Review: A Harmonious Trio and a Human Instrument at the Fair Lawn Community Center

It almost did not happen because of the potentially dangerous winter weather, but a concert featuring brand-new trio Brother Sun and blues performer Danielle Miraglia went forward over the weekend and brought two radically different musical approaches to the .

Ron Olesko, president of the Hurdy Gurdy Folk Music Club (which hosted the concert), thanked the crowd for filling the seats of the auditorium.

“Give yourself an applause, because you braved the weather,” Olesko said Saturday night. He also thanked Miraglia, who drove from Boston to perform.

When Miraglia stepped up to the stage, she was armed with just a stool, a rectangular wooden box, her acoustic guitar and different harmonicas.

While her voice had an edge to it and she did not fall into the “typical folk” tradition, her music was blues, honky-tonk wrapped in a bluegrass feel. Her style has been compared to Bonnie Raitt, Sheryl Crow and Janis Joplin. Between Miraglia plucking the guitar, slapping the body of the guitar, and stamping the wooden box with the heels of her boots, her whole person became an instrument.

Besides displaying her musical talent, Miraglia also incorporated her sense of humor.

 “I sing a song called ‘Snowglobe’ and during the first snowfall of the season a friend said, ‘Hey you should play ‘Snowglobe’,” Miraglia said. “However, he recently said, ‘Never play that song again’.”

Her humor was further demonstrated in her blues song, “Sell My Soul.”

“The ones who used to ignore me, will be at my feet because they heard me on the radio,” she sang.

As a Boston Red Sox fan, she lamented about the team's loss in 1986 World Series.  

“I remember Bill Buckner put tears in my father’s eyes,” she sang, and further bemoaned her father getting drunk over losing money.

As she played, her voice ranged from the rough and gravely to the more melodic, very similar in style to early, early Melissa Etheridge.

When she finished, the crowd erupted in applause and at the end of the evening, and she sold CDs and greeted fans. Everyone was met with a smile and an autograph.

Olesko promised that Miraglia would return in the Hurdy Gurdy’s 2011/2012 season.

Following Miraglia’s performance, the trio Brother Sun first performed an a cappella. Whereas Miraglia’s performance was different in tone and style, the members of the Brother Sun trio were very much, as Olesko put it, a “little super group.”

To hear Brother Sun perform was like sitting in on an jam session. It was three musicians who love music, and enjoy each other's company. Each one brought a different element.

Chicago's Joe Jencks’s voice exploded in power in the way Travis Tritt’s would. Greg Greenway, from Richmond, Virginia, sang in a style that met somewhere between John Sebastian and James Taylor and Pat Wictor, from Brooklyn, both looked and sounded like Geddy Lee, from Rush. Wictor also sprang the slide guitar, that made sounds from either a western or science fiction movie.  

They sing for each other, like the audience is almost an afterthought. It’s like what all good artistic creators do—they create what they want to see, read or hear.

As they sang, their styles harmonized. Nobody was the lead singer or the back-up singer, but all three succeeded in both roles.

Brother Sun is clearly a 1960s-style folk band, with protest songs dedicated to a teachers union, a request to bring the troops back home from war and even a doo-wop style poke at Fox News.

“If you’d rather go hunting with Dick Cheney—Fox News!” they sang, and the audience giggled and laughed.

Upon a closer look at the crowd by the end of the evening, it was clear that younger fans are popping up more and more at the Hurdy Gurdy shows. As Olesko said previously, this performance was “not your grandfather’s folk music.”