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Event
Stuart MacDonald/The Mutineers Benefit Concert/CD Release Party
Stuart MacDonald, founder of southern Maine's decade-old eclectic string band The Mutineers, will release a solo album called Leave It There on November 15th, 2013 at Frontier in Brunswick. All ticket sales will benefit the Good Shepherd Food Bank. Ted DeMille & Bobby St. Pierre will also perform at this event and release their "Jack Rabbits 'A Courtin.'"
MacDonald is excited about this new release, which features Jeff Trippe and Darren Finnegan of The Mutineers as well as local standout musicians Pete Morse, Dan Burke, Kevin Midgley, Jay Conway, Rick Wile, Gus MacDonald, Alan & Kim Bean, Leonard Krill & Brad Peck.
This collection takes the listener on a journey through the world of traditional music, with a variety of stylistic approaches. The title track, a traditional gospel hymn, relies on picked guitar and gorgeous piano lines alongside a steady acoustic bass to offer its words of wisdom. There are rollicking full-band versions of "In The Pines" and "Rude & Rambling Boy" alongside old time string band offerings like "Wreck of the 'Ol #9" and "Free From the Chain Gang." In the latter, Burke's dobro and Trippe's mandolin beautifully accentuate this newly released prisoner's vow to start anew.
MacDonald does perform several songs alone with guitar and harmonica. The Irish & Scottish (respectively) "Mary & The Soldier" and "Daily Growing" are beautiful old ballads performed in his unique arrangement. In the sparse "New Prisoners Song," Pete Morse features provides a poignant pedal steel guitar part alongside MacDonald's guitar & vocal.
This project covers a lot of ground within the folk, traditional, string band, acoustic, roots etc. arena. This is the music that is the framework of all that we hear now in these modern times. All the great early musicians from Jimmie Rodgers and Kelly Harrell to Henry Thomas and Washington Phillips, kept these old songs alive. This, and other humble recordings, aim to do that as well.
Writes Trippe of MacDonald's Leave It There:
"My friend Stuart MacDonald is probably the best example I know of an artist who will never sacrifice the integrity of the music he plays upon the altar of commerce. And make no mistake: we need such people. They remind us over and over that even the most gauche of pop bands still
must ride upon the shoulders of giants such as Robert Johnson, Lonnie Johnson, Doc Boggs, and Clarence Ashley. Beyond that, Stu has that rare ability to take us back even further, to the days that preceded the earliest recorded music, to those times we can only harken and lean to as we might gaze at the strange and blurry faces in nineteenth-century tintypes, when the names of performers and writers were lost but the songs survived. They still echo in the old granges, dance halls, taverns, and sometimes, in the interpretations of unique performers such as Stuart MacDonald."
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LocationFrontier (View)
14 Maine Street
Brunswick, ME 04011
United States
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