Cathy & Marcy's Blog

July 17 & 18 we will celebrate the 4th Annual Old Time Banjo Festival in the greater Washington, DC. area. During the festival concerts and workshops, we will take time to remember our friend MIKE SEEGER. It’s no exaggeration that without Mike’s music collecting, documenting, teaching, recording & performing, the world’s interest in old time music, and banjo history and styles in particular, would be a lot smaller. Marcy has composed a new tune, “Rockbridge”, dedicated to Mike. Many songs and tunes will be performed in his honor. Read more about Mike Seeger on his website.

Mike was enthusiastic about “next generations” who embraced old time music from both traditional and innovative points of view. Two young players on this year’s festival are perfect examples. FRANK FAIRFIELD makes his first Washington, DC appearance. Hear him play “Nine Pound Hammer” like an old timer from the past on youtube.

ADAM HURT’s‘s elegantly innovative clawhammer style has made him a young star in today’s old time music scene. He’s won just about every significant contest, but more importantly brings a style all his own that still beautifully embraces the tradition.

TONY TRISCHKA’s contributions to banjo from minstrel sounds through contemporary bluegrass styles have influenced thousands of players from Bela Fleck to Steve Martin. His new TONY TRISCHKA SCHOOL OF BANJO continues the thread of exploring and teaching.

CHEICK HAMALA DIABATE plays the ngoni from his home country of Mali along with the banjo and guitar. A beautiful singer, composer and griot, his music will mesmerize.

What are Cathy & Marcy up to banjo-wise?
Cello Banjo, Tenor Banjo, Five String Banjo, Melody Banjo- we love them all and are practicing some new tunes/songs as well as our parts for the BIG BANJO ORCHESTRA, which will include TONY, CATHY, MARCY ADAM & hopefully even a BANJO BASS from the late 1800′s restored by Kevin Enoch.
Here’s a fun youtube video of Cathy & Marcy in BANJOLAND for all ages.

Join the BANJOFEST fun:
July 17
Old Time Banjo Contest- 11am @ Takoma Park, MD Gazebo
Contest and mini-concert free to audience. Winner gets a Kevin Enoch TRADESMAN Banjo. Sign up in advance or at the Gazebo at 11am.
Birchmere Music Hall @ 7:30pm- full concert
July 18: WORKSHOPS @ House of Musical Traditions with Tony, Adam, Cathy & Marcy
More info on the whole festival at www.oldtimebanjofestival.com

Aloha Snowstorm!
Click on each photo for larger version
ALOHA In the Hawaiian language means affection, love, peace, compassion and mercy. Since the middle of the 19th century, it also has come to be used as an English greeting to say goodbye and hello.(wikipedia.org)

While the east coast was getting slammed with 30+ inches of snow, we went directly from the GRAMMY Awards to the land of sun, sand, whales & Aloha – Hawaii. We spent lots of time in the music community-taking in a Slack Key Guitar concert with George Kahumoku and Ledward Kaapana, writing songs and jamming on ukuleles, guitars and harmony singing for hours and hours with Ginger Johnson and Robyn Kneubuhl of the Hula Honeys, visiting Keola and Moana Beamer (gorgeous slack key guitar and hula dancing), meeting songwriter/producer Melinda Caroll (who has compiled lots of CDs of Girl Scout Songs) and even meeting up with our local friend, Paul Reissler of Kid Pan Alley. We’ve got lots of ideas for a recording and brought home plenty of new material to work on.

Cathy took her first Hula lesson and is hooked-now looking up where to take classes in Maryland. Marcy taught Ginger of the Hula Honeys some CELLO BANJO and left one behind so Ginger could practice.

Meantime, we saw humpback whales up close and personal! Right now, the locals call it “Whale Soup”, not cause we’re gonna eat them (Cathy is still very vegetarian), but because the ocean is FULL of whales. We took a Pacific Ocean Foundation whale watching boat and marveled at 45 solid minutes of a boat side visitor-a baby whale (only 2 tons), playing with us. Then some star gazing, volcano trails, snorkeling, and a visit to a fabulous aquarium.
Whale MovieCLICK TO SEE WHALE MOVIE
Cathy lived in Winnipeg, Manitoba for 5 years and Marcy in Michigan for more than 15, so we apparently had already survived enough monstrous snow storms. As big as this was, neither Winnipeg or Michigan would have closed down. But, we’re shoveling now-both through the mail and the snow.

It was a whirlwind weekend for the GRAMMY Awards. We started Saturday, Jan. 31 with a networking breakfast @ 8:30am with nearly 100 folks involved in children’s music. The more the merrier! Then Cathy, Marcy & Chris Bacon were part of a Children’s Music nominees concert at the GRAMMY Museum. Standing room only created a special feeling and we were honored to perform with our fellow nominees. Later, at the Lifetime Achievement Awards, we saw Thomas Edison’s GREAT grandchildren accept an award. WOW! WOW! Real descendants of this inventor genius who’s phonograph and 1000+ patents changed much of the course of history.

Banjo to Beatbox Team: Charlie Pilzer, Trevor, Cathy, Marcy, Christylez @ GRAMMY Museum

Sunday, the pre-telecast event gave out 100 awards. And the winner is…….Ziggy Marley in the children’s music category.
Saw friends Bela Fleck, Sharon Isbin and quirky Loudon Wainwright win (High, Wide & Handsome).
MEANTIME, my nephew asked me to get Taylor Swift’s autograph. Nine year old Laila, part of our entourage, also had that in mind. So, when a friend pointed Taylor out in the crowd, we headed her way to request the autographs. We were stopped by her body guard who told us we couldn’t go near Ms. Swift. I said, “This nine year old simply wants an autograph. Are you gonna break the heart of a little girl?” He said, “There’s lots of little girls in the world.” I reminded him this was the price of fame and Taylor was more than happy to sign 2 autographs for us, JUST before winning her first GRAMMY and becoming the big winner that evening.
If you saw the TV show, just know that we saw it LIVE-along with 14,000 of our closest friends at the Staples Center. We were touched that our friend Mike Seeger’s name and picture were amongst the group the academy said goodby to this year.
At the GRAMMY party, Chris Bacon and his date led the dance floor in some cool SE DC line dancing moves. A few hours later, we were headed to the airport for Maui to work on a new cross cultural CD with our friends Ginger and Robyn of the Hula Honeys.
Long as we’re making music and life is interesting and we think we can make people happy, or thoughtful, or both, we’ll keep on doin’ it. Aloha for now.
Cathy & Marcy

First: Make a tax deductible contribution of $25 or more to Guitars Not Guns by going to their web site www.gngnca.org – and clicking on the “Donate Now” button in the upper right corner of any page. Specify the amount you want to give and in the “Dedication” section, write:“HEARTSTRINGS”.
Second: You will receive a Thank You from Guitars Not Guns that includes a request form for you to fill out.
Third: Complete the request form and e-mail it to us at info@cathymarcy.com
Fourth: You’ll hear back from us within a few days. We will suggest up to 3 instruments within your budget as well as recommendations of convenient, friendly and reasonably priced places to buy online or near you, depending on where you live.

Then: as you make more music in your life, you’ll enjoy it more knowing that you helped provide that same opportunity to a deserving kid in the metropolitan Washington D.C. area.

We will be helping people find electric & acoustic guitars, banjos of all kinds, ukuleles, mandolins, whistles and folk flutes, dulcimers and more.

We teach Marcy’s song, “SHARING” in sign language. The sign for “sharing” shows that you give some away and you take some for yourself. Click on song to LISTEN.
The song is from the CD, “CHANGING CHANNELS“.
SHARING

PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD. The program will run from November 1- December 20, 2009

We have always enjoyed hearing, seeing and performing with talented kids. Our upcoming 24th Annual Winter Family Concert will include the best in Scottish music. Our good friend and master Scottish fiddler, Bonnie Rideout joins us. In 1998 Marcy produced Bonnie’s family CD, “Gimme Elbow Room” which won a Parents’ Choice Gold Award.

Bonnie introduced us to the Rockville High School Pipe Band. They will also perform in the concert. The members of the band meet every Wednesday at Rockville High School to rehearse. Ages range from 12yrs.-high school. They work hard, practicing as a group for 2 hours per week marching in formation, learning new material and fine tuning the band sound with Highland Pipes, bass drum and snare drums.To keep up, many of the kids take private lessons during the week and everyone has to practice. We LOVED the sound of lots of Pipes together.

This band has been going since 1961 (with different kids of course). Some of its more notable performances include concerts at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the dedication parade for the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial; a Redskins half-time show; the world premeires of the movies Patton and a Bridge Too Far. For over 30 years, the Pipe Band has also been responsible for holding the annual National Capital Area Scottish Festival.

Come meet these talented kids, see and hear how the bagpipes work-or if you don’t live near here, find a local Pipe group.
Hear the Pipe Band, Bonnie Rideout & Cathy & Marcy together!
Check out the pipes up close!
For tickets, click HERE

Are we movie stars? Not yet, but we have taken the adventure of making our first official “music video” of the song “JUBILATION” from the new BANJO TO BEATBOX EP. Hard to say if we are the stars or if our puppets are the stars. OK, so how’d it happen? Read on!

When we decided to make a music video it began with the planning stage. Our first goal was that every aspect would be fun and that all the people working together would enjoy it. So we started with planning and brought together a great team of people of various ages and skills. Brad Tehaan was a film student that Cathy met in a film editing class. At 22 he is the brightest and best and we fully expect him to be making major movies in the future. We hope he includes us.

Ingrid Crepeau makes puppets that equal the genius of Jim Henson (we don’t take this compliment lightly) and she was excited about making puppets of Cathy, Marcy, Chris and Trevor, our recording engineer. She took photos of each of us and even looked at what clothing we would wear in the video shoot. Then Ingrid disappeared to her puppet making workshop.

Meantime, we created a script following each line in the song, and Brad turned it into a storyboard so that he’d know every camera shot that he needed to cover. We decided to make some of it look like live concert and to shoot some of it on green screen. Our friend Michelle Valeri would create Photoshop backgrounds so whatever we shot on green screen would have a location that could tickle the imagination. We all had a lot to learn and everyone was up for the experiments.

Cathy & Marcy assembled all of the props which included scuba gear, beach ball, clock, glow sticks, fun sunglasses, toy piano, beach hats, lounge chair, raincoat, windup toys, confetti, and more.

During the 2 day video shoot we had puppeteers ranging in age from 11 to 63. We also had a six year old apprentice, an expert at toy trains. The song JUBILATION played constantly as we performed and filmed each scene. Ingrid created shadow puppets for the audience and we started by filming the shadow puppets on the green screen. Then we filmed performance scenes, and then we went through every scene Brad had listed and more that we made up on the spot. The goal was that during the show each of us would meet our puppet with surprise and glee and by the end everyone would be singing JUBILATION. It was a giant team effort that included plenty of jokes, laughter and after hearing the song JUBILATION 1000 times, new rhymes and verses!

Once the filming was done Brad had the job of assembling all of the footage, editing, syncing the music to the film, creating animation, incorporating Photoshop pictures, and even learning about new animation techniques with one of our puppeteers, Barry Gordimer. It took about four week’s of Brad’s free time to pull the video together. He showed it to us every once in a while and we would get to comment and make suggestions.

The JUBILATION MUSIC VIDEO was a jubilant and fun process that brought together friends who love being goofy, creative, artistic and joyful together. When were done, after 100 hours of work between everyone involved (which does not include the making of the puppets) you’ve got almost 5 minutes to look at. We may not be movie stars, but we hope every time you watch it will tickle your funnybone, encourage you to sing-along and enjoy the fun for the sake of fun.

Comment on this blog to let us know your thoughts. Should we star in another movie?

For more on Chrisstylez Bacon visit www.Christylez.com

For more on Ingrid & Michelle’s puppet and song magic visit www.dinorock.com

And for all things Cathy & Marcy you know where to go www.CathyMarcy.com

FOR LYRICS & LINER NOTES TO THE BANJO TO BEATBOX CD TO HERE:

TO ORDER YOUR OWN DIGITAL OR CD COPY OF THE BANJO TO BEATBOX CD,GO HERE

Upcoming shows with Cathy, Marcy & Christylez Bacon:

June 27: Smithsonian Folklife Festival with ELLA JENKNS

July 22-25: Wolf Trap 11:15am

August 15: Blackrock Center for the Arts, Germantown, MD 7:30pm

August 16: Philadelphia Folk Festival

See CALENDAR for more date info.

Thanks for being here!