Skitterin' Up
The Black and Blue Band
Black and Blue Music
1999
15 tracks
The Black and Blue Band is a family affair. Besides singer/songwriter Jake Willis, the band includes his wife Tammy Williams and their three sons aged thirteen, ten, and seven. The band's publicity materials demonstrate the parents' great pride in the abilities of each other and of the three children. In this day and age, it's reassuring to see a family who can work together so well.
There are benefits to having family members make music together. Among them are those legendary "blood harmonies" everyone loves, the tight sound that can occur when the musicians are so familiar they can predict what comes next, and the closeness the family itself enjoys. There are also hazards. Prime among these is loss of objectivity. This can go in two directions. It's all too easy to be over-critical of one's spouse or children, picking away at every little flaw in an irrational drive for perfection. It's equally as easy to see only the wonderfulness of one's talented husband, wife, or child and fail to notice those areas which could be improved. The trick is to find balance and objectivity.
The publicity for The Black and Blue Band brims over with praise for the writing and performing talent of Jake Willis, the beauty, grace and "haunting harmonies" of Tammy Williams, and the "amazing" talents of the three Williams boys. Reading this build-up, one might expect to hear an exceptional performance from this band. To assume this, however, would be to ignore that Tammy Williams is "an emerging vocalist" and the boys are, after all, still children with only the limited experience their years allow.
For a band which includes a novice vocalist and three children, the music on this release is not bad. In fact, had this information not been provided, I might still report that the music of The Black and Blue Band is not bad. There is clearly a lot of talent in this family. The music is clean and unoffending, a pleasant mix of faux Celtic and straight folk styles in a comfortable variety of tempos.
With the amount of excellent music being released in Canada, especially in the folk/roots area, is not bad good enough? If the aim is to make a dent in the national market, not bad simply won't make it. If the aim is to release a nice family album and to play gigs around one's own town, where the family is known and loved, a release like this is probably good enough. The artists can reap the love of local audiences and sell enough CD's from the stage to pay for the project.
Based admittedly on hearing only this one example of The Black and Blue Band's work, I hear a number of problems these artists need to resolve. The first step may be for one or both of the adults to learn to step outside the band, outside the family, and view it objectively as simply another group of musicians. If this is not possible, then another solution is to seek the opinions of knowledgeable, trusted musical peers who may be able to be more objective and honest in their critiques.
Over all, the music is competently performed. Clearly, even as young as seven years old, there is a great deal of talent in this family. However, while all the parts are in the right places and the songs roll smoothly from beginning to end, there is nothing here to spark the listener's imagination. There is a flatness of emotion to most of these tracks, a sense that too much energy may have gone into playing the music correctly and not enough into just enjoying the process.
There is nothing exceptional, either, about Jake Willis' songwriting. His melodies are clearly based upon traditional forms, in a couple of cases recognizeably so as other songs, and show little elaboration of those forms. This is plain music to the point it can become boring at times. As a lyricist, Willis would benefit from workshopping with better writers than he, studying great poems and lyrics of the past, or finding a songwriter mentor. Willis is not a bad lyricist, or poet even, but his lyrics tend to be cliche and uninteresting, at times even pedestrian. Even where he borrows from themes of old English, Irish, or Scottish folk songs, he fails to achieve their lyric beauty. Here is a poet who is technically competent but, having refined his craft, now has to develop his art to achieve greater depth of imagery and emotion.
Tammy Williams has a sweet voice. She needs to spend some time further developing her range and technique. Her performance on this release, however, suggests that mostly she just needs to sing more, to develop her confidence. Once she has become more confident of her own skills, this will be heard in her performance and will by itself improve her sound greatly. It seems, too, that Willis needs to pull back and just let his wife sing. In "Sarah Donnelly," the one song where Williams is the lead singer, her vocals are often overtaken and even covered by Willis' harmonies. It's difficult to tell whether this occurs in actual performance or as a result of the mix.
What can be said of the performance of those three admittedly talented boys? Only that they need the benefit of life-experience, of practice and performance, and of an objective teacher or director. They need to get past the sheet music or the rote-memorized song and to discover the joy of playing spontaneously. With time and some guidance, this will come.
This is clearly a band that has room to grow and develop. If these parents can learn to step outside and view the players not so much as their perfect loves and more as working artists, that growth will occur more quickly. Because this is difficult and sometimes impossible to do, they may be well advised to find an outside advisor to provide some direction.
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