My skin has a tendency to crawl when I hear anyone who isn't African-American playing delta-style blues. It's empty, patronizing and foolish posturing existing on the surface of a complex experience. But if I'm willing to accept The Black Keys, John Spencer and the North Mississippi Allstars into my iPod, there are obviously
exceptions to my distaste, and ones that have as much to say about the conditions in cultural evolution as my hypocrisy as a cultural critic.
With the critical success of bands immersed in the folk music traditions of Eastern Europe-such as Beirut and DeVotchKa-Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trost, the duo from Albuquerque known as A Hawk and a Hacksaw, are as extraordinary among their peers as is their coupling with a foreign culture championing unlikely loyalties from indie music purists and pop culture urchins alike.
Perhaps it's the wanderlust spirit within Barnes and Trost that informs their curiosity and openness to vast musical legacies. Hawk, which excised quips from
Hamlet
and
Don Quixote
for its band name, exudes a nervy confidence, yet balanced humbleness, in its aesthetic. "While we are interested in Eastern European music," Barnes tells SFR, "and it is a huge influence on us, we don't consider ourselves the torchbearers of a tradition." Hawk is currently gearing up for an eight-month tour of Europe. The pair will leave the states on Feb. 15, but not before playing one last gig at the College of Santa Fe's O'Shaughnessy Performance Space (1600 St. Michael's Drive, 473-6270)-or the "garage," as it's known to CSF students (8 pm Thursday, Feb. 8. $5).
Hawk has been busy putting the finishing touches on a new EP as well. The seven-track, instrumental album comes on the heels of the band's most recent and third LP,
The Way the Wind Blows
, an album partially recorded in Hungary with members of the Romanian band Fanfare Ciocarlia. Barnes moved to the Romanian village where Ciocarlia lives and set up a studio to record. Hawk will make Budapest its home base during the upcoming tour. "It will gives us an opportunity
to rest and travel throughout Eastern Europe on our days off," Trost says. A grant they received from the arts council of England will have them touring the UK with Hungarian musicians in May. Hawk also will tour in Spain, Portugal, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Scotland, Austria, the Netherlands and Belgium this summer.
Embracing Eastern European music proved to be an emotionally and experiential search for Barnes. "The first I heard of it was through a tape by Bulgarian women's choirs-they sing a cappella and harmonies and multiple melodies going on at once. When I played with Neutral Milk Hotel, we used to listen to it while were out on tour." Neutral Milk Hotel is a group Barnes joined when he was 19. The band is considered by many as an important and innovative voice in independent music. It was part of a group of musicians based in Athens, Ga., known as the Elephant Six Collective, which also included members and indie-rocker phenoms Of Montreal, whom Hawk recently opened for in Albuquerque. "Neutral Milk Hotel was for me a really great band to learn from-the same with Elephant Six Collective, living in a house with musicians who were constantly doing stuff when I was that age was really good for me," Barnes says.
Heather Trost, a UNM graduate who studied music and creative writing, joined Hawk in 2004. These days, the two are the band's primary musicians. Trost, who has played the violin since the age of 3, met Barnes while playing at a gig with her former band Foma. Barnes, who at the time wrote, composed and played all the instruments for Hawk, was in search of a string player. He approached Trost about playing together and she agreed. Barnes was near completion on Hawk's second album,
Darkness at Noon
, when Trost permanently joined Barnes, and she has since contributed more to the band's overarching sound. Trost echoes Barnes' sentiments by saying that Hawk is not merely a "folk cover band" and, despite their affinity for traditional Eastern European melodies, their passion lies in "adding their own things" and ultimately their own personalities to each composition.
Their stage performances are as equally engaging as their music. Barnes has built a "drum kit" and fancies himself, perhaps ironically, as a one-man band. "What I'm interested in is the idea of the one-man band. The traditional way, that for centuries the guy in the village would play the pipe and the drum simultaneously, or accordion and drum. It exists across the world, it's been going on forever." One may imagine European audiences a tad skeptical. No so. "We get a better reception in Europe than we do in America," Barnes states, a sentiment supported by Trost: "European audiences are really receptive; they're more open to it than American audiences."
Cross-pollination of cultures is the new authentic. Openness to the musical spectrum seems to be what will drag us from the doldrums of mediocrity. A Hawk and a Hacksaw, unlike so many of its contemporaries, realizes that echoing a culture is not the same as understanding a culture; it is a doorway, an invitation, to a world yet unexplored.
