by: Gabi Kirk, Marketing Lead of Bandwagon Bros

After a raucous show at Bocci’s Cellar in Santa Cruz on September 20, The Sea People will be bringing the beats tonight in Berkeley. I spoke to these fine fellows over email about their (f)influences, band dynamics, and cartoons.

The Sea People are: Ella Cooley: lead vocals; Christopher Beachy (no pun intended): keys, backup vocals; Charlie Glick: guitar, backup vocals; David Kettler: bass, backup vocals; Dan Bardenstein: drums.

by: Gabi Kirk, Marketing Lead of Bandwagon Bros

The clinic in Wli Todzi as of spring 2012.
Photo copyright Rise Up Development Collective.

Some people seek to bring creativity to the world not just for fun, but to enrich other’s lives. When Jeremy Kirschbaum (University of California, Santa Cruz ’12) studied abroad in west Africa in 2010, he met the Wli Todzi community and was inspired to work with them. While the most pressing need is to raise money to finish a much needed health clinic, the Rise Up Development Collective has multiple goals, including an eco-tourism program to maintain long-term economic opportunities for the village.

We spoke with Daisy Garcia, Rise Up Development Collective publicity director, about their next benefit show at Bocci’s Cellar on Saturday September 29. Check out the Facebook event here. 

What is the mission of the Rise Up Development Collective project?
The mission of the project is to provide a clinic for the town of Wli Todzi [in Ghana] and its surrounding areas. We hope to sustain the income for the clinic through eco tourism in Wli Todzi after the physical structure is built and equipped with doctors.

Why are you throwing this show? What other events have you hosted in the past?
The purpose of the benefit show is to raise funds for the clinic structure….We have hosted and thrown a few shows in the past months.

Who’s playing during the show? What kind of music and why did you choose these artists?
Ancrestree Reggae, DJ Rasta Cruz, DJ Don-ette G are all performing at the event. We have collaborated with Ancestree Reggae multiple times before. They’re always a treat to see and are some of the best chillers around. http://www.ancestreereggae.com/

What can we expect from the Ghana Clinic project in the future? Any upcoming events, volunteer opportunities, etc. for the group?
We’re hosting a contest for any one with interest in the project. You can hear more about the contest at our next seminar on October 2nd in the Kresge Student Lounge on the UCSC campus. Anyone can get involved with the project at any time. You need only to attend an event or attend one of our weekly meetings. We’re currently changing the meeting time, so stay tuned for concrete meetings.

To learn more about Rise Up, visit their website at http://www.riseupghana.org/  

Gabi Kirk is the Marketing Lead of Bandwagon Bros. She’s worked as an events coordinator for the University of California, Santa Cruz Sustainability Office and lead campus outreach at the Student Environmental Center. She believes that sometimes life is filled with too many emails and not enough sandwiches eaten outdoors, and she’s working to remedy that imbalance.

I’m a musician first and foremost, and over time have found my identity through the saxophone, composition, and education. As a musician, I’m constantly looking for new ways to grow and expand my understanding, and in that quest I applied for a Fulbright Fellowship to study folk music in Bulgaria. One happy email many months later in March 2012, I found out I won the grant.

After months of anticipation and the crazy last minute packing of my life for one year, I flew to Sofia, Bulgaria on August 7^th to begin my stay abroad. My grant officially starts on September 1^st 2012, but I came out early to attend an orientation program, as well as a mysterious but legendary music festival that I knew little about.

The first part of my journey was this elusive gathering in southern Serbia, in a town called Guca. The Guca Festival is the self-proclaimed largest and most popular trumpet festival in the world, and features hundreds of Gypsy, Serbian, and international brass bands of the absolute highest caliber.  I am a huge fan of Balkan brass music, and Guca Fest felt like Mecca.

After literally three days of non-stop travel (San Francisco -> JFK -> London -> Sofia -> Belgrade -> Guca!) and sleep deprivation, I finally arrived in the town of Guca. A nice Serbian man named Moshe accompanied me on the last leg of the bus trip, and he turned out to be the host of the main concert that evening, as well as the host of his own talk show on Serbian television. We talked about a potential appearance on his show, and he later introduced me to the festival organizers! Serendipity was working full force, and I was ready to embrace everything that the festival had to offer.

As soon as I got off the bus, I was approached by a Serbian guy around my age, and ended up camping in his backyard in the middle of town. Upon entering his abode, I was greeted by a group of international travelers that immediately proceeded to pour me what seemed like an endless glass of beer, and before I knew it, I was drunk, and tired. I napped.

The next three days were madness; a blur of pigs and sheep rotating on giant rotisserie grills, huge Serbian-style burgers, trumpets in my face, heart pounding brass music that puts the most bass-heavy electronic music to shame, non-stop dancing, drinking, making of new friends, and getting woken up at 8am to the sounds of a neighboring brass band that never went to sleep combined with the puking of one of my campmates.

The town was transformed for one week from a quiet village of 3,000 people to a drunken and noisy oasis of over 200,000. People came from all over the world, and I made friends from France, Germany, Sweden, Australia, Slovakia, Lebanon, Bulgaria, USA, and other countries. Some were there for a new and exotic experience, others simply to party, but what united everyone was a love for the frenetic and emotionally explosive music that is uniquely accomplished by a 10 to 15 person band of virtuosic brass musicians playing ancient music passed down orally throughout generations (I also heard a rendition of “Rolling in the Deep,” the tradition is expanding…)

For me, Guca was an amazing and inspiring experience I will never forget, and I encourage anyone with a sense of adventure and at least an inkling of appreciation for Balkan brass music to attend. It’s during the second week of August, and just google “Guca Fest” to get more information.

Alas, I had to leave before I wanted to, so I hitched a ride to the nearest town where I commenced a one-day journey back to Sofia, consisting of busses, trains, and sleeping in a train station near the Bulgarian border. Beware; transportation schedules are not easily accessible….

The next two weeks I participated in an orientation program for Fulbrighters in Bulgaria, which was jarring at first after coming from a raucous festival. But it was great nonetheless and I learned a lot of Bulgarian and met the other interesting and motivated Fulbrighters.

Now I am in Plovdiv, the proclaimed “cultural capital” of Bulgaria. It is the second largest city after the capital Sofia, and will be my home until July 2013. I will be enrolled in the Academy of Music, Dance, and Fine art where I will study Kaval (traditional Bulgarian flute) with a master teacher, traditional composition methods, and work with the Karandilla Gypsy Brass Orkestra on a music education initiative for Romani youth. Throughout my time here, I hope to assemble a band of local musicians and record an album towards the end of my stay featuring original music and arrangements of folk songs.

In the mean time, tomorrow I’ll go to the east coast of Bulgaria and visit little villages with a friend, hopefully record and learn some folk music, and soak up as much old-world culture as I can while its around. Stay tuned!!

For more of Teddy’s blog postings on his adventures in Bulgaria, check out: http://www.teddyinbulgaria.wordpress.com. Be sure to listen to his brass band. To visit his website with more info and music: www.teddyraven.com.

by Jefferson Bergey, San Francisco Singer/Songwriter

My name is Jefferson Bergey. I am a singer-songwriter-server who recently transplanted from Chicago to the bay area. I’m also a writer, a web series host, a private teacher, a wedding singer, a volunteer, a rabid music fan, a reader, a lover-not-a-fighter, a social networker, and an odd-jobber.

Basically, I’m a professional plate-spinner.

My life is drastically different now than it’s been over the last decade. I’m finally tapping into the many facets of my own creativity and exploring avenues I had been too terrified to explore in the past. Through heartbreak, bouts of depression, and stages of stale and stagnant idling, I had to figure that out on my own.

In the past my creative process could have easily been compared to an on-going eating disorder.

I spent years artistically anorexic. I didn’t think I was good enough to call myself an artist. I didn’t think that I had anything that was worth hearing or reading or to be shared. I finished an album that I never put out. I wrote short stories that would never be shared. I wouldn’t write. I wouldn’t perform. If I did it was for some sort of family-related function that had hardly anything to do with channeling the artist that I was intentionally muffling. I was musically and artistically emaciated.

Then there were times where it was more like I was battling with bulemia. Inspiration would clock me over the head and I would obsess. I would grab that muse with both hands and I would drop everything else that was going on in my life in pursuit of stuffing it all into my body only to regurgitate it into something I had envisioned..often to a disastrous result. Nothing that is regurgitated is ever really that pretty. There were times where new ideas were flying out of me at a rate that I couldn’t wrangle them in. Meanwhile the rest of my responsibilities fell to the wayside and were neglected for the sake of a batch of budding creations, some that would never flower. It was a sad little garden.

There was no balance. It was all or nothing at all. Now I can see that it doesn’t have to be that way.

I didn’t have to reinvent myself, I had to get on the ground and dig myself up from the earth. I had to forgive myself for not being perfect. I had to stop listening to the voice that wasn’t telling the truth. I had to learn to cultivate the artist instead of letting the weeds take over in their pursuit to strangle the little life that wanted so desperately to flourish and, at least, have a chance to look into the sun and live a little.

Any doctor, trainer, nutritionist, or dietician will tell you that multiple small, balanced meals spread out over the course of a full day is the way to maintain a healthy metabolism. I now prescribe to a similar approach with my creative endeavors. Small meals of creativity, spread out across every day has brought on more positivity and progress in the past year than in the previous five. This leads me to believe that someday it will lead to a healthy artistic metabolism and bushels of tangible fruit from my daily labors.

One of the biggest proponents of my personal creative reawakening has been through a ritual that begins every day. Years ago, I was given a book called The Artist’s Way. It’s a spiritually driven, slightly new-agey approach to summoning the artist that may be hibernating under the surface. I only read the first couple of chapters before it was feeling more like a twelve-step program then a guide to leading a more artistic life. But what I did gain from those few chapters has helped immeasurably.

One of approaches used to tap into this philosophy is an exercise referred to as Morning Pages. The idea is simple. You write as soon as your day begins. Basically, I roll out of bed, pour myself a cup of coffee, and set a timer for a half hour. In that thirty minutes I simply write whatever I’m thinking without stopping. I don’t deny anything that comes to my head and let it flood out beneath my fingers on my laptop. Some days it functions like a journal where I recount the events of the previous day. Some days I spend the entire allotted time writing about some crazy dream I had. Some days I wistfully describe a woman I am interested in or getting to know. Some days are terribly frustrating and all I can write about over and over again is how I don’t feel like writing at all. Either way, every day I set the timer, I sip the coffee, and I write whatever comes to mind.

I don’t judge the words, I don’t go back and make changes, and I don’t stop. I could compare it to riding a wave. The wave isn’t going to wait for you, so you have to keep paddling to stay on top. That’s why I consider it to be stream of thought exercise without really thinking at all. You don’t allow any do-overs and you don’t get to change anything. I ride it out, and let it take me to the shore. In fact, I NEVER read my entries back once that alarm goes off. I move on and begin my day. It’s not only a meditation of sorts, it’s a gift to myself for the future. I can someday peek into my head from a certain day or period of my life and time-travel back to the thoughts that were consuming me.

At first I didn’t understand how this was going to jump-start my creative juices since it was feeling like a chore. But then I started to see how the space in my brain that I gained from purging all of the clutter not only allowed me to focus more on my time management, but I started to see potential lyric fragments jump out at me from the screen. One of my own personal favorite lines from a song I wrote last year came out of a morning pages session. I admitted to myself that I wanted to be as strong as a single rose that somehow can grow through a crack in the concrete. I wasn’t thinking when I wrote that. I just let it happen. On a few occasions when I’ve gone through anything difficult or trying, I can always return to the entries to see what I was feeling at the time. I was recently writing about a particular experience and needed to recall details to continue with lyrical ideas already in progress. I went back to the day after the event and found in my morning pages a plethora of phrases and ideas from what I had written.

Now, keep in mind that you have to sift through a lot of sand to mine any gold. I realize that for every one tune that I think is decent, there are five that I will throw back on the heap. That’s one of the many reasons that I find, on a creative path, there is no finish line. You simply have to keep plugging away and be pleasantly surprised when the good stuff separates itself from the crap. But then I have to forgive myself for writing the crap and not let it get in the way of the next attempt.

I still have a long way to go before I can comfortably talk about myself as an artist. I will continue to spin plates, but I’m learning to become more confident in the choices I make, the recipes I follow, and the taste I have acquired through experience and diligence. I will get those dishes dirty, clean them, and look forward to making another meal. If one falls and breaks, I will forgive myself, clean up the mess and move on. I won’t continue to scrub the same old pan and expect a different luster to make me feel any better.

Someday I will have a healthy garden that will yield life which will feed not only me, but others as well. If you’re reading this and you’re also trotting down an artistic path, maybe someday our paths will cross and we can make a salad. In the meantime, I’ll be waiting for the tide to come in every morning to paddle out into the unknown.

Jefferson Bergey is a singer-songwriter recently transplanted to the Bay area from Chicago. Since arriving in California he’s performed and volunteered at the Special Olympics summer games, completed a seven-month residency at 50 Mason Social House in San Francisco, sings weddings and corporate events with Suite Love Express, contributed original music to an upcoming documentary dealing with teen bullying, started a blog, became a host for Fish Eye Film’s Tasting the Bay, and writes and performs in his own web series, Bergey and the Buddha. He likes to be busy. Follow him on twitter @jeffersonbergey and like him on facebook: JeffersonBergeyMusic.

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