Arem's Carr Lecture to focus on restoring, reviving, and re-imaging music
Multimedia archivist, musician and producer Jocelyn Arem and her Grammy Award-winning Magic Shop Studio colleagues will showcase the process of reviving, restoring, and re-imagining the music in an artist's archive in a presentation scheduled at 8 p.m. Thursday, March 26, in Filene Recital Hall on the Skidmore College campus.
Free and open to the public, the program will feature music from the historic local Saratoga music club Caffè Lena—a site for Civil Rights music, blues, bluegrass, jazz, spoken word, traditional music and theater since 1960. This presentation will share the archive and listening experience in stages: from the original audiotapes, to re-mastered recordings, culminating in live performances by student, faculty, staff and alumni musical guests.
Skidmore’s Office of the Dean of Special Programs and John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative (MDOCS) are sponsors of the program.
The evening will start with a presentation on the audio restoration process by Arem, Jessica Thompson, and Steve Rosenthal, her Magic Shop Studio colleagues, then move into examples of the process by playing original recordings, restored recordings, and live performances of the following selections: “West Virginia Mine Disaster” (Jean Ritchie 1969), “Mama Yancey’s Advice / Love with a Feeling” (Barbara Dane, 1968), “Oh Death”/”Cripple Creek” (Mike Seeger 1971/Guy Carawan 1970), “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” (Frank Wakefield 1971), “Aint Nobody Home But Me” (Roy Book Binder 1974), “It Makes No Difference” (Rick Danko 1988), and “Wedding Song” (Anais Mitchell 2013).
The goal of this three-part approach is to illustrate the archival restoration process
“from studio to stage,” giving audiences and performers an inside look into the buried
treasures hidden in music archives, and how exciting it can be not only to discover
and preserve them, but also to engage with and reinvigorate them for new audiences—where
they take on new meaning and come alive in exciting ways, Arem explained.
Performers will include Raymond Giguere, Dave Scheffel, Phoebe Radcliffe, Elisa Smith,
Alisha Stommel, Jack Mullin, Noah Prebish, and the band Fenimore Blues.
According to Arem, “We simply let the performers choose whatever song from the Caffè Lena CD box set that spoke to them. It ended up working out nicely and organically that their choices reflected the chronological breadth of the archive (1960s-2000s). So we will be able to present a historical overview of the Caffè’s musical history and various musical styles from blues to bluegrass to singer-songwriters, interpreted in new ways from a DJ to the Chinese Erhu to an all-female acoustic group.”
She added, “During the event, in the introduction to each song we will share the current performers’ connection to the song and why they chose it.”
Arem, a 2004 Skidmore graduate, is currently project manager and associate producer for the Erroll Garner Jazz Project, an initiative to preserve the legacy of this great African-American jazz pianist and reintroduce his music to the world. She is coordinating the preservation of Garner's multimedia archive, and producing an album reissue, website, and digital database with live event programming, to be released in 2015.
She is also returning to writing/performing her original poetry and music in New York City (currently developing a new jazz/soul album project), and redesigning her own website to reflect her dual-explorations in music performance and musical archival/production work.
In the years following her Skidmore graduation, Arem was in charge of the Caffè Lena History Project. She curated a collection of 6,000 photos, 700 hours of recordings, 45 boxes of memorabilia, and 100 interviews to illuminate and preserve the café’s legacy. She found a home for the complete archive at the Library of Congress and last fall, ASCAP presented Arem with its Deems Taylor Award for Multimedia for the project.
Arem’s Carr residency on campus this spring, co-sponsored by Skidmore’s Office of the Dean of Special Programs and MDOCS, included three campus visits as well as the March 26 presentation.
