You can be twins and have diametrically opposed views on things, contrary to the impression created by Three Identical Strangers, the fascinating documentary about triplets separated at birth. For instance, my identical twin just told me he doesn’t care for live music, and I can’t live without it. To that end, I recently took in a pair of performances, one in Brooklyn and one in Westport, Connecticut.

The fourth annual Brooklyn Americana Music Festival was a delightful free event at multiple venues September 20 to 23. I saw music in two vastly different spaces—inside the Dumbo Archway, with trains rumbling past every 10 minutes, and on Pier 3 of the newly built—and bustling on a Saturday afternoon—Brooklyn Bridge Park. The latter was more intimate, with tables set up to create a kind of club, and the former offered spectacular views of Manhattan and a chance to watch the passing parade.

Little Nora Brown (right) and Stephanie Coleman: peers, rather than student and teacher. (Jim Motavalli photo)

I think I’ve seen 13-year-old banjo player Little Nora Brown three times in the last month—lucky me—and in Brooklyn she was paired with fiddle player Stephanie Coleman. It’s a tribute to Brown’s burgeoning talent that they seemed more like peers than teacher and student. Her singing is maturing, too. Here she is on video with Stephanie Coleman:

What little I saw of Nashville-based Indian-American sibling duo Giri and Uma Peters was impressive, in a Nora Brown kind of way. He plays fiddle and sings, she plays clawhammer banjo. On their website, it says, “They have attracted the attention of MacArthur Genius Grant awardee Rhiannon Giddens, dobro master Jerry Douglas, guitar virtuoso Molly Tuttle, and blues harmonica great Phil Wiggins.” Add me to that list.

The M. Shanghai String Band was missing some key players, and one regular singer had lost his voice, so it didn’t add up to a stellar performance. Also, songs from John Prine’s first album should be retired due to over-exposure.

Mamie Minch (left) and Tamar Korn: the odd couple, but two big talents. (Jim Motavalli photo)

I loved the combination of Mamie Minch and Tamar Korn, first encountered at the Brooklyn Folk Festival. Korn was also fine up at Oldtone this year. As a duo they’re a bit like the Odd Couple; Minch is quite tall and relatively still when she plays, and Korn is short and extremely animated—really “putting over” a song, as they used to say. She plays an array of fake instruments, too. Their harmonies sounded a little under-rehearsed, but I love their choice of material—old gems, for the most part. Minch has an absolutely lovely, deep alto, and is a fine songwriter and guitarist, too. They’ve made one somewhat lo-fi EP; I hope they do more soon.

Jolie Holland and Samantha Parton, whose work I loved in The Be Good Tanyas, were curiously slack in Brooklyn. The songs (including a cover of Dylan’s “Minstrel Boy”), and the harmonies, just weren’t cohering.

Karen Dahlstrom is from Idaho, but has been resident in New York many years. She’s been on my radio show, and I’ve caught her in the band Bobtown. She was fine solo, with the wide open spaces of Idaho a frequent theme. Check out her album Gem State.

Cricket Tell the Weather, which relocated from Connecticut to Brooklyn, is one of my favorite bands, but fiddle player and leader Andrea Asprelli recently started graduate school at NYU so the version of the band we got was a duo with guitarist Jason Borisoff, her former partner in Atlantic Crossing. They were just fine in a set that showcased her singing and songwriting and his hot picking.

Queen Esther under the arch. (blurrily photographed by Jim Motavalli)

And I love Queen Esther, who always reminds me of Valerie June, but is a bit more urban in her approach. Although fine with just a second guitarist, she’s working in a staggering number of genres and formats, including theater.  Listen to this:

Her work as a vocalist, lyricist, songwriter, actor/solo performer and playwright/librettist led to creative collaborations in neo-vaudeville, alt-theater, various alt-rock configurations, (neo) swing bands, trip hop DJs, spoken word performances, jazz combos, jam bands, various blues configurations, original Off-Broadway plays and musicals, experimental music/art noise and performance art.” She played with Elliot Sharp, and was in the original touring company of Rent.

Queen Esther is working on a song cycle about Cathay Williams, probably the first African-American woman to serve in the U.S. Army—albeit, disguised as a man. Despite many possibilities of exposure, she served for two years after the Civil War. She’s in an upcoming book of mine; stay tuned for that.

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The grand finale at the Connecticut Ukulele Festival. (Jim Motavalli photo)

And last night in Westport I went to the first annual Connecticut Ukulele Festival, produced by Peter Propp and held at the Westport Suzuki School. I missed all the workshop stuff—I’ll never be a musician, and I know it—but the point is that this is an instrument you can pick up and be playing straight away.

Steve Forlano is an amiable uke player who embraces that philosophy wholeheartedly, and began holding sessions for would-be strummers at the Westport YMCA. These days they get 20 to 30 beginners at the weekly events. Forlano brought Propp and three or four other uke players (collectively known as the Cukes) up to my WPKN radio show. They performed the Beatles’ “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and the Kinks’ “Sunny Afternoon.” Very nice. That’s the video above.

The Edukated Fleas play the hits–from 1930. (Jim Motavalli photo)

I made it down for the concert, which was very well attended for a first event. The Edukated Fleas have a laid-back approach to standards like “Me and Jane in a Plane,” “Deed I Do” and “No Moon at All.”

Uncle Zach revives the Allen Sherman songbook. (Jim Motavalli photo)

Uncle Zak was amusing, playing song parodies and oddball tunes. He grew up in a family where all his uncles played music—especially ukes—and a lot of the songs were from that repertoire. There was “Blue Moon” and something called “She Ain’t Rose but Rose Ain’t Here.”

Abe Deshotel’s quirky songs were modernized with effects pedals. (Jim Motavalli photo)

Abe Deshotel was the evening’s moody singer-songwriter. He played his uke through pedals and played both some striking originals and covers by Leon Bridges and Hozier. Could work on his stage presence, though.

The headliners were worth waiting for. I’ve followed uke pioneer Victoria Vox through 10 albums and maybe a dozen live performances, and even when she’s down the evening is up. These days she’s decidedly upbeat and playing with her husband, the talented guitarist Jack Maher.

Victoria Vox is upbeat these days, and has a lot of new songs flopping around on the deck. (Jim Motavalli photo)

Vox is a one-woman band with her uke and mouth trumpet, but Maher (who records with Feed the Kitty) adds a lot, both in terms of fills and the occasional solo, plus vocal harmonies. I was thrilled to see Vox has written a whole crop of new songs, all of them strong, and some of which appear on her latest album Colorful Heart. “Out on the Rails” is a tuneful number about hobos, and “I Remember the Music” about the stuff that stays with you.

“Leaving Without Goodbye” is from her new project with Maher, Jack and the Vox. It’s about a fight Jack and Victoria had, but as Maher pointed out, “We got a song out of it.”

I’m sure there will be a second Connecticut Ukulele Festival.

NORTH HILLSDALE, NY—When I told people I was going to an old-time music festival, they asked me who might be playing that they’d know. “Bill and the Belles,” I said. “Anna and Elizabeth. The Foghorn String Band. Big stars all.”

Little Nora Brown and John Cohen. There’s no generation gap at Oldtone. (Jim Motavalli photo)

They certainly are to me, and to a widening coterie of fans who make the trek up to the rural three-state region (Connecticut and Massachusetts are minutes away), even braving the cold to stay up late into the night—when honky-tonk, Cajun and square dancing rule.

The Foghorn String Band were everywhere over the weekend. (Jim Motavalli photo)

If you don’t know these acts, you may soon. Move over, Beyonce. Let’s start with Anna and Elizabeth, who are ballad singers and tradition explorers, but also a great deal more than that. Along with fellow adventurers Sam Amidon (from Vermont) and House and Land (from North Carolina) they aren’t afraid to add an electronic sheen to their music—at least on record, at Oldtone it was shivery pipe organ and fiddle that added the effects.

Esther Rose (foreground) on the Tweener Stage. Singer-songwriters were welcome. (Jim Motavalli photo)

Elizabeth LaPrelle has been described as the best ballad singer in America, and I second that, with a nod to June Tabor, who’s the best ballad singer in England. LaPrelle sings with a sense of high drama, and I absolutely love that. Murder ballads are, after all, about murder—something that gets lost as bluegrass folks rush to show off their hot licks.

Anna and Elizabeth, going for the dramatic. (Jim Motavalli photo)

At Oldtone, Anna and Elizabeth made each song a dramatic event. They used tools (some centuries old) such as the pre-movie “crankie”—painted scrolls that tell a story—to heighten the effect. On one song, Anna Roberts-Gevalt started out playing a frantic banjo part, which got more and more percussive until she was pounding on it and screaming. Believe me, it worked.

On another song, “Margaret,” Elizabeth held up a laptop and played a scratchy 1940 Margaret Shipman recording from the archives of Vermont’s Helen Hartness Flanders. Then they played the song themselves. That worked, too. Just before I left, I heard Elizabeth sing an eight-minute version of “Pretty Saro” accompanied only by two sax players providing drones. Check out the results here:

Providing effects was fiddler/organist Cleek Schrey. A highlight was his luminous fiddle tune, with Anna dancing and Elizabeth providing wordless vocals. Schrey is the perfect tour partner, an almost avant-garde folkie.

Tamar Korn on the Tweener stage. She played novelty and ancient Yiddish songs with great vivacity. (Jim Motavalli photo)

The first act I saw at Oldtone was Run Mountain, sadly lacking the multi-talented old-time pioneer Bill Dillof, who died this year. His wife, Paula Bradley, bravely carried on without him, in a duo with Vermont-based fiddler and singer Jim Burns. They were wonderful. Did you know that the “Diamond Joe” in the song of the same name is a steamboat? I didn’t, either, but as Burns said, it makes sense of the song.

Cedric Watson made the hills reverberate with his resonant voice and accordion/fiddle playing. (Jim Motavalli photo)

There’s a nice tribute to Dillof (1948 to 2018) in the Oldtone program book. He said that with music “I just get lost in the rhythms and the chord changes, the hum and the resonance all around you…It’s as strong as the need to eat when you’re hungry to sleep when you’re exhausted. You just float right into the music. That’s what I do…I’m a musician.”

Paula Bradley and Bill Dillof performing as Moonshine Holler at the Buttonwood Tree in Middletown, Connecticut. (Jim Motavalli photo)

Cedric Watson was ubiquitous at the festival. It’s great to see young musicians so capable. He played Cajun, blues and folk stuff on accordion and fiddle and sang in a resonant voice that made the cows perk up. He was mostly solo, but sounded great with a band on some things.

Bluegrass old-timer mandolin player Frank Wakefield gets his photo took by the Afghan Photo Studio. (Jim Motavalli photo)

I’ve been closely following the Foghorn String Band since seeing Sammy Lind and Nadine Landry at The Hoot recently. Along with fellow Foghorns Caleb Klauder and Reeb Willms, they were the festival’s MVPs, playing in every conceivable combination. Lind, who’s an incredibly versatile fiddle player with a voice that doesn’t get used enough, was on the bandstand half the time with various combinations.

The Downhill Strugglers: ragged but right. (Jim Motavalli photo)

The Downhill Strugglers were ragged but right. I’ve written so much about them via the Brooklyn Folk Festival that suffice it to say they make the pre-war music come alive. John Cohen, an original New Lost City Rambler, was in good voice, and Jackson Lynch and his fiddle were on the bandstand when Lind was not.

An Oldtone innovation is to offer between-set acts on the small “Tweener” stage, and it was there I heard a darned nice newcomer named Esther Rose. The festival is not averse to singer-songwriters, though it’s not the regular fare.

A highlight of the excellent Jimmy C. Newman tribute (organized by Klauder and Willms) was a song called the “H. Brown Shuffle.” Newman composed it for a local auto parts store to finance the release of the flip side, “Cry Cry Darling.”

Bill and the Belles, with banjo player Helena Hunt. (Jim Motavalli photo)

I’d just seen Bill and the Belles at the Hoot, so was surprised to see a new banjo player, Helena Hunt. She seemed to know all of Grace Van’t Hof’s parts. But maybe she was just filling in. Of course, they brought alive a tradition that never really existed but should have. What if 1930s crooners had loved the Carter Family and classic jazz? Absolutely nobody sings like Kris Truelsen. He’s a 78 come to life.

Jill Turpin of the Green Mountain Festival in Vermont acquited herself well on the stage. (Jim Motavalli photo)

It was a pleasure to see Jill Turpin up on stage during Nadine Landry’s gospel feature on, of course, Sunday. She just promoted the very first Green Mountain Bluegrass and Roots Festival, but she can sing very credibly, too! It figures, since you have to do these events for love, not money.

Hubby Jenkins read from his little book of ghost stories. (Jim Motavalli photo)

Oh, and don’t let me forget Hubby Jenkins, who triumphs in the art form known as the solo set. Not only did he do a song written by a white guy from the perspective of a black guy regretting the end of slavery (and put it in context), but he read a suspenseful ghost story—with chapters after each song. What a showman! He played fine banjo and slide guitar, as well.

Little Nora Brown was a delight, as always. She’s more mature—in her banjo playing and backwoods singing—every time I see her, even if the interval is mere months. I love her song patter. She gets tied in knots sometimes trying to explain her love for this music, but it’s sincere and charming.

As usual, the cows seemed to enjoy the scene. Cool Whisper Farm must be more placid the rest of the year. Here’s Elizabeth LaPrelle with saxophones, performing “Pretty Saro”:

And here’s one more Anna and Elizabeth video. their performance of “Margaret,” using the original field recording: