What if you only
had one fiddle or mouth organ for a whole family or party? You would make do
with what you had -- hands, feet, voices, spoons, sticks, washboards, old
string or wire, whatever you could rustle up around the place! In that
tradition, Sheesham & Lotus
(Teilhard Frost and Sam Allison) play “olde-tyme” music from the Appalachian
Mountain-region. Looking like they just stepped off Huckleberry Finn’s raft,
Sheesham & Lotus play jaw harps, ham-bone percussion and home-made bass
harmonicas in the ragtime and mountain style. Let them take you back to a time
when families entertained themselves with dance, song, and music created fresh
each day. See Sheesham & Lotus in
Spruce Grove on Saturday, February 9th at 2 p.m. as the second
performance in Horizon Stage’s 2013 Family Matinee Series. Sheesham & Lotus came together in 1998 playing as the rhythm section in a fiddle band called Flapjack. Together for the next seven years they were on the road throughout Canada and the United States playing dances, concerts and workshops. It was during this time that they took a keen interest in the folk traditions of North America, particularly the American South. Both became enthusiastic historians of old-time fiddle and banjo music, learning from the old masters across the regions south of the Mason-Dixon line. Through personal instruction, perseverance and osmosis they learned harmonica, jaw-harp, flatfoot, and song.
Sheesham & Lotus play fiddle and banjo respectively, with an additional array of home-made curiosities of noise-makery. Sheesham makes gourd banjos and fiddles, and Lotus plays an invention called the contra-bass harmoniphoneum, which is a self-contained bass-harmonica and euphonium horn that can be used while plucking a banjo. Sheesham & Lotus use horns for singing, harmonicas, jaw-harps and more. Their sound can be described as American roots music but they also love to play fiddle tunes, hokum blues songs and ragtime string music. “The sounds of the south are near and dear to our hearts,” says Lotus, “from the old fiddlers to the Memphis jug-bands... there is so much to hear and learn.”
Let Sheesham & Lotus take you, and your family, back to simpler time when music was made orally, physically, with the cutlery or anything else that could be found. Tickets are just $18 for adults, $15 for children and seniors. Curtain is at 2 p.m. and there are free craft and colouring pre-show activities in the lobby for kids starting at 1 p.m. Tickets may be purchased at the City Hall Ticket Centre (315 Jespersen Ave), by phone at 780-962-8995, or online at www.ticketmaster.ca. Electronically you can visit www.sheeshamandlotus.com or like and follow them on facebook.
“Sam Allison and Teilhard Frost
performing as Sheesham and Lotus (are) a real shot of joy… they perform old
time music as if born into it… These guys are so in love with old time
stringband music that the excitement jumps in the room… You have no choice, ya have to dance.” Penguin Eggs Magazine
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