Folk Alliance 2014 Report

Don't let the title of this article mislead you.  I am the least qualified person to evaluate and report on the talent that came to the Westin Hotel in Kansas City for the 2014 International Folk Alliance Conference.  The problem is not my judgment of talent.  On that end, I think I'm pretty good!  The problem is that I was just so damn busy.  The conference was a total trip, but that doesn't change the fact that there's still only 24 hours a day and that that's not an adequate amount of time to hear everything.  Yes, Graham Nash was there.  Yes, I had every intention of hearing his keynote speech. Was I able to catch him? No. 

That said, it was impossible not to hear great musicians 24/7.  Literally impossible.  You could walk through the Westin lobby, ballroom, mezzanine and bar and there would be a 100% chance of hearing either an organized performance, impromptu jam session or an acoustic guitarist riffing around like a maniac by the elevator.  And in the elevator—and in the men's room.

One thing's for sure:

51 weeks out of the year this would never fly.  If this wasn't a contracted thing, literally every single registrant would be kicked out of the hotel for totally valid, repeated noise violations. To call this a liberating musical experience would be an understatement.  If for some reason you were a grinch who hated folk music, this conference would be hell.  At noon you would be suffering.  At midnight you'd be suffering.  At 5 am?  You better believe you'd be suffering.  For people like me though, this was heaven.  Albeit a very busy version of it.

But when I wasn't busy I heard some great music by some great artists.  Below are just some of them.  I recommend you check them out.

Baskery

Whiskey Shivers

The Appleseed Collective

Star and Micey

John Fullbright

The Midnight Roses

Carolina Story

And, of course, Gangstagrass—the reason I was even there.

Security by Antibalas

Security by Antibalas

This hour-long afro-beat jam album may not be essential, but it's wildly fun free-form funk, filled with brass, scissor-y guitars, b3 organs, static electronica and percussion thats rivers down like a violent hailstorm.  The whole thing is masterfully arranged and, at times, these virtuoso musicians' sonics are quite hypnotizing.  

Music Of The Near-Death Experience

Celestial Soul Portrait by Iasos

In 1978, the Developmental Psychology department at Plymouth State University performed a series of studies on 60 patients who had survived near-death experiences. The goal, Professor Joel D. Funk has said, was to determine which piece of music best resembled what was occurring in people's heads in the moments when they thought they were going to die.  

For his experiment, Funk played a series of recordings and found that the most consistent piece chosen by his subjects was "The Angels of Comfort" by Iasos, an artist who was a pivotal figure in the development of new age music.

It was arguably an appropriate discovery, for Iasos was a product of a near-death experience.  Born in Greece in 1947, his father was a holocaust-survivor; a victim of unbelievable terror at Auschwitz. 

An accomplished musician, Iasos moved to San Francisco and became both blessed and cursed with a colorful creativity that manifested itself as an amazing, never-heard-before music, which occurred only in his head.  In a sensation he described as "wearing headphones but without the headphones," the "radio" inside his young mind was playing what Iasos described as "paradise music."

What's paradise music? According to Iasos, it was "heavenly music that exists on higher dimensions...paradise is a frequency range.  Boredom is low frequency.  Hatred is very low frequency.  Love is a nice, high frequency.  Paradise is a super-high frequency."

Released in 2013 by Numero Group, Celestial Soul Portrait is a 13-track compilation of Iasos's "super-high frequency" paradise music.  It's as beautiful and breathtaking as it is listless and unfocused. Listeners with narrower definitions of "good music" will probably think it's pretentious—and they may be right.  But if you have any "new age" in your musical palette—or even the slightest issue falling asleep at night—this collection is almost essential listening.