Steep Ravine has already played venues such as the New Parish, the Freight & Salvage and Chthonic Theater. The band just released its first full-length, Kickstarter-funded album of original material, Trampin’ On, and leaves on tour Monday for Los Angeles, New Orleans, Seattle and many places in between.

Jan Purat is on violin, Simon Linsteadt is on guitar, Alex Bice is on upright bass and Andy O’Brien is on mandolin.

The Daily Californian talked to the band about its influences, its new album and the terrible price of playing bluegrass for Hawaiian hamburgers.

Daily Cal: How did you come together as a group?

Jan Purat: We were all going to UC Santa Cruz at the time. Simon and I went to the same high school and had been playing music together for a while. We had a bluegrass jam at Andy’s house one time and then somehow got invited to play at this Hawaiian bar and grill. We basically had a regular gig jamming for tips and a free Hawaiian burger.

Andy O’Brien: It was an awkward place to play bluegrass, but we did it anyway because it was so much fun. Plus, the food gave you the shits every time!

DC: Where did the name of the band come from?

JP: We named the band after a hiking trail on Mt. Tamalpais. It leads from high up on the mountain down to Stinson Beach. It’s this beautiful canyon filled with old-growth redwoods. It seemed like a fitting name for our band.

DC: How did you get more gigs starting out?

JP: It’s been pretty amazing with this band how much people have reached out to us. We’ve had to do some work getting gigs but not as much as I had expected. I think a lot of people find it refreshing to see young people really focusing their efforts on this genre of music.

DC: Why bluegrass?

Simon Linsteadt: None of us come from a bluegrass upbringing — we have roots in funk, classical, rock and folk. I think I came to really appreciate the genre around junior year of high school. A lot of people don’t realize how embedded bluegrass is in the musical history of the United States. For me, bluegrass is the diamond of American music.

DC: When you write songs, do you try to replicate that traditional bluegrass sound?

JP: I think we draw a lot from bluegrass, but we also take a lot of elements from folk, jazz and gypsy jazz. Most of our originals have traditional bluegrass instrumentation but pull from a bunch of different genres. It comes naturally — I think that’s what makes us unique; we don’t try to sound like any one thing. Bluegrass is the main ingredient, but not the only one.

SL: Bluegrass is the pot in which everything is melted … Don’t put that in the interview.

AO: We all have very different backgrounds, and it’s hard to not reflect that in our music.

DC: How is the new album different from things you’ve done before?

SL: A lot of the stuff we do live has to be really high-energy because we’re usually playing in bars. This album was our chance to show a spectrum of sound; we have some gentle tunes and some more uptempo tunes, jazz-oriented tunes and bluegrass tunes. We had so much freedom to experiment in the studio.

DC: How was your first experience in a professional studio?

JP: We had an amazing experience at Tiny Telephone Studios. It’s one of the only studios in the Bay Area that records exclusively with analog, meaning that we recorded everything on tape — nothing digital.

SL: Our sound engineer, Jacob Winik, was incredible. He was basically our impromptu producer; he let us get all of our ideas out and made us feel
really comfortable.

AO: I don’t think Jacob has much experience recording bluegrass music, which turned out to be perfect. Since we aren’t really a traditional bluegrass band, his different, fresh approach was more coherent with our different kind of sound.

DC: Where will you be touring the new album?

JP: This will be our first big national tour. We’re basically making a loop to New Orleans and back — we’ll hit LA, San Diego, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Missouri, Colorado and then Seattle, Portland and the Northwest. It was a lot of work to get all those gigs, but we’re really excited to finally have everything in place for the tour. It’s going to be great.

AO: Everything depends on our 1994 Plymouth Grand Voyager. Once we hit the Rockies, all bets are off.

DC: Will you turn a profit on tour, or are you doing it for the exposure?

JP: It’s really up to us. Unlike a lot of bands, we can busk and play on the street — and we love to do it! If we busk on tour, we’ll definitely make some money. We’ve been playing at the Montgomery and Downtown Berkeley BART stations and doing really well.

Alex Bice: Busking is kind of like our 9-to-5 job.

SL: People are especially happy to see us in the mornings. I think they like to see that musicians can wake up early too.

DC: Why have you chosen to base yourselves in the East Bay?

JP: There are so many great venues to play in the East Bay. Plus, this is a great place to build a following; the people here are really receptive to our music. It feels like home.

You can keep track of Steep Ravine through its website and Facebook page. Its new album is available now.  

Contact Eliot Claasen at eclaasen@dailycal.org.

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Last Thursday night, in a rare occasion for a hip urban nightclub, everybody was dancing. For about three hours at the New Parish music club in Oakland, shyness and coolness gave way to bobbing heads and bouncing feet at the sound of the California Honeydrops, an Oakland-based band with music rooted in gospel, R&B, New Orleans second line and blues.

By the time the group took the stage, both floors of the New Parish were packed from wall to wall with people young and old, so much so that dozens were turned away at the door. Touring the United States and Europe behind their newest album of original tracks, Like You Mean It, the Honeydrops haven’t been back to the Bay Area since April. Thursday night’s show was something of a homecoming.

The band made its start as a trio in 2007, playing at BART stations in Oakland and Berkeley with a trumpet, a washboard and a tub-bass (or “soul-tub”). Picking up a few new members and a weekly gig at the Cheese Board Collective in North Berkeley, the Honeydrops got more and more work playing private parties — including a couple of shows at UC Berkeley co-ops — weddings, bars and clubs. By the time they began raising funds through Kickstarter to record their first full-length studio album, the Honeydrops had become a popular Bay Area act.

Making $26,000 through Kickstarter, recording Like You Mean It and picking up a manager — who happens to be a UC Berkeley graduate — the band has been busy touring and promoting for the past six months. The now five-piece group is becoming more and more accustomed to sold-out crowds and international recognition, playing festivals like Outside Lands, High Sierra and the Monterey Jazz Festival.

The California Honeydrops’ sound is an incredible mash-up of genre. At times sparse and soulful in the tradition of early R&B, at others a jubilant cacophony of horn and second-line rhythm, their music is difficult to label. Despite the all-over-the-map quality of its sound, the group finds coherence in its message and delivery, both of which are positive and celebratory. According to the group’s lead singer, trumpeter and songwriter, Lech Wierzynski, that’s what the music is all about — celebrating life.

“Some music makes you want to shoot yourself,” Wierzynski said after Thursday’s show. “That’s not what we do. Whatever’s going on with you, we’re going to make you forget it; we’re going to make you remember the good things. Sometimes you need music to remind you how good things actually are.”

Wierzynski, born in Warsaw, Poland, and raised in Chicago and Washington, D.C., grew up listening to gospel music. Though few songs touch on overtly spiritual themes — in fact, Wierzynski’s songs are just as often about loving as they are about love — it’s sometimes hard to control the urge to shout “Hallelujah!” But you’ll probably end up shouting something.

A Honeydrops show is a participatory experience. Out front, Wierzynski directs the band as much as he does the audience. During nearly every song Thursday night, he had the audience singing with him. At one point, he split the crowd and orchestrated a “freak-out” competition. He spent time between songs to check up on the general mood of the room, asking at least 10 times, “Oakland, are you feeling good?”

“We like to interact,” Wierzynski said. “I think that’s what makes us special. I think that’s what brings people back.”

“(A show) is like a conversation,” he added. “You’ve got to get everyone involved. You don’t play whatever you feel like playing; it’s all about connecting with people.”

When it comes to dancing, the audience needs no direction beyond the music. Whether it’s a funk tune that causes you to impersonate moves you’ve seen in “Soul Train” clips, a mournful ballad that makes you crinkle your nose and shake your head or a washboard-driven song that leaves you stomping around barn-dance style, there is no staying still. Thursday night’s Oakland crowd never stopped moving.

“It’s nice to play for the hometown crowd,” Wierzynski said. “I mean, they go the craziest. This is the freak show right here. The Bay Area has got some crazy-ass people.”

Now headed south and then on to Germany, the California Honeydrops plan on returning to the Bay Area music scene in January, starting with a New Year’s Eve gig at Yoshi’s in San Francisco. Word is, they might have a weekly slot at a new club, Leo’s, set to open on Telegraph Avenue and 55th Street this December.

Contact Eliot Claasen at eclaasen@dailycal.org.

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Taylor A. Vega/Staff

Low

Low’s slow-churning melodies and haunting harmonies were the antithesis of the warm, jovial midday sun they accompanied Friday on Arrow stage. The three-piece based in Duluth, Minn., brought the cold of its hometown to the city, interrupting its icy melancholy every so often with striking vocal arrangements that would thaw away the frost of its still-poignant tunes.

With a majority of the crowd sitting idly and enjoying the weather, the Sub Pop veterans brought a precision and attention to detail to their performance that some of the audience unfortunately could not fully appreciate. Despite the somewhat lackluster impatience of the spectators at first, Low won them over progressively with a consideration for volume dynamics that few at the festival could match.

This is where husband-and-wife vocal duo Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker thrive; their chemistry impressed not only vocally but instrumentally as well. The band is one of the few remaining that feels comfortably entrenched in the early ’90s glory days of fellow indie idols like Mazzy Star, even harkening back to the sauntering shoegaze of My Bloody Valentine.

Songs like the existential “Plastic Cup” burst from their muted verse portions as the two’s harmonies kicked in, prompting many to oblige as echoes of “you could always count on your friends to get you high” filled Hellman Hollow. Low certainly did not demand attention, but the quiet confidence of the group’s performance commanded it.

Loudon Wainwright

Stepping onto Rooster stage Saturday, a casual Loudon Wainwright III, donning denim shorts and a baseball jersey, was met by an equally casual 3 o’clock crowd. The area around Rooster stage, one of the smaller stages at the festival, was hard to maneuver in by the time Wainwright began his roughly hourlong set: Blankets and chairs covered nearly all available space on the ground, and a smoky haze covered everything else.

Known for the confessional and diarylike quality of his songwriting, the 67-year-old, Grammy-winning Wainwright kept it personal Saturday; most of the songs he played were about family, which is also the subject of his latest album, Older Than My Old Man Now. Reminiscent of a couple of tracks from his newest album that feature spoken word over rhythmic vamping, Wainwright told stories between songs, mostly about his family.

Although his subject matter and delivery were heartfelt, Wainwright’s performance lacked excitement. The extended periods of talking between songs took away from the set’s momentum and created an informal, living-roomlike atmosphere bordering on boring. Even those in the first row found no reason to get out of their lawn chairs. To exacerbate the problem, it was hard for a lot of people to hear anything at all. Those on the large slope to the right of the stage — which probably included nearly half of the audience — could barely hear the sound of Wainwright’s guitar, let alone his voice.

Wainwright’s personal and casual approach would have been better received in a more intimate setting. As it was, he had a hard time capturing the interest of his obliviously chattering audience.

Father John Misty

As the afternoon came to a close and the sun began to shine through the trees of Golden Gate Park at Arrow stage, ex-Fleet Foxes drummer J. Tillman, who performs under the moniker Father John Misty, took to the stage shielded by a giant iPhone cutout. The theatrics were clearly a commentary on one of the modern musician’s greatest grievances: the cellphone camera. Whether irked by the technological barriers between performers and their audience or simply teasing his fans with an onstage gag, the ever-quirky Father John Misty did not address the prop — nor did he have to.

Tillman, alone and armed with only a guitar, some reverb and his angelic vocal chords, put all of the quickly growing crowd at Hellman Hollow into a trance with cuts from his debut as Father John Misty, Fear Fun, stopping only momentarily to take a jab at Giants fans and professional sports team allegiances after a dreamy rendition of “Only Son of the Ladiesman.”

Compared to his SUPERB-sponsored Lower Sproul performance last year with an incredibly talented backing band, Tillman’s show at Hardly Strictly was a significant departure, marked by a focus on the singer’s most obvious talent: his voice. Although the twanging live guitars of “I’m Writing A Novel” were certainly missed, the slower version was a welcome alternative, even garnering some laughs from the audience with its ridiculous and caustic lyrics.

Long-haired and bespectacled with Ray-Bans, Tillman fit right in with his audience and fellow performers at the festival. His surprisingly raw set felt like a deliberate step away from the intricately coordinated live musicianship of his old Seattle-based project; the bare-bones setup of the stage and arrangements were unexpectedly pleasant in a day otherwise lined with banjo fills and stand-up bass. Tillman also took the liberty of letting loose a small host of new, unrecognizable material for longtime fans awaiting new Misty material.

Musicianship aside, the conversation and excitement surrounding the performance were undoubtedly signs of Tillman’s growing stock in the indie music mainstream. Taking the stage after indie heavyweights and fellow Sub Pop signees Low, the condition of the grass went from bad to worse as a mass migration of fans — many already quite inebriated by this point — stormed the Hollow to watch the Father preach.

“I’ll just call this what it is, my vanity gone wild with my crisis,” admitted the guilty Tillman as he strummed the final chords of “Now I’m Learning to Love the War” while still staring out into the audience from the painfully apt giant phone cutout as they pointed their phones back at him. Tillman’s performance was not filled with the glamour and shine of the cellular device he was mocking, but its simplicity and immediacy made it one of the most powerful of the weekend.

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Carli Baker/Senior Staff

Beneath the red, green and blue-lighted pillars of Sproul Hall, London-based electronic artist Max Cooper played to a mostly student crowd of about 120 Thursday night. The free outdoor concert, put on by UC Berkeley’s ASUC SUPERB, featured a half-hour opening set by student group String Theory followed by an almost two-hour performance by Cooper.

A former genetics researcher at University College London with a doctorate in computational biology, the 33-year-old Belfast native has been writing and performing electronic music professionally since 2007. Starting out as a dance DJ in the late ’90s, Cooper came to realize his inclination toward composing and producing music while pursuing his doctoral and post-doctoral degrees in the mid-2000s. He has since released more than 50 original tracks and remixes.

Cooper has caught the ear of publications like Clash Magazine and IDJ Magazine, and his music has earned him accolades such as the title of one of Resident Advisor’s top live acts of 2012 and the fifth position on Beatport’s list of the top artists of 2012. Thursday’s performance came at the tail end of Cooper’s roughly weeklong North American tour, which included appearances in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Oakdale, Calif. (for Symbiosis Gathering), and Juarez.

The artist began his set Thursday night with a resounding crunch. Reacting to what Cooper considers his more academic material, the crowd nodded sporadically to broken, mechanized sounds coming at a crawling pace. With the introduction of more sounds, both rhythmic and melodic, there eventually emerged a recognizable song to which the crowd was able to move in sync — but always with abstract, soundscape-like underpinnings.

Through his music, Cooper tries to evoke feelings, images and different states of mind.

“I write music to communicate a concept or a feeling,” he said after the show. “I usually start with an image or an emotion, and I ask myself, ‘How can I translate this into music?’”

Throughout the show, Cooper created what he calls “musical environments,” characterized by minimalist instrumentation and effected sounds, heavy on the reverb. But these more thoughtful, evocative compositions were interwoven with undeniably danceable tracks, full of throbbing bass, hard-hitting drums, rhythmic sequencing and totally graspable melodies. For Cooper, it’s all about toeing the line between the academic and the danceable.

“I want people to have fun with my music, so it should be danceable,” he said. “But I also want to challenge people — I want it to be musically interesting.”

Though stressing the fact that his creative process is emotive and feel-driven, Cooper recognized some crossover between his previous career in genetics research and composing music.

“What I was doing before and what I do now both have a lot to do with taking something that’s more abstract and recognizing patterns within it,” he said. “Genetics is recognizing patterns in signs, and music is recognizing patterns in nature.”

As the night progressed, so did the amount of bounce in the music and movement in the crowd. Speaking to the musical evolution of the set, Cooper said that he never plans a setlist in advance.

“I don’t plan out the songs I play beforehand,” he said. “I get a feeling from the crowd and I stick with it. It’s all improvised.”

As shown through the multiple times he raised his hands in appreciation toward the audience, Cooper said that he had a great time playing on Sproul.

“The crowd was really open-minded tonight,” he said. “I felt free to do what I wanted to do.”

With a new album in the works, a busy touring schedule for the coming months and increasing critical and popular attention, Max Cooper’s continued success in the electronic music scene is as guaranteed as his groove.

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But this group of young and hopeful musicians doesn’t really reflect the performing community as a whole. Not all performers are weekend musicians, and not all performers have other sources of income, like parental or governmental support. There are those who survive entirely upon money earned playing music — and I’m not talking about the ones who make it.

I know a 57 year-old guy who performs nearly every night of the week. He’s in something like 4 bands and often sits in with others. His sole money-maker is his bass. Somehow, the gigs at bars, restaurants, wineries, county fairs, and charity events sustain a reasonably comfortable lifestyle; nothing extravagant, but he’s got a trailer to call his own and some pretty awesome guitars — which isn’t bad, considering.

Musicians’ wages, compared to others’, suck. Nearly every time I play music, I end up earning less than $8 per hour, tips included. I’ve never had to make a living playing music, and didn’t give my low wage much thought until I played a few gigs with that 57 year-old bassist.

For him, money earned playing music is dinner — a thing he needs. For me and others like me, money earned playing music is usually blown on something like a celebratory six-pack — it’s a bonus.

Young, aspiring musicians and bands find value in the opportunity to perform for an audience. Our attitude toward material payment is shaped by this perspective; we’ll play for cheap. But low-balling the value of our service carries repercussions.

The monetary value of musical performance, like any good or service, is determined by market competition. Typically, if one band is willing to play for free while another asks to be compensated, the former will get the gig. (Of course, this is assuming that the good or service is the same, which is a bit tricky in terms of musical performance.) I mean, this is the same principle that has made WalMart the largest corporation in the world: People want to pay less.

Without the means to draw a line, like a powerful union or laws, each performing musician plays a role in determining the wage of his peer. When one agrees to play a gig for a really small sum, this has bearing on the value of musical performance itself and the entire performing community, including those musicians who need gig-money to live.

Blame is hard to pin. I wouldn’t fault the aspiring musician or band, hoping to gain exposure — there really is a lot of value in gaining access to an audience. I wouldn’t fault the venues and bookers, either — they’re making totally natural business decisions. But it sucks that a single group within a community–-in this case, the young, aspiring performers — should make it harder for somebody like a 57 year-old veteran musician to earn a reasonable wage for his already undercompensated service.

I haven’t thought up a solution yet, but until I do, I’m demanding at least three tequila shots the next time I play.

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