Call It Campground

Stroll the campgrounds at Clifftop late at night, after the day's contests and the evening's dance, and you'll hear a glorious cacophony which would have delighted the heart of Charles Ives (that composer of antiphonal marching-band collages): fiddles ring, growl, and scratch, banjos, guitars, banjo-ukes and unnamed instrumental oddities twang and thunk as countless circles of friends—some old, some just-made—gather to celebrate the diverse glories of old-time music. Some of the tunes played are, like the players, long-time friends, mysteriously refreshed and made new with each rendering. Others are crooked treasures unearthed by some diligent collector or tunehound, to be savored and instantly snatched up by cronies. Occasionally, brand new creations in the old-time style may leap forth—like some mountain-girl Athena, dressed in gingham, bursting bravely from the brow of a fiddling Zeus. But even in playing old tunes, round about the 15th time through the loops and coils of those dervish strands, mysterious things begin to stir… like half-glimpsed golden carp gliding through absinthe-green pond waters.

I contend that amidst such extended witching-hour colloquys, a new old-time sound has evolved—a music that hews closely to the old sound while breaking new ground. This form of music is less about stage performance than rapturous, entranced, endless musical conversations about the unfathomable depths of the humblest of fiddle tunes. I’ve grown fond of the term “campground” for this extended, improvisational, organic form of old-time music. It's a sound that's been captured “in the wild” on countless cassettes and minidiscs over the decades, but has rarely made it onto recordings…

To nail down the sound I mean, I must distinguish it from a few things. First, I am hopefully talking about something more than what has been contemptuously referred to by some as “festival fiddling”, or lowest-common denominator old-time music. There’s a certain kind of old-time sound from someone who got a little lazy when working out the bowing, and has fallen into some patterny playing that doesn’t serve the tune well. A certain way of slurring and pulling hard on certain notes with an incessant busy rhythm that does not convince the aficionado. I hear less of this type of music as the years roll on. More of us older players have stuck with it long enough to almost figure out what we’re doing. And the younger players coming along, iPod, podcast, MP3 and MySpace-savvy, have all managed to get their hands on obscure old field recordings that put them several decades ahead of the rest of us in getting the repertoire and the feel.

By “campground” I also don’t mean the sort of mega-jams that happen when twenty or thirty musicians decide to dogpile into a sort of musical sauna and sweat their collective way through some tunes. You could call that sort of music “organic” I guess in the same way that a large, mobile mushroom moving towards a major population center is organic; but in neither case are we sanguine about the long-range prospects.

Last but not least, much of the really good music played in the campgrounds wouldn't qualify as what I’m calling campground music as a style (perhaps to the relief of the players). You can hear some amazing music wandering around as long-time friends sit down to share a few tunes-- no frills, no messing around.

What I can say about “campground” as a style is the following:

• The music goes on a long time. Each tune gets played long enough that the repetitions actually begin to work on the players’ and listeners’ ears as a specific effect. In this sense a comparison could be made to minimalist music (and in fact some reviewers of the Clifftop Notes project have been using phrases like “old-time Steve Reich”) which counts on the impact of many repetitions with slow subtle changes.

• The music is a conversation. Players listen to and respond to each other so that you hear little variations move through the performance like shifting weather patterns. Players savor the individual style of each player and the particular chemistry of the session as that particular combination of players respond to and play off each other.

• The goal is extended collective exploration of the tune. Variations and improvisation, when they happen, are not like soloing in jazz or bluegrass. Rather they represent a player finding an unexpected alternate pathway in the tune, another way of hearing something they have heard hundreds of time. The experience is similar to what the French call jamais vu (the polar opposite of déjà vu), the experience of seeing something familiar as if you had never seen it before. (This first happened to me, as a teenager in California, staring at my foot—under circumstances best referred to only obliquely at this point.)

This kind of playing happens at dances as well, when you need to play a tune many times through to keep the dancers moving. But I don’t think it happens much on stages, because the energy of the music is not turned outward towards a “performed-for” audience but rather into the circle of the players. As a result, trying to capture it in a recording is also in a way a paradoxical, quixotic quest. (Listeners will need to judge for themselves the extent to which we’ve tilted at the windmills and vanquished the giant on the Cliffhangers/Clifftop Notes trilogy.)

So there you have it—birth of a new genre name. Call it campground! — Mark Simos