “If you think back to 1965 when Dylan went electric at Newport, some of the old-guard folkies were really upset about it. Today, what Dylan was doing back then is very common on the folk scene.”
A popular debate has revolved around how, exactly, folk is delineated. Take hip-hop: grassroots, supporting local scenes, utilizing the musical tools at hand — it fits the standard criteria as well as, or even better than, some of the things we call folk without a thought. It begs the question: How old does something have to be before it qualifies as traditional?
“There are valid arguments to be made that hip-hop is a valid folk form,” said Regenstreif. “It’s part of a community. I wouldn’t say that what Kanye West does necessarily has anything to do with folk music, but certainly with the street-level artists, the case could be made.”
From the artists’ perspective, folk makes for a milieu that’s more loyal and less ageist; performers can maintain a dignified career into their later years. For another thing, it’s a whole lot easier for rockers to repurpose themselves as folk artists than vice versa. John Kay of Steppenwolf had a hand in inventing heavy metal with the biker anthem Born to Be Wild, but he’ll be at the Folk Alliance International Conference as a singer-songwriter — a return, in fact, to his pre-Steppenwolf identity in Toronto’s Yorkville folk scene of the mid-1960s.
It’s the rare artist who can comfortably inhabit both realms, and Regenstreif cited one.
“When I look at, say, Bruce Springsteen’s Broadway thing (Springsteen on Broadway, the long-running solo concert series now commemorated with a Netflix special and album of the same name), to me that’s much more of a folk evening than a rock ’n’ roll evening. It’s a solo performance with a lot of talking. When I listen to (the album), it reminds me of a folk concert.”
John Prine, a contemporary of Springsteen from the more acoustic end of the spectrum, was far ahead of the curve in establishing an independent, self-run business model when the major labels started dropping the first wave of singer-songwriters. But even this paragon took considerable flak in 1979 when he recorded Pink Cadillac, a rockabilly-flavoured outing partly produced by Sam Phillips, the man who discovered Elvis Presley. One person’s roots could be another person’s betrayal. That kind of binary thinking has been dissolving over the years, though. It could be that straitened times foster a greater sense of unity. Co-operation benefits everyone.
“The music economy in this day and age is a really difficult one,” said Regenstreif. “Record companies, for most intents and purposes beyond the most popular acts, have mostly fallen away. Eighty to 90 per cent of the folk material that crosses my desk now comes from artists who are putting out their own records.”
In Finnan’s view, the most significant development of the past 20 years has been the consolidation and dissemination of myriad American roots styles under the Americana banner. It’s a trend that ticked along quietly until the unlikely multiplatinum success of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack brought it into the full spotlight.
“The branding of that, the presence of that, the adoption outside of the U.S. of the term as a descriptor for a certain sound
Eighty to 90 per cent of the folk material that crosses my desk now comes from artists who are putting out their own records.
and style — that would be the one dramatic shift in terms of the musical ecology across the spectrum,” Finnan said.
Emblematic of another very healthy development is Tanya Tagaq, this year’s FAI keynote speaker and a spiritual inheritor of Buffy Sainte-Marie, this year’s recipient of the International Folk Music Awards’ People’s Voice Award.
(While in town for the conference, Sainte-Marie will discuss her authorized biography Friday, Feb. 15 at Rialto Hall and will perform Saturday, Feb. 16 at Corona Theatre; both events are open to the public.)
“I’m looking forward to what Tanya Tagaq has to say,” said Regenstreif. “There’s been a real surge in the presence of Indigenous music in the last several years, and she has been right at the forefront of that.” “There is no other artist who so boldly inhabits an approach to creativity
that is as devoid of artifice, convention or worry about public perception,” said Finnan.
“The relationship to Indigenous communities in the U.S. isn’t as engaged or interactive within the (American) music industry. It’s one of the great challenges and opportunities. There’s plenty of work to be done to foster the same sort of renaissance that’s being seen and felt and heard in Canada.”
As the conference gets set to welcome 3,000 delegates from 35 countries, Finnan — who got his post-secondary education at Concordia University — remarked on how Montreal was chosen partly for its “incredible musical history. As it relates to our theme of creativity and innovation, Montreal is an internationally known hub. And it dovetails with our return to the U.S. next year, in New Orleans. There’s a cultural and musical story and lineage there that we want to tap into.”