April 18, 1980 Gusto Nightlife column: Folk makes a comeback

Having started my own brief musical career in a coffeehouse in the mid-1960s, I’ve always had an affinity for them.

April 18, 1980

Acoustic music revival

Acoustic music takes over the town this weekend in the form of the ninth annual Buffalo Folk Festival at UB. What a perfect occasion for sampling the biggies – such nationally renowned performers as guitar master John Fahey or Mimi Farina, sister of Joan Baez. But for the deep-down essence of folk music, you have to venture outside the standard concert settings. At the festival, you’ll find it flourishing in the open mike sessions and the workshops, where performers and audiences loosen up and exchange songs and delights at a more intimate level.

For the other 51 weeks of the year, acoustic music plays locally wherever it can find an accommodation. Gone are old standbys like the Limelight Gallery and (temporarily) the Tralfamadore Café. Others, like the Rue Franklin West and the Central Park Grill, have altered their musical formats. In their wake are a handful of latter-day venues which vary considerably in ambiance and amiability.

Closest to the old-fashioned ‘60s coffeehouse – where people actually sat around, drank coffee and dug the music – are the Friday night get-togethers in the storefront studios of Peopleart/Bflo in the heart of the Elmwood district on Buffalo’s West Side, a couple doors away from the Lexington Food Co-op at Lexington and Ashland avenues.

For $2 admission, there’s a choice of about 10 large tables in a long, shallow semicircle facing an unadorned stage. The high-ceilinged white room is graced with an art exhibit – recently a curious, conversation-provoking collection of “found” objects. At the back are the rest rooms, a workshop where performers gather and Movable Feast, the work of a large, cheerful, Lexington Co-op woman in a denim dress who provides traditional coffeehouse fare – coffee, tea, cappuccino and cake – for old-fashioned prices. Many of the audience, however, have brought their own snacks, six-packs and bottles of soft drinks and wine.

The crowd is a mix of performers and their friends, old-time folk aficionados and a younger group in its late teens. “We’ve been getting kids from Canisius High School too,” says singer Stefani Brooks, who runs the musical end of the program. “They put on a coffeehouse in school and we went and they treated us like Hollywood. It was like we were stars.”

Performers at Peopleart may be solo or duo and, like most other places, they sing with the assistance of microphones and a sound system. There are two or three sets, starting at 9:30 p.m. and ending about midnight. Talent varies, but there’s rarely a set that doesn’t provide a fair measure of delight. Ms. Brooks draws from a circle of local folk mainstays, but also has succeeded in booking feminist Madelaine Davis for one of her rare singing appearances. That comes next Friday. In addition to pop and traditional tunes, there’s some striking original material.

An open stage session at Peopleart on Good Friday was so well attended by performers and fans that Ms. Brooks is talking about doing more. It was a fine night. Desperate Dave Goddard, who co-hosts these things with Ms. Brooks, strummed out some fast-paced Dylanesque blues. Blonde, beautiful Kim Cady sang a stunning song she’d written in the Joni Mitchell style. A high school guitarist picked Bach and “Malagueña.” Well-seasoned singers from Hawaii and Lake Placid, who just happened to be in town, stepped up and did a few numbers.

Another touch of the traditional can be found at the other end of the weekend – Sunday night at 9:30 in the Greenfield Street Restaurant not far from Main and Jewett. This is where folksinger Ros Magorian has been overseeing a coffeehouse for three years. The restaurant is big and commodious, the crowd polite and attentive, though the music sometimes has to compete with the cleanup of the kitchen for the first few songs.

Here’s the place to hear uncommon and old-timey instruments like dulcimers and autoharps and banjos. Ms. Magorian draws her performers from both the traditional and contemporary sides of the fence. Sometimes, like this Sunday, she brings in a classical music group. On other Sundays, out-of-town artists are booked, especially those who might have played Saturday in the UUAB Coffeehouse in the Rathskellar in Squire Hall on UB’s Main Street Campus.

Practically everyone who’s casually visited the Main Street Campus in the past 15 years know “The Rat.” Age hasn’t changed it much. Still, it’s a more natural setting for coffeehouses and folk music than the cafeteria on the main floor.

The weekly UUAB Coffeehouses used to offer the city’s best schedule of traditional and small-label recording artists – Jim Ringer and Mary McCaslin, Utah Philips, Rosalie Sorrels, to name a few – thanks to the long and dedicated efforts of Judy Accardi and her aides. It occasionally attracted a couple hundred or more for better-known performers, but it was never a high-priority item on the UUAB Music Committee budget. This year Mrs. Accardi left to raise a family and coffeehouses are held on an irregular basis. Most of the energy and funding has gone into the Buffalo Folk Festival.

Much the same situation prevails at Buffalo State College, where midweek coffeehouse sessions are held on an intermittent basis in the Student Union’s second-floor Fireside Lounge. Once the city’s folksingers would have considered the colleges a good bet for a chance to perform. Now they don’t.

The liveliest gathering of folk musicians around town comes Monday night in Curran’s, a cozy Irish bar across from the WGR-TV studios downtown on Delaware Avenue. Monday open mike at Curran’s draws a steady parade of people carrying guitar cases, all of them hoping to do three or four songs in their turn. Some of them also hope this will serve as an introduction to big, bearded Jim Curran, proprietor of the place, who features acoustic music every night of the week but Sunday.

One recent Monday, host Mike Meldrum got so many singers signed up so early that he stopped the list at 15 and sent them on half an hour before the usual 10 p.m. start. Music at Curran’s generally tends more toward the commercially popular singer-songwriter stuff of the past couple decades, but on open mike night, almost anything can happen. Last Monday a former Buffalonian who now runs a coffeehouse in Binghamton treated listeners to old-time tunes on the hammered dulcimer.

It’s also a good place to run into the leading lights on the local folk scene. If they aren’t playing on stage in the back room – that tiny back room fills up pretty quickly – they’re up front by the bar. John Brady, Joe Head, Kathy Moriarty, Kim Cady, Dave Goddard and Rev. Glenn Wallace, who runs a coffeehouse and open mike in the Shoreline Church in the Shoreline Apartments at 200 Niagara St. on alternate Saturday nights. They come out to open mikes for the fun of it. Or sometimes to try out new material. When the hour gets late and the crowd thins out, it becomes almost like a singaround. Brady and Head may join together for inebriated duets on Steely Dan’s “My Old School” or Ms. Cady, Meldrum and Jack Kolberg may crank up a traditional harmony.

Folk music finds a second home at the Schuper House in Niagara Street in Black Rock, but on a less regular basis. Big shows like the Dave Van Ronk concert earlier this month bring young and old fans out in droves. But some of the lesser dates with local performers pass almost unnoticed. That means the musicians wind up playing to a handful of folks in that big, empty back room while the regulars cluster around the bar or the pool table up front.

A number of other places offer acoustic music one night a week. The Koinonia Café, a homey little place at Elmwood and Breckenridge avenues, has performers Friday nights. The Bona Vista, home of the blues on Hertel Avenue, has a Tuesday open mike with Ernie Insana, but it hasn’t drawn much notice from fans or performers as yet. Phil Dillon finished putting some electric guitar licks behind Insana’s rendition of “Take It Easy” a couple weeks back and noted that what’s needed is better promotion of the session. What’s really needed, he adds, are more places to play. The singers could fill another full-time folk club on the order of Curran’s. And, the performers reckon, so could the fans.

For performers, the most commercially viable dates are at the various suburban Ground Round restaurants on Fridays and Saturdays. Artistically, though, they aren’t as satisfying. “There’s all this other stuff going on,” says one singer. “You feel like you’re providing background music.” Acoustic duos and trios are the order of the day at the Ground Rounds and their repertoires run toward Jackson Browne and the other pop singer-songwriters.

Occasionally, an acoustic performer finds a stage that suits him well and holds it down for an extended stay. The Pointless Brothers have been a weekly staple at the Central Park Grill on Main Street for years. They play Sundays. That’s also the case with Sid Krupkin weekends at the Rampant Lion on Pine Avenue in Niagara Falls. And every Friday at the Red Jacket Inn, formerly the Treadway Inn, near the North Grand Island Bridge in Niagara Falls, is a wonderful acoustic quartet that calls itself Dr. Jazz and the Jazzmanian Devils.

Dr. Jazz is Brian Bauer, one of the great ragtime clarinetists. He toured with Leon Redbone, but decided the road was not for him, so now he unfurls his talent and his peculiar wit for uninhibited Canadian tourists on getaway weekends – the predominant patrons of the Red Jacket Inn this season.

They dance the old dances to Dr. Jazz’s old tunes (“Now here’s a cute little number from 1922,” he’ll say. “Hi, m’am.”). They laugh at his funny costumes. He seems to have a new hat for each song. And they rise to the bait when he asks if there are any fans of ‘50s music out there. “Yes,” they shout. “OK,” he says with a dry smile, “here’s some ‘50s tunes as they were done by the original artists – Jenny Lind and Stephen Foster.”

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IN THE PHOTO: A Friday night at the Peopleart/Bflo coffeehouse. Photo by Ronald J. Colleran of The Buffalo News. The faces look familiar, but unfortunately there's no identification.

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FOOTNOTE: The Peopleart/Bflo storefront has new tenants, but the music continues in the cozy basement of Unity Church, 1243 Delaware Ave. at Auburn Avenue, between West Ferry Street and Gates Circle. It’s in operation from March through June and Labor Day through Thanksgiving. Best place to find out what’s happening is their Facebook page, which currently notes the recent passing of John Brady.

Brian Bauer is still Dr. Jazz. Now his band is a trio, he calls them the Jazzbugs and they were performing regularly on Sundays last year at Nietzsche's on Allen Street. He also has a website, jazzbugs.com.

The Pointless Brothers are still among us, too. They're part of a big lineup of local acoustic artists represented by Sunshine Productions.