Evie Ladin Band brings folks together with music
In Evie Ladin’s case, recording the music in “Jump the Fire” meant capturing the enthusiasm of a live performance that includes virtuosic banjo playing, a world-renowned “body music” artist and a singer who had never performed these new songs vocally without physically playing them on banjo at the same time.
Finishing that sort of challenge deserves a celebration, which is how Ladin is kicking off her trio’s CD release tour on Thursday, May 19, at Freight & Salvage in Berkeley.
With her Evie Ladin Band, which includes her husband and Crosspulse founder Keith Terry and multi-instrumentalist Erik Pearson, “Jump the Fire” sets out to capture a side of Appalachian folk music rarely considered: a vibrancy that takes a genre sometimes consigned to performing arts centers and recitals, and brings it back to everyday people.
The title track leads off the new album with a shot of energy and sunshine, a song tailor-made for a crawfish boil.
The percussive dance of Terry’s “body music” — literally music made with one’s body by snapping, clapping and more that is championed by his nonprofit arts organization Crosspulse — and the traditional dancing in the audience helps turn a set of songs and a group of strangers into, even if only for one night, a small community.
Nothing in Ladin’s geographic background indicated she would grow to be a touring troubadour and ambassador of Appalachian folk music.
The daughter of a mother who was an international folk-dance teacher and a father who was an unabashed fan of the music, Ladin lived in a household that opened its doors to traveling musicians of all stripes, giving wandering entertainers a place to stay on the mid-Atlantic seaboard.
A guest workshop with a banjo player studying Ghanian ethnomusicology introduced Ladin to the African roots of Appalachian folk and put her on a path through college and a Fulbright scholarship, studying the rhythms and dance of the continent.