Arts
Roots Music for a New Century
Roots Music
for a New Century
Cris Williamson
by Euan Bear
Tret
Fure Cris
Williamson West Street
Arts |
Peg
Eves is a woman on a mission to showcase new women's music while honoring
its roots. And at the same time, she's running a Brattleboro-area arts
organization. Her year-long concert series, Women for a New Century, is
a happy confluence of effort that accomplishes both tasks. She's an experienced
concert producer, having produced concerts for Holly Near, Theresa Trull,
Kate Clinton, and Laura Niro in venues in Randolph, Barre, Montpelier,
and Burlington in years past.
West Street Arts is the beneficiary,
a nonprofit project located in the former West Dummerston Grange Hall
on the West River by a covered bridge. It features after-school programs
for kids and an art camp, along with a "Kindermusic" program
for infants to age 7, and adult dance classes ranging from square and
contra to belly and Latin.
Eves is bringing Tret Fure,
Cris Williamson, and Ferron, among others, to West Street Arts. "These
women are the matriarchs of women's music, though I don't want to use
the term," Eves explains. "I really want to engage the younger
generation, and I'm onto a couple of artists who will do that." She
mentions a duo from Canada with whom she's negotiating. "I don't
know whether they're lesbians or not. They do some spoken word, some politics,
some jazz, rock, hiphop. They'll be fun."
She says she's looking to find
out who's out there. "I'm looking for the new wave of feminists -
that's why I called the series 'Women for a New Century.' But at the same
time, our matriarchs are more prolific and powerful than ever."
Tret Fure has been one busy,
guitar-pickin', award-winnin', festival-plannin', song-singin' lesbian
this summer. Between appearances at the National Women's Music Festival,
Milwaukee's Pride Festival, San Francisco's Pride, and the Michigan Women's
Music Festival, not to mention her own "Tomboy Girl Festival,"
in Madison, Wisconsin, it's been a busy summer. The award was presented
at the NWMF for Fure's 30 years of contributions to Women's music. Fure's
partner Jane Weldon also received an award for convincing all of the NWMF
performers to donate their appearance fees back to the festival so it
could continue for another year.
Fure's latest CD is My Shoes,
released two years ago to warm reviews. Sample cuts available on her website
pour forth a voice as smooth as honey mixed with a little whiskey fire
- sweet, deep and hot, rollercoastering from emotional and musical lows
to highs. While some reviewers have characterized the title cut as a "plea
for understanding her" [ahem] "lifestyle," it comes across
to me as a simple, tired-of-other-people's-shit, stand-up statement: if
you haven't been where I've been, don't you dare think you can judge me.
Fure's roots in women's music
go back to the beginning in the 1970s, when she was among the first women
music engineers. She worked with rock bands Poco, Yes, and J Geils Band.
She wrote songs other more famous people sang, and some of them - Bonnie
Raitt, Van Dyke Park, and members of Little Feat - played and sang on
her own first album in 1973. She turned out three more solo albums from
1984 to 1990 with Second Wave Records.
Somewhere in there came Cris Williamson,
first with a job engineering a kids' album, then engineering five of Cris's
records aimed at women who love women, followed by three more albums featuring
the two of them in musical duet. The two were together musically and personally
for 20 years. It is not a deliberately ironic scheduling choice that has
Cris Williamson on the West Street Arts stage in October as the second
concert in the series, but a coincidence, since she's performing in Burlington
at the Unitarian Universalist Church the night before.
Fure has now moved on, pursuing her solo career. Her previous album, Back
Home, got a second-place nod from OutVoice.
If you're a Tret or Cris groupie,
you might want to reserve a seat by phone and make a $55 donation to West
Street Arts, which gets you a front row seat and a signed copy of the
artist's latest CD, plus a photo.
So satisfy your curiosity, remember our roots, and keep an eye out for
how this series will branch out and blossom with the women musicians and
stand-up comics who follow these first two. It's worth a trip to the southeast
corner of Vermont.
Euan Bear learned of Women's Music in 1974, when the matriarchs and
their listeners were fresh young dykes out to have a good time and make
a safe space for us all to live.