We need live music
On Crow and Gazelle's sublime Kansas show
You don’t usually find music reviews here, and that’s not exactly what this is.
Stay with me.
On Saturday, as part of my job marketing the Green Guitar Folk House I went to see Crow and Gazelle. They’re folk/Americana touring musicians outta Texas/OK.
Seeing live music can be a transcendent experience.
The reason is may be overlooked because music is more common than it should be. After all, we set poetry, dance, and visual arts up on pedestals. That shit is fancy, and it sure ain’t for everyone.
But music has somehow crossed the blood-brain barrier of art. It’s made for all, available to all, without fear or rejection. The madness of that truth is worth swimming into.
On Saturday, it was Crow and Gazelle, a duo of particular beauty and capability in this regard. Mike “Mac” McClure (The Great Divide) and Chrislyn Rose Lawrence are bonded lovers who have the gift of not being young. So their musical experience and life weariness are a core part of how they are able to stand upright on a big stage, and fill the space.
What makes their performance remarkable is the raw truth of their storytelling. Their lyrics unfold with simple elegance and grace, paired with Mike’s effortless guitar picking and Chrislyn’s spare and beautiful percussion. Their words are direct, and universal.
Musical performers are brave.
For years and years, music makers stay inside a room practicing chords, singing refrains, scribbling lyrical ideas. They do it again and again, in all kinds of combinations. Like all artists, they often and repeatedly fail.
If they’ve made it to the stage and you are paying to see them, then you know a few things about them:
They work for however long it takes to make a song good, combining and re-combining words and instruments.
They work to combine the right songs in the right order on an album under one idea, with imagery and good mixing.
They work to figure out a setlist of songs, old and new, original and covers, to appease a mysterious, unknown audience.
They work to promote everything, including their own imperfect selves, in whatever clothes they own or don’t own, with whatever agents or team they have, probably on tech and social media channels they’d prefer not to ever look at.
Then, they figure out where they are going on tour and what they’ll do when they get there, and how they’ll keep from getting sick or losing their voice, and which truck or car to take, and which equipment they’ll need at each and every stop.
In the meantime, they may very well be working another job, to make ends meet.
Sure there is autotune, and looping setups, and synthesizers and now, AI, that can *probably* make things “easy” or write some kind of song.
Maybe someday we won’t need songwriters at all.
But I doubt it.
All the manmade junk can’t mimic the truth that arises in the making of art, music in particular. What Crow and Gazelle does — simply with a guitar, a drum, a tambourine, a microphone and their voices — is produce a vibration of love that pulls the audience into a healing embrace.
We need live music. We need to get out of our heads and our houses and step into the courageous space made by the artists who are musical performers.
It’s a miracle that’s happening at all, and all the time, and probably somewhere a mile or so from your front door.