VERO BEACH — You never know what to expect when Joe Craven takes the stage. Last month it was as emcee of the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. This week, it’s playing a Spam-can violin – among many other things – in the Vero Beach High School Performing Arts Center.
Some of the nation’s best-known folk musicians perform Wednesday, July 3 in one of Vero’s least-publicized musical events, a mostly-Americana concert and apt prelude to the Fourth of July.
The faculty of the Mike Block String Camp, currently underway in Vero Beach, comprises the stellar roster of musicians that includes a cellist who plays with Yo-yo Ma, a percussionist who recorded with Jerry Garcia and a fiddler who jams with Béla Fleck.
Together their modestly priced concert – $20 – offers an overview of the jazz, folk and avant-garde improvisation taught at the camp.
Now in its third year, it draws students of all ages from local music programs and from around the nation, a few coming from as far away as Poland and Japan.
Both faculty and students are staying at the island’s Aquarius motel near South Beach, where nightly jams around the pool can be overheard by passersby.
While there is world music for the first time – the Carnatic music of southern India, played by violin virtuoso Arun Ramamurthy – most of the music is rooted deeply in American history.
Traditional Appalachian bluegrass, Celtic music from the British Isles, back-porch banjo pickin’ and Delta blues are as likely to fill the high school’s halls this week as jazz fusion, atonal and avant-garde improv.
Of the dozen performers on stage Wednesday, Craven may get the most laughs. He may also claim the most dropped jaws, at least for any Deadheads in the audience. Craven played percussion on the iconic “Shady Grove,” recorded over a three-year span in the early 1990s with Jerry Garcia, lead guitarist of the Grateful Dead, and David Grisman, the neofolk mandolin and banjo player, with whom Craven played for 17 years.
Craven is fresh from emceeing last month’s 40th annual Telluride Bluegrass Festival in Colorado. One of the biggest such festivals in the nation, drawing crowds of 12,000 on each of four days to hear artists like Emmylou Harris, Jackson Browne and Steve Martin.
As emcee, Craven’s acting skills were pressed into use – he was once involved in theater, and is also a mixed-media artist. He is a former museum assistant curator for the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno.
Raised in the southern U.S., mostly in the Carolinas and Atlanta, he now lives in northern California with his wife and the youngest of his four children, Hattie, 12, who last year released her first album.
Craven describes much of his current music as “found sound.” Carrying on the same impulse that fueled his art from found objects, he “Dumpster dives” for new things to make noise with; the Spam-can violin he calls a Spamivarius is one.
At last year’s fiddle-camp concert, performing with jazz pianist (and Columbia University professor) Victor Lin, Craven grabbed a five-gallon water jug from the Performing Arts Center’s wings and dragged it on stage to play.
“I love to look for things that are part of the environment in which I’m going to perform,” he says.
He is expert at making sounds from his own face – the hip-hop mouth percussion technique known as beat box, which particularly enthralls his students. “My goal is to broaden their horizons about what music can be,” he says. “That’s very exciting.”
Like the Mike Block Camp as a whole, Craven uses no sheet music. “Mike’s camp is ear-trained,” he says.
Music is performed, then imitated, as opposed to learned from “ants on a page,” as he called the notes on sheet music.
Self-taught, he doesn’t read music, though he broadly acknowledges the usefulness of training for those who want to dig deeper in “the language of music,” he says. Still, he believes music-making doesn’t have to include notes on a page.
“I tell people it’s like learning to talk,” he says. “You don’t need to know how to read to learn how to talk. By the age of four, we’re already talking spontaneously and fluidly. This is very, very important and it’s at the heart of how I teach: giving people permission to learn music informally in the same way that they learned how to talk.”
Craven has his own music camp, situated along a rushing river in northern California. There, musicians of multiple generations gather to get “un-stuck,” he says of those already in the creative process. Others are there to learn to play or sing as rote beginners.
The camp, called Rivertunes, “gives people permission to take possession of what they’ve already got. I really do believe everyone can make music. They just have to make that choice,” he says. “My goal is to prove that anybody with a mental or physical disability or just struggling with the idea of learning music can make music just by making the choice to make music.”
As for Wednesday’s concert, he has a humble request: “Lower your expectations and broaden your horizons,” he asks. “As Joseph Campbell said, ‘don’t be attached to the outcome.’ Open your mind to take a chance. If you don’t have any idea what it is we’re going to play, all the more reason to lay down some cash and give up an evening because you have no idea what you’re going to see.”
He says that’s a tall order for people who are “marinated” in pop-driven media like television, movies and the radio.
“Folk has a place at the table,” Craven says. “But it’s only one chair.”
Along with Craven, Eggleston, Lin and Block, performers include Colin Cotter, Kai Welch, Lauren Rioux, Arun Ramamurthy, Brittany Haas, Hanneke Cassel and Zach Brock. The musicians’ bios are on the camp’s website, www.mikeblockstringcamp.com.
