Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hammer, with Frank Fairfield

Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer, with Frank Fairfield, Saturday March 17th at the Arcata Playhouse

I had known for weeks that I'd be going to this show, carried by the name of Frank Fairfield alone.  I went to some generic indie folk show at the Jambalaya about a year ago (maybe Arborea, with Justino.  Maybe What the Folk by Don.  Regardless, Indie Folk inclines itself to being generic.)  where Frank Fairfield had a brief set.  I didn't expect to hear anything worth mentioning that evening so I got fuzzy with beer and exhausted from good natured dancing, and so when Frank Fairfield hit the stage I was already sitting on the floor, so I didn't have anywhere to go when I was completely taken aback.  After set after set of flowy-garmeted hippies with acoustic guitars, on walks a straight man in a shirt buttoned to the adams apple, 1850s mustache, carrying a fiddle and a banjo along with the prerequisite guitar.  No smiles. No banter.  Frank Fairfield begins to play with the seriousness of a concert violinist, but with the repertoire of Pa Ingalls, and a hootin' and a'hollerin and stomping the stage to beat any one man band.

Frank Fairfield plays Rye Whiskey (Live on KEXP) ("Is it fair to say you just weren't made for these times, Frank?" "Is it? Oh, I don't know, I think everything's just as it should be.")

By tonight, Frank Fairfield has learned to laugh - just a muted chortle behind the mustache, but often and about every little thing.  (It's interesting timing, because a thought that's been percolating in my head about being an effective young person is that you must take yourself seriously, and also, for goodness sake, don't take yourself so seriously.)  It's hard to say if the Frank Fairfield we see onstage is conceit, or if there is some rare creature wandering the country and stepping onstage sometimes to let us in on his magical world.  I'm in favor of stage personas.  The holistic solo artist approach, in which the singer songwriter presents his or herself entirely (personality, distastes, provenance)  for your consideration, strikes me as quite desperate for approval.  And not of musical approval, but of the essence that "I need validation for my entire life. Please."
But if you're of the opinion that music is expressive, ie aims to illustrate some limited aspect of time and space, then letting the audience know about the artist's personal life isn't critical.  The stage presence certainly needs to stem from a place in his or her psychology, but what is presented onstage is deliberate and exaggerated so as to make a point. It isn't critical for me to know Frank Fairfield's personality, distastes, and provenance, but I'd like to think that him laughing a bit comes from the offstage Frank Fairfield, who commiserates with the onstage Frank Fairfield about how fast his cheap banjo loses tuning.

His performance is as expertly executed as his demeanor, very rich nuggets of joy and pain of the old fashioned kind and of every tempo, contained within a neat set.  Six tunes, the procession as such: Fiddle, banjo, guitar.  Fiddle, banjo, guitar.  (I went with Madeline who told me what made it a fiddle was the pegs were on the back instead of the sides, and that he played it in his lap.)  I'm sorry, the only tune names I recall are "Bye, Bye, My Eva, Bye, Bye" and "Short Life of Trouble."  The intensity and volume was unobtrusive, so that by the time it got around to being loud you were good and ready.  His banter is short, his songs, wrenching and nostalgic, are 7-10 minutes but they are too short, his set is nearly an hour but it is too, too short.    Effectively, his set does everything right that the apparent headliners ignore.

Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer - Now I do believe they deserve their reputation as fine and harmonious indie folk musicians.  The trouble is they effort to sabotage their legacy with incongruous costumes (Anais looks fine as a gypsy and befits the tragedy of the songs she sings about maidens, being five months pregnant.  But Hamer - he's got a clean face, a bright red t-shirt, and skinny jeans, which neither suit him, the aura, or his duo) and greedy execution.  If you like the soothing timbre of male and female vocals singing a seven minute ballad, then you will love two hours worth.  You may applaud at the end of two hours and earn another seven minutes of these two story tellers, two hours and seven minutes of soprano and bass.  While Fairfield was playing mazurkas and odes and blues, the only tractable variety between songs of the headliners was in the lyrics.  The songs were neat contained within themselves, but failed to be cohesive toward any larger structure - how easy it would have been to remove about five or so.

Maybe what I dislike about this genre is that it over-relies on the voice as an instrument.  It IS an instrument, but an entire set or band that makes every other instrument the bland support for its vocals had better be interesting or risk monotony.  It's fine, some people are vocal people.  I should point out the very drunken audience, 'silent as mice' according to Anais, were totally digging the set and asked for the encore sincerely.  Another long story about the song and how so funny it relates to what happened while we were on tour and how we met.

Frank Fairfield is the musician's musician; Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer sing pretty songs and waste your time.  Apparently the world loves them.