the concert I went to last night

[dragonlady7]

"Bela Fleck And Abigail Washburn: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert" (Watch on YouTube)

This is the duo I saw in concert last night doing an NPR Tiny Desk Concert some time a year or two ago-- the child Abigail's pregnant with in this concert is 10 months old now, and as she charmingly described him during some of their patter, he is "a fatty. Can't find a chin on him for the life of us," as contrasted to the five year old who is now all long and child-y "and no waddle left in him"-- this was in the context of introducing a song they'd written about how fast time moves. (Watching the video, her voice is a little weaker and breathier than it was last night-- looks like she's at the stage of pregnancy where her lungs are a bit compressed, and I'm impressed she still did the clogging song. Now she is sort of a sweet little waif in a lace handkerchief-hem dress, and I'm refusing to consider whether she's younger than me.) (Their banter was about like this, though.)

It was a lot of songs off their album, but it was lovely to have the introductions and contexts. Abigail, on some of her earlier albums, has sung songs in Mandarin, and she explained one of them-- she'd majored in it in university, and took up banjo afterward, and so the second song she ever wrote was in Mandarin, and she explained the poem it was based upon, a Classical Chinese meditation of a woman looking at the yarn she'd knit her now-absent son a garment from, and then she concluded "so this song has nothing to do with that poem," and then as she sang the first few lines, she translated them as she played the instrumental licks between them.

As Dude and I came in and sat down, the woman in the chair in front of us looked at us and said, by way of greeting, "You're the youngest people here!" Ed note: We are not notably young. Also, for the record, there were a handful of other people under 40 present, including one twentysomething in a fantastic knee-length poofy dress with petticoat and some very demure ankle boots, I quite liked her aesthetic but I only saw her fleetingly.

Apart from that, yeah, it was a lot of older folks. Not entirely white, but quite.

(There was a hilarious schtick they did about how they met, which was a fictional story about how BanjoMingle Dot Com [which they singsonged in unison, it was quite funny] got hacked and accidentally paired them despite them having specifically requested other criteria in their acronym-laden profiles, which so far hasn't shown up in other videos of the two of them performing, so I'll mention here that it was goofily amusing. Though the part I liked best was not the actual punchline, it was that Béla described his sad lonely state, and Abigail said "she was just a lonely girl eating a lot of pints of mint chip lactose-free ice cream and watching Battlestar Galactica reruns" and Béla said "actually that sounds great" and she was like "actually it was, I don't know why I felt I needed to change that".)

In the audience, Dude and I discussed prior concert experiences-- we both used to go to shows a lot more when young. But he admitted he'd never been in a moshpit, and most of my show experience prior had been in pits. The reason is that my youngest, baby sister, in fact Farmsister, was super into punk and hardcore when she was about 15 or 16, and I was about 20, and there were concerts she wanted to go to that Mom wouldn't let her attend, but I could go, so I volunteered to chaperone her. And so I spent a bunch of those summers home from college going to punk shows with my baby sister and getting in fights with people who tried to bother her. And I'd sort of forgotten about that, but it's a lot of the shows I went to. Meanwhile Dude, living alone in NYC, went to a lot of like, jazz clubs where you paid a $3 cover and sat next to the piano bench with the bottle of beer you brought in and listened to a guy humming along with his own improv solo.

So-- different lives, there. It did solidify my resolution that I have to buy my own banjo, though; I'm going to the farm tomorrow after tonight's lesson ,and I'll be back in a week in time to go to the next lesson, but I won't have had access to an instrument to practice at all in that time, so. *shrug*