Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Launching Artosphere
Rani Arbo headlines first week of WAC festival
Rani Arbo is already out for her morning walk in the Connecticut sunshine when it’s time for a phone interview with What’s Up! With birds serenading her along the way, she talks about the pleasures of being outdoors and of playing shows with her band, daisy mayhem, the folkAmericana-bluegrass-pop quartet that will perform twice during the opening week of Walton Arts Center’s Artosphere Festival. First up is an indoor concert at 7:30 p.m. May 5 in Starr Theater, followed by a performance as part of the Trail Mix series starting May 6.
Arbo thinks that this will be their third trip to Northwest Arkansas. “The last time was kind of a magical visit; I remember that we were stationed out on the trail [to play], and at some point we got a little rained out, so we ended up inside the James Turrell sculpture on the Crystal Bridges trail. We ended up singing inside there, which was amazing! The acoustics are incredible!” she enthuses. “We travel so much that things start to run together, but then there are these magical moments that stick out. And I have to say the whole setup of the Artosphere gatherings along the trail is just really, really one of the neatest performance setups we’ve ever been involved with. We’re super-excited to come back.”
On May 6, Arbo’s fans are invited to stop by Nadine Baum Studios at 505 W. Spring St. in Fayetteville to see the Arkansas Pottery Festival’s exhibition, then hear live music from Dandelion Heart, Papa Rap, mömandpöp, All Time Hits of Carnatic Music by Priya Ram and her students and more. Trail Mix concerts will be at various locations on the Walton Arts Center campus and nearby. The evening will close with an opening reception of the new visual arts exhibition, “Sol,” in WAC’s Joy Pratt Markham Gallery. More information on Trail Mix concerts can be found on the Artosphere app.
Arbo says that a traditional outdoor concert experience can be a little predictable; people gather around a gazebo or outdoor stage and have a picnic, which is a lovely time. “What I love about the Artosphere setup is that
it’s a discovery — so people are kind of ready to be surprised and delighted,” she says. “It’s kind of evoking the same wonder and vibe that you get when you take a walk in the woods and you don’t know what you’re going to find.”
That means being ready for kids. Arbo says daisy mayhem will pull from their album and program called “Ranky Tanky,” and children are invited to sing, clap, dance and interact with the band. “We wrote that album when we all had small kids, and we wrote it to be an album that wouldn’t drive parents absolutely crazy,” she explains. “It holds up pretty well that a lot of them aren’t officially kids’ songs, but there are things that we repurposed into being kids’ songs or songs that kids would like.”
She says that kids particularly enjoy seeing her husband’s “Drumship Enterprise,” made of old suitcases, cardboard boxes and other nontraditional pieces set up in the same fashion as a traditional drum kit.
“It harkens back to a jug band sort of a time,” she laughs. “It’s not because we can’t afford a drum set!” The quieter quality of sound makes room for the percussive qualities of the bass, fiddle and guitar too. The enterprise is always changing she says.
“You’ll watch a kid watch Scott. And you can see inside that little head, this child is saying ‘I could make that. I have all those things.’ We have all these stories of kids or parents who called us after shows and said, ‘You know Charlie went home and made an entire drumset out of cardboard boxes and cans and tape.’
“You should stock up on your recyclables before you bring your child to our show.”
Arbo says that she’s always been “an outdoors girl” despite growing up in Manhattan. While she studied sacred music and played cello, she was also doing science experiments and exploring the natural world with her father, who is a scientist. In college, she studied geology as a way “to spend time in the mountains and be a scientist,” while also making music. She wound up swapping the cello for a fiddle, which was easier to lug around while exploring the Yukon, British Columbia, Montana and other places. It was during this time that she discovered her love for old-timey music and bluegrass.
“I wandered for a little bit in the wilderness, trying to figure out what was going to happen next, and got a job at a magazine as an editor,” she says, where she met the bassist for daisy mayhem, Andrew Kinsey, with whom she’s played music for almost 30 years.
They formed a band called Salamander Crossing, which toured for most of a decade. “Then that band broke up as bands just sort of do sometimes. And then we remade this one, with a new guitar player [Anand Nayak], and with my current husband, [Scott Kessel] who plays percussion.” Their 20th anniversary hit at the same time as covid. Arbo says she’s glad that covid restrictions are allowing the band to get out and play again. Over the last two years, they laid low only doing a couple of online shows.
“I feel like our band performances are so much about the live energy and the exchange that we have with a live audience,” she muses. Plus she wanted to leave space for newer bands. “I thought, you know, other people need them more than we do right now. We can just kind of sit tight for a couple of years, and come back, which is what we’re doing now.”