Word: passims
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...CLUB PASSIM'S FORTIETH ANNIVERSARY BENEFIT CONCERT...
Drum starts; Katryna Nields strikes an akimbo pose in mid-jumping jack. She is beautiful. Her band, the Nields, something that just graduated from Yale, giddily rocks Sanders Theatre: thirty-and-up Cantabridgians stand to applaud. Where is Joan Baez, who came to Club Passim barefoot and left a star? She played last. And reuniting earlier in the show with their banjos and mandolins were the Charles River Valley Boys, Harvard alumni from the 60's. At its 40th Anniversary Concert, Club Passim looked back, looked forward, and its music squirmed between the weight of history and the multiple identities...
...Club Passim? It's that sunken whitewashed place across from the Coop, below the map store. Tom Waits got his start there. In its heyday Club Passim (then Club 47) was a familiar nightspot for Harvard students: "It was the House of Blues without the booze," says co-founder Betsy Siggins Schmidt. Over the years though, student nightlife has fragmented as venues multiplied, and the Club's Americana format has become less immediate than it was when folk musicians were creating a vocal canon of protest in the days of Vietnam and the civil rights movement...
Just as folk has handled even its most disconnected moments, Club Passim quietly thrives in the Palmer Street alley, watching Harvard Square grow up and retaliate against itself. Its folk platform has become "Americana," a broad, historically oriented aesthetic that unfortunately seems neither to play to the young nor to exhort the masses. The emcee and speakers at Passim's 40th anniversary concert emphasized that the club was "as good as it ever was," yet this impulse to confirm folk's endurance suggests insecurity over the more insular, less underground but perhaps less relevant position of Americana folk music today...
That said, Club Passim threw an anniversary party that was both accessible--it was like going to church after a two year hiatus--and sometimes experimental. Sanders Theatre sold out to an audience that erred on the side of grown-up but was livelier for it. We all clapped to the beat as Joan Baez jigged and the Charles River Valley Boys covered the Beatles. The program became a kind of historiographic French smoke where the congregation pulled old records from the cabinet. Reassured by the immediacy of older artists like Baez and the Charles River Valley Boys, the audience...