An interview with fiddler and clawhammer banjo player Brad Kolodner. We talk a lot about the banjo, but Brad does more than just banjo. Topics include growing up as the children of folk musicians, the commercialization of Old-Time music, and the lack of women on bills at Old-Time Festivals. Hear all about Brad's upcoming projects, links below.
Features the tune Stony Run by Brad Kolodner from the album Stony Run from Ken and Brad Kolodner.
Brad's website: https://www.bradkolodner.com/
Charm City Junction: https://www.charmcityjunction.com/
The Baltimore Old-Time Festival: https://www.baltimoreoldtimefest.com/
Email me at meganbeller@fiddlestudio.com.
Listen and subscribe on Apple Music, Spotify, or Buzzsprout. Find me on YouTube and Bandcamp.
Here are my Fiddle Studio books and my website Fiddle Studio where you can find my courses and mailing list and sign up for my Top 10 Fiddle Tunes!
An interview with fiddler and clawhammer banjo player Brad Kolodner. We talk a lot about the banjo, but Brad does more than just banjo. Topics include growing up as the children of folk musicians, the commercialization of Old-Time music, and the lack of women on bills at Old-Time Festivals. Hear all about Brad's upcoming projects, links below.
Features the tune Stony Run by Brad Kolodner from the album Stony Run from Ken and Brad Kolodner.
Brad's website: https://www.bradkolodner.com/
Charm City Junction: https://www.charmcityjunction.com/
The Baltimore Old-Time Festival: https://www.baltimoreoldtimefest.com/
Email me at meganbeller@fiddlestudio.com.
Listen and subscribe on Apple Music, Spotify, or Buzzsprout. Find me on YouTube and Bandcamp.
Here are my Fiddle Studio books and my website Fiddle Studio where you can find my courses and mailing list and sign up for my Top 10 Fiddle Tunes!
Welcome to the Fiddles Studio podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Meg Wolvis-Beller and today I'll be bringing you a setting of the tune Stony Run by Brad Collodner from the album Stony Run from Ken and Brad Collodner. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking to Brad Collodner Now. Brad is a banjo player but also plays the fiddle. I was very excited to have him come on because he's a professional musician with deep roots in old time.
Speaker 1:So we'll definitely talk about old time and he also does a lot of other things, so I'll just really quick list some things. Brad plays with the bands Charm City, junction Brad and Ken Collodner. He teaches online through a site called Clawhammer Corner. He's a radio host, so he does this kind of thing all the time for Folk Alley Bluegrass Country Radio, and I know, because I live in Baltimore, that Brad does a lot of organizing both on small scale and house concerts that I've mentioned on this podcast, and large scale, such as the Baltimore Old Time Festival, which I already have my tickets for. So we'll be talking through a lot of that, but welcome, brad. Thanks for coming.
Speaker 2:Hey, it's great to see you. Thanks for having me on and see you virtually through the radio, of course and it's nice to get to chat a bit. Often I see you out at our local old time jam that we do every other Tuesday night and it's great to connect a bit here.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, I have in the past started with asking people how they got started in folk music. But I'm curious because I know that we both have fathers who have brutes in folk music and I know that my dad his story was he grew up with music, but not folk music, and in his 20s was the 1970s he just basically spent his entire 20s immersing himself in it. And I was curious about your dad because he is so involved in performing and teaching Ken Collodner, famous Hammer Dalsimer player and does a lot of fiddling. How did your dad get into folk music?
Speaker 2:We may have the same father, because that's the same story that my father has from his time as a kid. Before he was 20, I don't think he was really exposed much to folk music or roots music of any kind. He took some piano lessons and couldn't stand it. He just wanted to be out playing soccer with his friends and it was in his 20s that he started to get interested in the fiddle. That was his first instrument and then the Hammer Dalsimer and it just kind of took over his life. He was in school at Johns Hopkins here in Baltimore and working on his dissertation and his doctorate in public health research and as soon as he finished he pivoted to doing music full time and many years later he's still doing music as his primary profession. And that was my exposure to folk and roots. Music was through him. As a little kid it was just all around the house. The Hammer Dalsimer was always being played by him or his students, who were in the living room most nights and he played lots of fiddle as well. But it was always my dad's thing. It wasn't my thing. It wasn't my sister's thing. It was at least in those earliest years. My sister picked up the fiddle.
Speaker 2:She's a couple of years younger and I played cello for much of my childhood because my mom played cello. So I was really into playing cello in the school orchestra. I say I was really into it. That's kind of a stretch. My parents would probably say otherwise. I didn't practice that much. I didn't come out of the case too often, but I was okay at playing cello. I was like third chair out of four in the school orchestra and it wasn't until I was a bit older. I was 17 when I first heard the banjo. At least I connected with it at that time. Maybe I heard it earlier, I don't remember hearing a banjo prior to that, but when I first heard Clymer banjo being played, it really connected to me and it spoke to me and I sort of changed my life at that point, without even realizing that I was going down this new path. And I'm still on 15, 16 years later.
Speaker 1:I have this conversation with your dad where he goes. So are your kids getting into it? Because he knows my kids play the fiddle and I say no. And every time he reassures me. You know, brandon started the banjo till he was 17. So what happened? Where was this banjo revelation?
Speaker 2:The banjo revelation happens in a little town north of Camden Maine, washington, maine, at the location of this festival that no longer exists, called Metalark. It was a camp for adults primarily. There were some kids that would go to the camp and take classes. You know, a mixture of folk styles French, canadian, irish, old time just a whole blend of traditional fiddle styles and different instruments represented at the camp. And I went to the camp with my dad and with my sister who had been going for many years, and I really just went because I heard there was a pond there that you could swim in, there was a field where you could play soccer and run around. It just sounded like fun and I didn't think too much about the music side of things.
Speaker 2:I always appreciated my dad's music. I listened to his albums as a kid. In fact I would go to sleep at night listening to his band's recordings. He played in a band called Helicon for many years that played folk music from around the world and they have some tremendous records and they were part of my life as a kid. But I never saw myself playing that music. And then I heard Claude Hammerbanjo in the staff concert that first night of camp, played by this wonderful player out of Ithaca, new York, named Richie Stearns, and I remember him playing a Johnny Cash song on Claude Hammerbanjo.
Speaker 2:At the time I was really into classic rock and old country music and just loved that approach to a song that I was already familiar with, and so I signed up for the Claude Hammerbanjo class and fell in love with that style. Richie handed me a banjo to borrow for the week that had a goat skin head. It was covered in fur, like it was really gnarly banjo head. It was really beautiful actually, but it was a real skin head on the banjo and it just. I couldn't do much.
Speaker 2:In that first week I learned the very basic strumming pattern, but pretty quickly I realized that the music was there in my head. I knew what the music was supposed to sound like, what those tunes. I already had tunes in my head. They were there just ready to be extracted, and so as I got better at the banjo, I found myself teaching myself a lot of these tunes that were already in there, and it was just a matter of learning some of the basic technique, and I took a couple of lessons from a local instructor here in Baltimore named Lisa Roberts, who I still often get together and see and play music with.
Speaker 2:So it really just was mostly a process of self teaching and, of course, being exposed to my father's music and, considering that my father was very integrated into the community of old time and roots music, he took me to jams and pretty early on I'd say within a year or so of playing, I was already joining in at some concerts as a guest.
Speaker 2:Whether or not I really deserved that slot, I don't know. It was nice that he was very. He was very excited, of course, that I was playing banjo and wanted to show off that his son could play some tunes and I definitely remember some of those early concerts being very nervous going out there on stage playing with him. But I enjoyed that process of being able to share the music with others and right from the beginning recognized that it's not about the skill or the talent of the players on stage but how much they love the music and being able to share their love of the music with an audience. And that's one of the main inspirations for why I continue to play music and perform and record and do all this in the music world.
Speaker 1:Hmm, it's an interesting thing to think about that. It's not the skill level that necessarily makes it enjoyable to play or listen to, but the love I want to ask you about. You said the phrase claw hammer, banjo and I guess I'll just ask you for a short presentation on if I have listeners who play fiddle and don't know that much about banjo. I know claw hammer banjo is not the only type of banjo music, but can you tell us a little bit about what makes claw hammer and how that's different?
Speaker 2:Yeah, claw hammer banjo is a style in which you're playing a five string banjo, just like a bluegrass banjo player would, but instead of using finger picks metal finger picks on your index, middle and thumb you use the backside of your index or middle fingernail to strike down across the string. So it's more of a strumming downpicking kind of motion. Your hand is literally in a claw shape and for those of you listening out in radio world, if you just imagine your hand, your right hand generally is the one that you hold in this kind of bear claw shape, with your thumb curled in, your fingers curled in and then you strike down across the string and it creates a very different kind of tone, a different texture than a metal pick picking up on the string. It's a bit more mellow and there's more of a percussive component to claw hammer banjo. Your thumb lands on the drone string, which is the short fifth string on a banjo, and you just continue this motion of going hammering into the head and then back out and you're knocking on the head of the banjo. Essentially, with this claw shape it creates a very different kind of texture and sound than the bluegrass banjo style or the Irish tenor banjo style, which uses a flat pick. So it's really a unique way of playing and it dates all the way back to the banjo's West African origins. There are folks in West Africa today who play with this kind of motion of moving in and out of the string with the right hand, and it's really fascinating the evolution of the claw hammer style and I would say that I lean more towards a melodic style of claw hammer banjo.
Speaker 2:Within the claw hammer world there are rhythmic and melodic players and I kind of toe the line. I lean more into figuring out how to extract melody out of the banjo as a claw hammer player, whereas lots of folks use it primarily as a really driving rhythmic kind of sound. All said and done, it is really nice compliment to fiddle music because the syncopated and rhythmic nature of claw hammer banjo really meshes with some of the drive in the groove of old time fiddle, and it works with playing Irish tunes as well. You can play waltzes, you can play jigs, there's all kinds of music that you can play on claw hammer banjo. It's not just limited to old time, and that's something that I very much embrace, much like my father and how he has always been interested in a variety of musical styles. Well, I mostly identify as an old time musician. I enjoy all kinds of folk music and adapting claw hammer to different styles of music.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this has been brought to you by claw hammer banjo, so it makes me curious, with you describing all the different things you can play on the banjo. I know you play the fiddle too, and we're kind of talking here about old time music. Just technically, are the tunes the same on the banjo or the fiddle, or how do they change how you play the same tunes on both instruments, right? How's it different?
Speaker 2:That's a great question and that's something that I work on with students all the time how to claw hammer to identify a fiddle tune and how to take a melody from a fiddle player or a recording of a fiddle player and translate it to the banjo. The goal isn't necessarily to imitate the tune note for note and get it exactly how the fiddle is playing, because of course, there are things that a violinist or a fiddle are doing that you can't mimic. You know the some of the attack and the tone of the bow being drawn across the strings. You just can't replicate that exactly on banjo and with claw hammer there are some percussive and rhythmic techniques that are really nice ways to provide a counterpoint to what the fiddle is playing. That said, I do recommend to claw hammer players that you get the melody of the tune in your head and you try as close as you can to get that full melody and then work from there. So if you can learn the tune on claw hammer using a variety of techniques, claw hammer is a pretty odd kind of style because you have to use a lot of left hand techniques pull offs, hammer on slides and you have to use these right hand techniques without getting too into the weeds to get different kind of patterns. You can't just like go up and down like you would with a flat pick or back and forth like you would with a bow. It's a little bit more restricted to this down and then up motion, but you can't necessarily go down for two eighth notes in a row. You can't go up for two eighth notes in a row. You have to alternate going down and up and that leads to its own tricks.
Speaker 2:I will say that my general goal is to learn the tune. I often learn the tune on fiddle first. If I'm interested in learning a new melody, I'll pick up my fiddle and get the tune down. So it's really firmly in my head and in my fingers for fiddle. And then I'll go to the banjo and work it out from there. So I will add in chords and harmony on the banjo. I might add in some variations that are more idiosyncratic to the banjo that really complement what the fiddle is doing.
Speaker 2:But it's really a case by case basis, sometimes depending on the musical context. If I'm just playing with a fiddler, if it's a fiddle and banjo combo, I might lean more into playing chords and rhythm and providing a counterpoint. But if I'm playing in a string band where there's a fiddle, maybe two fiddles, there's a guitar, upright bass and a banjo or, in my case, a hammered dulcimer or accordion in the bands I play with I might try. It actually is a really fascinating instrument because I have this creative freedom where I can play melody or I can play rhythm, I can play some combination.
Speaker 2:There isn't really an expectation in the string band setting that the banjo has to carry the melody like a fiddler would. So it's really nice as a banjo player. Maybe why I've really loved this instrument so much is that it is kind of a blank canvas in which I can create all kinds of different textures. I can play more of a melody role, I can play a rhythmic role, I can play up the neck and do kind of funky variations. That's a really interesting instrument in the context of a band.
Speaker 1:I've heard him do all this. You can just think about what kind of music you don't think could be played or accompanied by Clawhammer banjo, and Brad Kaladner could find a way to do it. I've heard it.
Speaker 2:Playing in five or seven is something I have not tackled yet. Six, eight is probably. Playing jigs is something that I have done on a few occasions but that's something that is quite challenging for me. I'd say some of the hardest stuff to do on Clawhammer is like a two, four feel and maybe this is too dense for this purpose of the podcast, but it's called Fiddlestudio so might as well get into the nitty gritty bits.
Speaker 1:but we love the weeds.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is tough to play. I'd say like a slow, kind of relaxed country feel. If you're backing up a singer that's singing at kind of a really moderate tempo, like a bum chucka, bum chucka, that's like a really it works, but it's not. It doesn't feel as full on Clawhammer, but otherwise it's all. There's a lot you can do with it. One process to figure out how to weave it into other genres, for sure.
Speaker 1:Nice, because I know that you spend a lot of time thinking not only about banjo but also about old time music and where it's been and where it's going. I guess it's something I wonder about. I guess I'm feeling philosophical. I feel like old time music used to be. You think of it as something that was played on porches, played for like little community dances, and there were some fiddlers playing it on the radio, but it was the music that wasn't bluegrass, right, it was like the home music and it's changed a lot since then. I don't know, do you ever think about what's happening with old time and old time music in the scene?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't know if it's a zero sum proposition, though I think you still have people primarily playing old time as community music, something they do after work on the weekends with their friends, just for fun, not with any purpose of bringing it on a stage or recording it. I still think that's the overwhelming majority of old time music is played in those contexts and in fact that's where I derive much of my joy of playing. This music is just with friends here at my house, out at festivals, under a tree in the middle of the summer, in the woods, for no reason other than just to play, and that's primarily why I love the music, why I came to love the music. I just happen to make a living teaching and performing by using this music, but I still derive most of my joy from those informal settings where it's not a performance and I'm not trying to do anything other than just play for the sake of playing, and so I think old time and traditional music of many kinds are like that.
Speaker 2:I just think that, because of the nature of trying to make a living and be creative with the music in a way that shares it with others yeah, there has definitely been an increase in the number of folks who have formed bands and record albums and are out there touring, just like you'd see, with the bluegrass world or you know all kinds of music outside of traditional music and folk music.
Speaker 2:So there is certainly an increase in the number of folks who are playing this music in a professional capacity. But I don't think that necessarily takes away from or takes away from, like, the joy of just playing for the sake of playing. And I think it's possible to do both and be I'm very happy on stage, playing in front of hundreds of folks at a concert, you know, with my bands, or playing with those same people out at a festival and after we've played our set. And that's really, I think, for me, trying to make a career out of this is a way for me to play as much music as I can. So I have a schedule that I can write and cultivate and it allows me to play more music, to have this self-employed, full-time musician lifestyle.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I also. My job is also folk music, but I, you know, I think about it Sometimes. I wonder if you know, my dad's generation, like the baby boomers, had the folk revival and some of them went into it professionally. For my father he just did it, it was always on the side. His profession was computer science. He stayed in that. But then for me, for, like the older millennials, the children of that generation, then many of us played and then went into it professionally.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, I have a roadmap from my father to figure out how to make a career out of music. So when I finished college, as a 22 year old went to Ithaca College in New York to study radio broadcasting and journalism and I still do a bit of radio, but I primarily do music full-time and my father was very helpful at showing me the many different ways that you can make a living by doing music, and I think a lot of. It is just that the music, the professional music landscape, has changed so much. Now there are many ways to make a living doing this music. That's saying it's easier now, but there are different ways that you can earn a living.
Speaker 2:I teach remotely, you know. I do private lessons through Zoom. I have an online website where I teach banjo. People subscribe all around the world. You know. There's social media and ways, ways to sort of bring the music that I'm playing here on my front porch or my backyard to folks outside of town and I don't have to count on touring and playing shows all around the country to make a living. While I certainly love playing concerts, we mostly stay within the region so that I can have a balanced lifestyle and do things here in Baltimore that I love doing, exercise, and friends and community and all those things that provide stability. So there are. I think just the music landscape has changed so much and it's in some ways allowed folks like me and you who play traditional music to be able to earn a living through all these different kinds of streams of revenue.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it certainly is. It's really different from how it was 20 years ago, I think, when I started in folk music. It was closer to the older landscape where you really needed to be able to tour, and it is very different now. Well, thank you. I was just curious to get your take on some of that stuff. You mentioned teaching and online lessons. Can you tell us more about the online teaching that you do? People are interested. Is it just banjo or is it fiddle too?
Speaker 2:I mostly teach banjo online. Occasionally I'll do a workshop that's maybe geared around how to jam. I love teaching folks how to learn by ear and feel welcomed in a jamming environment, so I am confident in that kind of space. But I mostly teach claw hammer banjo and I have an online lesson platform that I've built. It emerged during the pandemic when I wasn't teaching in person anymore and I started an online lesson platform basically with hundreds now videos of teaching tunes, techniques, jam tracks.
Speaker 2:It's called claw hammer corner and it's hosted through a guitar lesson website primarily guitar called True Fire, but they also have other instruments, including banjo, and I have a subscription model that folks can pay a certain amount per month and have access to all that content and there's also lesson exchanges on there, so folks will send in little clips of them playing for a few minutes and they could be in California or Germany or Australia or all over and they send them in on their own time and then I watch and provide a response video detailing all the things that they might want to work on or ways to improve.
Speaker 2:It's really become my primary means of teaching. Now is this asynchronous model and it's really nice to have been able to meet online so many folks that I wouldn't have otherwise come into contact with here at my house in Baltimore, where I still teach a couple lessons every week. But I definitely enjoy the nature of an in person lesson where you can really play with each other. You can't really play with each other online, so it is something that I miss about the in person teaching, but online education is really where I've steered my efforts.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I know, with my online teaching, it's very gratifying to hear from people who live in a part of the world where they just wouldn't have access to a live local teacher in the style, and so a lot of times it's just great to hear people reach out and say that you know your content has helped them. I have a student in Australia, you know, and she's like there's no fiddle teacher anywhere near me.
Speaker 2:Or they don't have the time in their schedule, maybe they're restricted with how far they can travel with, maybe they have a disability of some kind. You know, there's all kinds of reasons why somebody wouldn't be able to come to my house to play and learn. So it's really, from an accessibility standpoint it's really nice, and affordability too. I mean it's definitely less expensive to pay a monthly subscription fee to take a private lesson every week.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a little bit about your teaching. I know you do have some bands that you play. What are your current projects that you're working on?
Speaker 2:Well, I have a new album coming out with the Band Charm City Junction. We have released some new singles from the project and we have a new album that is out in early February and it's called Salt Box and it has a mix of some of our original music some Irish, some old time, some bluegrass music. We sing the right songs and tunes and that's a band that's been around for about 10 years now. It's a creative project featuring myself on a band show. We have a fiddle player named Patrick McAvenue who comes from the bluegrass world, sean McComiskey, who is a button accordion player and quite renowned in the traditional Irish music world. His father, billy, is quite well known in Irish traditional music. And Alex Lackleman, amazing bass player, who I also play with in the band with my father, ken. So it's a band that has recorded a few albums and we have this new project and it's been a few years. The last album we did was back in 2019. So it's nice to have this new project out there. We're really happy with how it turned out. A couple of original tunes, original song on there.
Speaker 2:It's a fun band because we're friends primarily and we love playing music together in those informal settings Like I was talking about earlier. We really just enjoy playing for the sake of playing with each other. It's also quite fun to play festivals and play some shows around the country and record and push ourselves, because that's a band that, as I said, we come from different musical backgrounds, so fusing Irish and old time and bluegrass it's definitely a challenge and it's interesting to figure out what the commonalities are. There are lots of, there's lots of common ground amongst those genres. We often get siloed into our various genres and it takes a bit of effort to bridge those divides in those different genres. And so as a band we really embrace the process of taking an old time tune and adding Irish button accordion and maybe throwing in some solos, like you would in a bluegrass song. Or take a Cajun tune and figure out how to add Clawhammer banjo or bluegrass fiddle, and it's just. It's really a fun template for us to explore different directions for roots music.
Speaker 1:That's great. So, speaking of festivals, I know that you organize a big festival. You organize a lot of events we mentioned the old time jam on Tuesdays, and I know you have your house concert series but the big event that you do around here is the Baltimore Old Time Festival. When is that going to be and how did you get started doing that? Anyway?
Speaker 2:The Baltimore Old Time Music Festival. Yeah, april 19th to 20th in Baltimore, it's our fifth annual festival and, as you said, it is the Keystone event for the local old time music community. It's a culmination of many years of throwing house concerts and square dances and old time jams, putting on shows for bands that are coming from out of town, and we started it in 2019 at the Creative Alliance, which is a performing arts center here in Baltimore, and we have the idea to bring together all these different communities the folks who come to the square dance, the people who come to the concerts and the folks who are interested in learning how to play this music and just put it all into one weekend as a celebration of the growth of this community that we have here in Baltimore, which has really experienced a lot of growth and energy these past 10 years or so, and there are these young folks who have gotten into playing old time music. People have moved to Baltimore because of the scene and it's a way to show off the city and the community Also just have a really fun time. It's a great weekend and we've done it four times in the past at Creative Alliance, and this year we're moving to a bigger venue. We've sold out its weekly every year and we are definitely growing.
Speaker 2:And this new festival is located right on Baltimore's Inner Harbor. It's called the Baltimore Museum of Industry. It's a beautiful space with this outdoor pavilion where we'll do square dances and we'll have a maker's market with all kinds of vendors and people from the community coming in, and then we have a museum. That is this gorgeous space inside Big A Tram where we'll have concerts and there'll be hands-on workshops, lots of jams. It's a festival that has been many years in the making. It's really a dream for my father and I to put this together, and we work with a friend of ours, josh Kahn, with an organization called the Center for Cultural Vibrancy. They're co-producing the festival, with us providing a lot of logistical support to make it happen. Yeah, we're excited to see how it goes this year this new space and invite any of you listening right now to join us in April for the Old Time Music Festival.
Speaker 1:I'm excited. It's really fun.
Speaker 2:It is really fun and, honestly, that's the main motivation for a lot of the events that I'm involved with. I want to have a jam that I want to go to, I want to go to a square dance on a Saturday night, I want to hear this amazing band play in a living room, and all of those events that I'm involved with and they sort of build on each other. At this point a number of those events have done enough of them that they kind of run themselves. It sounds like a lot and there are certainly lots of events here in town, but I've learned how to be as efficient as I can when it comes to organizing all the logistics behind the scenes. But I embrace that side too.
Speaker 2:There's a real creative satisfaction that comes with curating, putting together a bill at a festival, arranging the schedule. It's a really interesting process, thinking about how folks who attend these events experience the events and how welcomed they feel and are they feeling included or not. That's a through line to all these events, as we really want them to be open and welcoming to people who don't have to be in the club in the Old Time community necessarily to be part of the music. Because I think what we're doing is trying to create a joyful and entertaining and sometimes educational experience for people and paying attention to all those people who are involved, not just the ones sitting in the center of the jam, and that's often where Old Time and Irish traditional music or any community of musicians it can get clicky and vibey and exclusive, and that's something that we're really strongly working to root out in traditional music communities.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, we've talked about the kind of in the club, out of the club, on the podcast, and that is one really wonderful thing about a lot of these, these events that are being organized. I'll tell you what, what I experienced a lot of times when I look at an old time or blue grass festival or lineup and I scroll through and I can't really help myself because there are so few women, I start to count them, you know, and that.
Speaker 2:I do as well, yeah.
Speaker 1:That may be partly just just me, but so I guess my my question as a female musician is to somebody who does a lot of of organizing and hiring is yeah, how do you think about that?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, there are many angles of diversity and representation that you can approach these kinds of questions, and having gender balance is very critical to how we look at booking our old time music festival and and representative of of all kinds of different angles of diversity, whether it's gender, racial, maybe LGBTQ plus status. You know, all of that is taken into consideration when we're thinking about who we're hiring and who we're presenting on stage, because, ultimately, I think it is up to those who book and are, for lack of a better term, gatekeepers in a lot of ways. It is really up to them to help push towards a more inclusive and diverse landscape within Roots music, because they're the ones who are deciding who to pay, you know, and who to bring to a stage that may have folks in the audience who are curious. You know what is this genre and what does this genre represent, and am I included? Am I welcome? You know, I think it's.
Speaker 2:It's much more complicated of a question asking. You know, is everyone welcome here? You can say all are welcome, but you know, if you don't have a black performer on the bill or if you don't have a balance of women and men and other genders, you know it's, it's not welcome, really. And so I think being able to lean into representation and thinking about those questions at all levels of organizing not just who you're hiring, but what terms are we using at the Square Dance you know, we've extracted ladies and gents from the terminology at our local Square Dance and we do gender neutral calling now and it's, those things are, yeah, they're the right thing to do, but they're also just if you're thinking about the growth of the community and trying to bring in more people, those questions are are essential to answer at all levels of organizing, especially when it comes to, you know, affordability and access, as I talked about earlier.
Speaker 2:You know those are all important things that we think about when putting on these events, because we want it to be a more inclusive community and it's also just makes for a great event when there's a whole blend of people from all kinds of backgrounds with all their experiences, and it's something that that's, yeah, very important to us. I also look at bills pretty regularly and notice the lack of women in particular, and that's something that it has improved over the last handful of years, but it's there's still a long way to go when it comes to representation on bills. It doesn't make for a great show. Also, I find, you know if it's just like the same kind of predictable folks who maybe look like me up there at one after the other.
Speaker 1:Well, talking about it and being aware is a great stuff, so thanks for chatting about it. We are doing a tune. We're presenting a tune today of yours that you wrote. It's called Stony Run. It's a reel, right. What key is it in?
Speaker 2:It's in the key of G and it is a reel. It's a tune that I wrote on the fiddle and then adapted it to the banjo and it's the title track of the latest Ken and Brad Collodner album, stony Run, and it's named for a little stream that runs right through my neighborhood here in Hamden, which is in Baltimore City, and it's actually the stream that also runs right behind the high school where both my father and I attended in different centuries of course, but my father and I both attended a school here in Baltimore called Friend School and there's a stream right behind the school called Stony Run and it runs right past my house here where I live now, and so I've always enjoyed the solace and peace that comes with sitting along and walking along that stream and wrote that tune down by the water. One day I yeah, it turned into the title track on our latest record and it's a two-part tune. It has an interesting harmonic structure.
Speaker 2:The A part starts on an E minor chord. It actually lays out really nicely on fiddle. There's some very fiddly left-hand lines, but harmonically it's definitely not your, just your typical one, four, five. Well, there are only four chords in the tune one, four, five and six minor six, but it does have an unusual structure with regards to the chords. But it is a square tune, so it would be great for dances.
Speaker 1:You've written a number of tunes, right? Do you try to write them in the style? It sounds like this one isn't exactly in the style of like a very traditional, simple, old-time tune, or how do you think about that?
Speaker 2:I think this tune could work really nicely in an old-time jam. I've actually had a couple of occasions now where folks have requested that we play that tune. I think you could probably tell that it's not a traditional tune just because of the way that the chords move around. It's a little bit more eccentric than your typical old-time chord structure. Yeah, I think it just depends on what I'm feeling when I write a tune. There are lots of originals that I've written that could be old-time tunes, but I've also written some things on banjo, especially on my solo album Chimney Swifts, which are most certainly not old-time tunes. Those are tunes that just come from a mixture of influences and are really fitting for that specific tuning on the banjo, for example, the title track of that album is in a really strange tuning and it maybe has elements in some of the vocabulary of old-time music, but it certainly draws on other influences.
Speaker 2:I don't confine myself to trying to sound like a traditional tune. In fact, that's a really tough thing to do is to write an old-time tune that sounds old but is in fact a new tune. Of course, none of these melodies fell from a tree. They were all written by somebody at some point. We just don't know who the original authors are. I tell that to folks all the time. When it comes to original music in old-time, it's all original at some point. I very much embrace playing new tunes and enjoy playing the crusty old standards as much as anybody, but it's nice to also weave in some of the newer melodies. There's some great new tunes out there and I love to bring them in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you mentioned a banjo album and the album this Comes From Brandon Ken Coladner. Where can people find your music online?
Speaker 2:You can listen and discover our music on our website, BradColadnercom, KenanBradcom. You can also look up Charm City Junction. We're out there as well. We play around the region quite a bit and we have this new album coming out, Saltbox, from Charm City Junction. Of course, my father and I have recorded a few albums over the years. I've got my solo record. You can listen to my radio show. If you are into Roots Music of all kinds, well, I host on Folk Alley and you can stream that online for free. Folkalleycom, or my Bluegrass and Old Time Music programs that I have on Bluegrass Country Radio, which you can also stream online.
Speaker 1:So look up, brad, you can listen to him talk. He can listen to him play the banjo all the things. Bradcoladnercom. Brad, thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker 2:Hey, thanks, meg. Yeah, I hope to see you out at another jam sometime soon.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. We'll be playing together soon. Okay, I hope to hear this tune now. Bye, bye, bye. Thank you for listening. You can find the music for today's tune at fiddlestudiocom, along with my books, courses and membership for learning to fiddle. I'll be back next week with another tune for you. Have a wonderful day.