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Spittle & Wisdom

Frank Fairfield, March 30th at The Ark

Frank Fairfield took the stage with an armful of instrumenents and more than a bucket full of folksy charm. He started out with a rambling monologue so quietly voiced it prompted a heckler to exhort him to “Mumble into the Microphone.” Clearly the heckler didn’t get the idea: that mumble WAS what Frank was saying. Throughout the evening, Frank Fairfield perfectly conveyed a self-effacing bumbler, but one whose mastery of performance contradicted this humility.

The set started with a medley of waltzes that started god-awful slow and dirgelike but gradually picked up to become spritely and finally, damned rambunctious. He’d done a similar ploy at the Folk Festival where I’d first heard of him. Piece after piece, he alternated among guitar, fiddle and banjo, congenially putting down the guitar to pick up the banjo in order to play “Lil’ Liza Jane” when an audience member requested it. The music was spot on, a bit coarse and primitive but well-polished and intentionally so. A barn-dance virtuoso.

It’s possible — just slightly possible — that Frank Fairfield’s stage personna is an act. He’s just so perfectly cut and pasted from a century or so in the past, from his handlbar moustache down to the long Firefly-like browncoat he wore. The performance didn’t have a drop of the Ziggy-Stardust-like irony to intrude on the fun.

And fun it was to bathe in Frank Fairfield’s stew of North American music, a song tradition that borrows and steals, boils down and percolates up through dozens of sources and millions of expressions. If I can poorly paraphrase one of his witticisms as a perfect epigraph for this sense of pan-musicality: “I used to know lots of songs. Now I just know a few. Eventually, maybe I’ll just know one.”

Before that hoppens, try to see Frank Fairfield while he still knows how to play an evening’s worth of merriment.