Chris Mason: Old Timey+Ancient=Brand New (Terence Winch)

 

Baltimore is a wondrous place whose praises I have sung, literally ("In Praise of the City of Baltimore").  It is the home of the American Visionary Art Museum, my favorite place for outsider art. But in Baltimore, everything seems like outsider art.  David Franks, who practically invented performance art, is still active there as a poet and performer.  Michael Ball runs the excellent i.e. reading series, bringing the work of a wide range of avant-garde poets to an intimate and homey space. The indefatigable Stephen Reichert edits the impressive literary journal Smartish Pace.  Everything is cheap, the drinks are all doubles, the waitresses all tough, everyone still smokes.

 

chris mason picking out a tune

 

And Chris Mason, cofounder of The Tinklers and the driving force behind Old Songs, is among its citizens.  I met Chris in the mid 1970s in D.C. and was immediately impressed with his friendly unpretentiousness as a person and poet. He settled permanently in Baltimore in the late ’70s, forming The Tinklers with Charles Brohawn soon thereafter.  The Tinklers, who don’t perform very often these days, make music that is a sure antidote to all that is slick and glib in the music world. It’s as though the Holy Modal Rounders hired William Blake as their lyricist. The musicianship is rudimentary but somehow perfectly suited to their naïve, funny, wise, sometimes even goofy songs.  A documentary about The Tinklers, by a young filmmaker named Brian Averill, is a must-see introduction to this Baltimore phenomenon. 

charles brohawn & chris mason

I hadn’t seen much of Chris since he left D.C.  But four years ago, Mark Wallace invited him to bring his new music/poetry project, called Old Songs, to an art gallery in Dupont Circle for a performance. I went, not really sure what to expect, and I was immediately captivated. In 2002, Chris, along with Mark Jickling and Liz Downing, started translating ancient Greek poets (from the 7th to 4th centuries B.C.), setting their translations to music they composed in what is essentially an old-time string-band aesthetic. Everyone in the gallery that night felt exhilarated at the way in which the three performers brought these "old songs" back to life again.  On the phone the other night, Chris told me he taught himself Greek “as an escape from this modern world.”  In putting the songs together he goes by the sound of the Greek, thinking of the poem “as it was when it was a song, because Sappho, Alcman, and all those guys back then, they sang their poems, and that’s why it’s called lyric poetry, because they used a lyre.” 

 

The group has already recorded six home-made CDs of ancient Greek poems, four of which are available at Penn Sound. And Chris has just published an essay in the Antioch Review beautifully describing the group’s compositional process.  “Sappho,” Chris writes, “shines her poetic light on us, as she has on so many others, across a distance of twenty-six centuries, but ‘It’s the same moonlight.’”

 

Comments

[Greg McBride]

Terry, I've already come to look forward to your daily posts. You need a regular gig. Good stuff!
Greg

[Marshall Reese]

Sing, the Tinkler's praises! Chris Mason is truly bringing the old songs back...

[stephanie barber]

old songs is one of my favorite musical acts, thanks for writing so glowingly about them

[Justin Sirois]

Chris Mason and Old Songs are a brilliantly kept Baltimore secret that more people need to know about. We cherish this stuff and thank you for getting the word out.

[Moira]

Thanks for this. You make me homesick!

[Paleohippie]

bringing the old songs back to life

translating the ancient poems of
Sappho, Aeschylus, Euripides
& my fav Archilocus

as well as lesser lyrics about
those treacherous, warring, slave-owning Greeks of Attica & the Peloponnesus

of democracies turned empire
& oligarchies run amuck