Curated by Richmond/Brooklyn-based label, Out of Your Heads Records, the inaugural Ossicles Fest will feature two nights of music that is many years in the making.
The concept involves attracting first-tiered talent for a stop in Richmond while the artists are on the road headed for the acclaimed Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tenn. The lineup for this first event includes guitar legend Marc Ribot, the young guitar legend-in-the-making Mary Halvorson and her Canis Major project, as well as premiere composer/flautist Nicole Mitchell, and the incredibly versatile local vocalist Laura Ann Singh’s Fracas Quartet.
The festival has two prime movers and a catalyst. First, drummer Scott Clark has been bringing adventurous musicians to Richmond since the heady first decade of the century, when the old-school music industry was dissolving into online file sharing and streaming. Talent magnet cities such as New York City were losing their attraction. Richmond’s Patchwork Collective was formed to provide support to retain local players and artists. Clark was busy reaching out to musicians in other cities to make RVA a touring destination.
“[Ex-VCU drum professor] Howard Curtis said there were two options,” Clark recalls. “You can go to where the scene is or make a scene where you are.”
Clark’s own collaboration with bassist Adam Hopkins was a natural development. Out of Your Heads grew from the recombinant group’s improvising nights, which Hopkins had organized first in Baltimore and in Brooklyn’s iconic avant-garde scene. When he and Clark joined forces, they not only had a wealth of contacts with great experimental players looking for an outlet, but their own established brand and logo.
The idea of the label tying a mini-festival onto Big Ears (March 26-29), one of the country’s motherships of adventurous and experimental music, has been floating around for years. Michael McBean, who organizes the monthly Saturday concerts at the Richmond Public Library, was the catalyst for it finally happening. “I brought it up at one of their [monthly] ArtSpace Second Monday events. I had been to Big Ears, and I was thinking about how it could work here,” McBean says.
Calling the festival “Little Ears” was a bit too on-the-nose. Instead they chose “Ossicles,” which are the tiny bones (the hammer, anvil and stirrup) of the inner ear. The lineup was the result of luck, past connections and persistence.
Marc Ribot, playing a sit-down solo acoustic concert on the festival’s opening night, Tuesday, March 24, has been a pivotal voice since his organically angular and tender guitar work helped define Tom Waits’ mature sound starting with the album “Rain Dogs” in 1985. He has played with everyone from Elvis Costello to John Zorn and led his own groups ranging from avant-garde abstraction to idiosyncratic Cuban rhythms to Philadelphia Soul. Playing solo in the quiet, listening room confines of Reveler Experiences, the night could go anywhere.
The second night, at Gallery 5, opens with Laura Ann Singh’s Fracas Quartet. There is no musician on the scene with greater range. In the past year, Singh has sung with the Richmond Symphony Christmas program; done regular gigs in Spanish, Portuguese and Russian with Miramar and her own group; done tribute sets to Burt Bacharach and Stephen Sondheim; and recorded a beautiful album of songs by women with the all-female Rosette Quartet. Fracas, stacked with local jazz virtuosos, is where she cuts loose with her own songs.
Next on the bill: A quartet led by flautist Nicole Mitchell, former head of the famous Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, now teaching at University of Virginia. “It’s crazy that she is only 90 minutes away,” Hopkins says. “She is internationally known, is super down to play, and really wants to be a part of the community. I admire here so much as a musician.”
Mary Halvorson’s new group Canis Major closes out the night. It is something of a coup to land the first stop of a national tour that will later play the Getty Center in LA and Lincoln Center in New York City before heading to Europe. Halvorson, a MacArthur “genius grant” awardee, is one of the world’s premier guitarists. And she’s no stranger to Richmond; Clark and Patchwork Collective co-founder Scott Burton brought her duo with violinist Jessica Pavone to The Camel around 20 years ago, and recently featured her at Reveler. But seeing her at this point in her career, leading her own all-star band that includes trumpeter Dave Adewumi, bassist Henry Fraser, and drummer Tomas Fujiwara, may be one of those shows that are talked about for years.
It is a very promising start that Hopkins and Clark hope to build on. And it is a labor of love, not commerce.
“We never got into this for money,” Hopkins says. “I’m not worried about selling 500 records much less a million. It is the same thing [with Ossicles Fest]. Of course, we need to make money to pay the musicians, but we are not approaching it as a profit-making opportunity. None of use are. It is just an extension of what we have been doing all this time.”
If things work out, next time they may try to find a way to replicate one of Big Ears’ distinctive charms: hosting simultaneous sets at venues within easy walking distance. Patrons can dip in and out and sample a wealth of bands. This time, the focus is on hosting events that no one will think about leaving.
The inaugural Ossicles Fest will be held March 24-25 at Reveler Experiences and Gallery5. For more information and tickets, visit the Out of Your Heads website here.
