Rick Bass + Stellarondo
Gig Seeker Pro

Rick Bass + Stellarondo

Missoula, Montana, United States

Missoula, Montana, United States
Band Spoken Word Folk

Calendar

This band has not uploaded any videos
This band has not uploaded any videos

Music

Press


"Road to the Ryman: Stellarondo and Rick Bass Shoot for a Dream"

Of course Stellarondo is up to something that is a bit over the top, a little hard to imagine and ready-made for failure. Hey man, that's art though, right? Leaping beyond the easy thing and not playing "Mama Tried" at your live shows are the differences between great musicians and the rest of us. What they're crafting is An Evening of Songs and Scored Stories with author Rick Bass at the University Theatre. Bass's award-winning work—The Watch: Stories, Where the Sea Used to Be and Why I Came West, among many other books—is well known in fiction and environmental writing circles, and he is a tireless advocate for wilderness protection. The marriage of the group and the writer may seem odd at first, but since Stellarondo vocalists—including primary vocalist Caroline Keys—are poets, the notion of scored stories isn't all that foreign.

Don't be mistaken: This project isn't an author reading aloud while the band mimics the alliterative shape of words or reinforces the meaning of words with whimsical sound effects. "We put a lot of thought into the sound," says bassist Travis Yost, "avoiding musical quotes, not making a rooster sound when there's a rooster or an owl sound when there's an owl. We are developing themes that we can revisit, something more musical than cock-a-doodle-doo."
Guitarist Gibson Hartwell explains how the author's words and songs become a singular artistic work: "The process changes his stories. He'll strike adjectives or phrases because the music does the work [for them]." Bass brings in a story and ideas are developed quickly or over the course of months. "We don't say, 'This song would go with this story,'" adds Hartwell. "The music by itself wouldn't stand alone without the words. The stories do, but maybe in this form they wouldn't so well because they've been adapted to the music."

This University Theater performance isn't a one-shot deal. This is the kick-off for something much larger—something called the Road to the Ryman. The Ryman Auditorium is home to the legendary Grand Ole Opry, and Stellarondo and Bass are intent to perform there in 2013. In the meantime, the group plans to tour on their way to a recording session in Portland. But not without realistic trepidation. Singing-saw player and cellist Bethany Joyce says, "It's weird to move ahead with a project that's only been performed twice." Yost interjects that the Pet Shop Boys didn't initially perform live. Joyce, ever the voice of reason, continues, "This whole tour seems like a large step for a small band. We're trying to fill an 1,100 seat theater, but it's exciting not to play in bars."

"I can't see it anywhere else but a theater," Hartwell says. "[This] is not a multimedia Hollywood experience. It's not going to pummel you. It's not going to hand-feed everything to people. There is a conscious effort to make the audience concentrate and focus on what is happening onstage."

The group has moved from playing porches in 2010 to playing 1,100 seat theaters in 2012 to touring and recording with a well-known writer, to filming the entire experience in a documentary format and finally (hopefully) performing in one of the most vaunted music halls in the world in 2013. But if that happy ending doesn't work out, Hartwell says they have a back-up plan. "If we don't end up playing in the Ryman, our second goal is to play the parking lot." - The Missoula Independent


"Stellarondo, Rick Bass Aim for Opry"

Since its founding, local band Stellarondo has set its sights on broad horizons. That ambition is evident in the group’s unusual instrumentation – a quirky mix of everything from pedal steel guitar to musical saw to cello – and in the group’s lyrical and musical material, which freely borrows from classical and folk idioms to create a kind of campfire chamber music.

Now, the band has fixed its gaze on a specific point of the horizon: Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, aka the Grand Ol’ Opry, the spiritual seat of country music.

“We’ve decided to set a goal of playing a show at the Ryman in spring or summer of 2013,” declares Caroline Keys, the group’s guitarist, singer and primary songwriter.

Granted, plenty of musicians dream of playing on that hallowed stage. But not many musicians have the advocacy of an award-winning novelist on their side.

That novelist is Rick Bass, the Missoula-by-way-of-the-Yaak author of 25 books – most recently “Nashville Chrome,” a fictionalized tome about Maxine, Bonnie and Jim Ed Brown, a sibling trio of real-life stars of the early Grand Ol’ Opry.

It was actually Bass who proposed the goal to the band. It wasn’t an entirely selfless suggestion: Bass hopes to be there on stage, too.

Over the past year, Stellarondo and Bass have forged an unusual collaboration, with the band creating musical scores to accompany readings of his short stories and essays. Next Wednesday, April 11, writer and band will take the stage of the University Theatre in Missoula to present a quartet of those collaborative creations, along with other music from Stellarondo’s catalogue.

For the 7:30 p.m. gig, the band will perform while Bass reads two short stories – “Eating” and “The Canoists” – plus an adaptation from his book, “Where the Sea Used to Be,” and an essay titled “The Windy Day.”

Bass and Stellarondo first performed together last September. Keys said that the response to that show, and the continued creative challenges of working with Bass, spurred the group to continue and broaden the collaboration.

Beyond entertaining local audiences, the University Theatre show will serve two other purposes. First, it will kick off a mini-tour that includes shows in Sand Point, Spokane, Portland and Astoria. In addition, the show will be videotaped, so that the group has a document of the live experience to send to the Ryman’s management.

“We’re really excited – and nervous as hell about these ambitious steps,” said Keys. “I guess that’s the way you do it if you want to keep going.” - The Missoulian


"Stellarondo and Rick Bass Team Up for Missoula "Scored Readings""

There has always been an element of storytelling in the music of local chamber-folk band Stellarondo (the band is, after all, named after a character in Eudora Welty’s short story, “Why I Live at the P.O.”). And there has always been a lilt of melody in the short stories of Yaak Valley-turned-Missoula author Rick Bass.

Next Wednesday, that middle ground will be mapped out when Bass and Stellarondo join together for two performances of songs and “scored stories.”

But please. If you come, don’t wear a beret.

“What appealed to me about this idea, as much as anything, was that it wasn’t anything like the sort of standard coffeehouse improv thing, where a poet reads a couple of stanzas and then the musicians produce some tone that apes or mimics what the reader had just uttered,” said Bass, choosing his words carefully in an evident effort to avoid saying what he really feels about such endeavors. “I think a more affirmative way to look at this is that we approached it like you would think about scoring music for cinema.

“I don’t think you need to snap your fingers if you like what you hear,” he added wryly.

Next week’s collaboration has roots that go back years, to a time when the band’s lead singer and songwriter, Caroline Keys, traveled with another of her bands, the Broken Valley Road Show, to perform at the Yaak Wilderness Festival. After meeting Bass and his family, the band returned to the Yaak several times on what Keys describes as “something that felt more like pilgrimages than tours.”

“Since then,” she said, “there’s just been this relationship that grew organically.”

About this time last year, Stellarondo traveled to Portland, to record the band’s first album. Along the way, Keys and guitarist Gibson Hartwell mused about the possibility of a music-and-story collaboration of some sort.

“It was a fantasy I’d had for quite some time,” Keys said. “But at the time, we didn’t really do anything to make that happen.”

A couple of months later, Keys asked Bass if he might write some text for the band’s Web site. Bass began showing up to rehearsals.

“It was in the midst of this brutal dark winter we had, where it was like everybody was wounded,” recalled Bass. “I would curl up on their couch and just listen; and week by week I would sit up a little straighter. It was like being resurrected by their music. I would avoid calling it ‘therapy,’ but it had something lovely and vital and joyful and creative to it.”

Eventually, the idea for next week’s performances was hatched. For the show, the band will perform original music while Bass reads two stories: “Eating” (from his 2003 collection, “The Hermit’s Story”) and “The Canoeists” (from 2006’s “The Lives of Rocks”).

But don’t bother reading along from your copy.

“We’ve carved out a lot of the words from the stories,” said Bass. “It’s amazing when you’re in this process how much starts to feel extraneous; the music can carry a lot of paragraphs that don’t need to be there. It’s been fascinating for me to realize that.”

Keys said she hopes that next week’s concerts mark the beginning of a larger collaboration.

“We’d like to explore some grants to maybe do bigger productions or perhaps something for radio or making an album,” she said. “For now, this is a great place to start.”

Wednesday’s performances take place at the Union Hall Theatre (upstairs from the Union Club) at 5:30 and 8 p.m., with family-friendly seating for the first show. Tickets are $6 for the early show, $10 for the later, available in advance at EarCandy Music and Rockin Rudy’s.

- Missoulian


Discography

Rick Bass and Stellarondo recorded an album of Scored Stories with Adam Selzer and John Askew at Type Foundry in Portland, Oregon.

Release date: October 2012

Montana Public Radio produced an hour-long Rick Bass and Stellarondo special in 2011 that can be heard here:
http://www.prx.org/pieces/73077-rick-bass-and-stellarondo

Photos

Bio

When award-winning author Rick Bass and Montana-based chamber folk band Stellarondo team up to present a live performance of original songs and "scored" short stories, the audience is taken on a dreamy, luminous journey.

Cello, pedal steel, guitars, banjo, double bass, and various percussion instruments merge and swirl with Rick's words with profound effect. The show engages both sides of the brain, the story-processing side as well as the music-listening side, and audiences are thus alternately lulled and stimulated simultaneously.

"Rick Bass and Stellarondo mesmerized the audience from the first note to the last vibrations of the weeping saw. Start with the haunting voice and lyrics of Caroline Keys, throw in an astonishingly versatile and talented band, and then mix that up with the poetic story-telling of Rick Bass, and I can confidently say that I've never tasted such a beautiful ensemble of art. It's a magic recipe." - Brian Schott, founding editor, Whitefish Review

"Stellarondo's music is utterly unique: a cutting-edge blend of orchestral folk and rock with splashes of bluegrass and country. When the band hooks up with an expert storyteller, Rick Bass, the performance is mesmerizing. You hear one story in the music and one in the narration that, somehow, weave together to form something wonderful and new." - Cherie Newman, Montana Public Radio

"Rick Bass is a national treasure." -Carl Hiassen

"Bass's language glistens with the beauty of the landscape he evokes.” San Francisco Chronicle

"One of this country's most intelligent and sensitive short story writers."--New York Times Book Review

"Stellarondo is the sound of the new Western frontier." -Joe Nickell, Missoulian

"Fresh possibilities is what Stellarondo is all about, from its crystalline lyrical imagery to its imaginative soundscapes conveying the expansiveness of Big Sky country." -Marga Lincoln, Helena Independent Record

"High Lonesome meets subterranean post-apocalyptica." -Joe Nickell, Missoulian

Stellarondo and writer Rick Bass began collaborating in Missoula, Montana during summer 2011.

Bass says:

“I volunteered to write something for Stellarondo’s web page and began going to their weekly practices, taking notes for that purpose. During this process, we started talking about stories, and sounds, and rhythms and arcs, and before we knew it we found ourselves working together—me on some songs they were writing, and Stellarondo asking me to read stories and adjust pacing and diction as they developed songs that fit the meter and mood of the shorter pieces.

It’s been an amazing experience, and I don’t mean to represent it as the somewhat-standard poetry-and-jazz fare that is sometimes encountered late at night in college towns and settings. If that sounds harsh and critical I don’t mean it to be. What I mean to convey is that this is way different from anything I’ve seen or heard; not only are they scoring stories as they would the visuals for cinema, we are adjusting my stories, editing, tempering, reworking.”

A Rick Bass and Stellarondo set typically includes two sets, each containing two "scored" short stories and three to four Stellarondo songs (audio on this EPK includes one scored story and two Stellarondo songs).

Rick's short fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, the Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, and others, and has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize, and the O. Henry Awards: Prize Stories. His most recent novel, Nashville Chrome, is about the country music industry in the 1950s.