The Mavens

Music Preview: The Mavens maintain preference for 'quality' country

Thursday, July 05, 2007
By John Hayes, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

In the bars, country music sounds a lot like it does on the radio and looks young enough to be carded at the door. The Mavens, however, play a kind of country that radio rarely spins, and its five members are long enough in the tooth to have collectively logged about 100 years of gigs.

"I think some of those [contemporary country] guys write some great songs," said The Mavens' Rick Malis. "But are people going to be singing those songs in 30 years? I'm not so sure."

Malis says the difference between what The Mavens cover and the radio plays is in "the quality of the songs." He's talking Roger Miller, Bob Wills, early honky-tonk, Western swing and '70s-era country rock a la The Flying Burrito Brothers, Poco and The Byrds -- music that Malis describes as "the best stuff that's ever been done in country."

Over the past four years, The Mavens have played as many as six nights a month, with many of those shows at The Thunderbird Cafe in Lawrenceville and at swing dances at The Edgewood Club in Regent Square and the Wightman School Community Building in Squirrel Hill.

That's part of the reason it took the band so long to release its first CD. "The Mavens" includes a few retooled classics and eight original songs that proudly telegraph the influences of the band's writers.

"I think that's what we're about -- the best old honky-tonk songs and '70s country-rock and Western swing, mixed with the influence of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones," said Malis. "This music is not easy to play."

"Cold Hearted Woman" is a decades-old collaboration cowritten by Corbin-Hanner Band's Bob Corbin and The Mavens' Mark Evans, back when Evans picked with Pittsburgh country bands Highway Ghost and Easy Elmer. Steel player Pete Freeman's "Mombo Jombo Queen" is sort of a spooky country rumba, and Malis describes his "Stuck Between a Rock and a Heartache" as "a killer hook that had been rolling around in my head for a long time."

A bunch of good songs "rolled out" of his head last year, Malis said, when he released a solo CD of Americana, folk and neotraditional originals.

"The Mavens" collection is selling "surprisingly well" on CDBaby.com, said Malis, but the swing-dance crowd and fans of well-crafted country songs can pick up their copies at the band's CD release party at 8:30 p.m. Saturday at the Bulgarian-Macedonian National Education and Cultural Center in West Homestead.

(John Hayes can be reached at jhayes@post-gazette.com


- Pittsburgh Post Gazette