Tarbox Ramblers turn Club Helsinki into Southern juke joint (1/6/01)
By Seth Rogovoy

(GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass., Jan. 7, 2001) - With its hard-rocking version of old-time, folk-roots music, the Boston-based quartet Tarbox Ramblers turned Club Helsinki into a hopping, Delta-style juke joint on Saturday night.

With his impossibly gritty and timeless vocals, bandleader/guitarist Michael Tarbox led his group through an opening set of traditional and original blues, country, gospel, bluegrass and folk. Though very much informed by rock, especially punk music, the group played a stripped-down, acoustic blend that swung relentlessly and sacrificed no dynamism, as testified to by the crowd of dancers that turned the group’s death-haunted soundtracks into party music.

The juxtaposition of dancers and death was an apt metaphor for the music and style of Tarbox Ramblers. The group favors a repertoire of classic, mystical, death-haunted folk and blues tunes like “The Cuckoo,” “St. James Infirmary” and the aptly-titled “Oh Death.” In the great tradition of the blues and front-porch folk, these songs of mourning and lament were sung (and danced to) with celebration and defiance, betraying as much their origins in the cultures of slavery and poverty as their original function in transcending those bitter realities.

Tarbox Ramblers was powered by the swinging, powerful rhythms of standup bassist Johnny Sciascia and drummer Jon Cohan. Sciascia propelled the tunes with an aggressive slap approach, and Cohan had an impossibly huge bass drum outfitted as his kick drum. Fiddler Daniel Kellar alternately sounded Gypsy, bluegrass, and jazz, but mostly he used his fiddle to insert the sort of blues licks that a guitarist would add to paint colors through and around Tarbox’s vocals that combined the moan of the blues, the twang of country, the funk of New Orleans and the knowingness of Bob Dylan. Kellar and Sciascia also added two- and three-part vocal harmonies, borrowing from gospel and high-lonesome bluegrass.

This was front-porch music with a post-punk kick in the rear. Sciascia introduced “John Hardy” as “a dance number; then again they all are,” before lunging into a fast hillbilly tune with a rockabilly twist. Tarbox colored “The Cuckoo,” a gambler’s confession, with a whiskey-soaked rawness answered by Kellar’s Balkan-inflected violin.

“Last Month of the Year” was rendered a capella with just percussion, with call-and-response phrases between Tarbox and Kellar and Sciascia. Tarbox’s slide guitar was often drenched with post-Hendrix distortion, and Kellar’s fiddle suggested that much of the bag of blues-guitar tricks might have originated on his instrument.

[This review originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Jan. 9, 2001. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 2001. All rights reserved.]