Sunday, October 21st – 4:30 to 6:30 p.m.
which way west? weekly concert series.
No cover charge, but your kind donations helps us pay the musicians and make the propagation of the culture possible!

The name sounds quaint, perhaps.  It evokes another time.  But this band’s music mines that time with absolute focus.

If you’re feeling dismissive, ask yourself if there’s been a time in America different at its root than another?  A time not in some part flushed with success, fraught with ambition; problems dismissed and brushed aside, or, in any case, the attempt to do so determinedly made while wealth is hastily accrued.

Post-war years are typically this way, aren’t they? and it seems to us that the long, challenging post-Civil War years only prefigure the post-WWI and post-WWII years in many basic ways, though historians we ain’t.  Black troops returning home from all three found little honor in their own land; but certainly there was progress, economic and cultural, to be made.  The cakewalk, minstrelsy, vaudeville, ragtime– old tools and new, tough enough to be hammered again and again into shape and used ever more effectively in new circumstances as they arose…

Is now not then and then not now?  Our friend Walker will tell you that time was just invented to keep everything from happening at once.

The Skedaddlers are no less timely than today’s, what?, homepage “news” teaser?  And beyond their timeliness, or the irrelevance of any questions of their relevance, the Skedaddlers are an aggregation of extraordinarily talented musicians who bridge the years with no effort whatsoever, save the considerable effort required by their proud musicianship.

Dennis Pash is at the core of the Skedaddlers.  Beginning in the 1960s and early  ’70s, Dennis was certainly regarded as the industrious Kansas City genius of ragtime scholars, ferreting out old ragtime scores and blowing them up again into vital life– finding the string band core of the performance history.  He’s a mandolinist whose facility goes far beyond mere skill or virtuosity; he inhabits his music.  His bandmates Nick Robinson and Dave Krinkel follow his lead, though they certainly don’t lack for their own insights, knowledge born of tireless research and virtuosic abilities.

For this and other recent performances, the Skedaddlers have recruited two musicians highly regarded and hard working on the Northern California circuit that revels in early jazz.  Virginia Tichenor and Marty Eggers are well known worldwide as key practitioners of the various interrelated forms that constellate around the Skedaddlers’ repertoire.  The Ragtime Skedaddlers, heard twice before at Bird & Beckett in their string trio guise, will perform this Sunday as a five-piece band, with Virginia doubling on drums and piano, and Marty on bass..

Prepare to fill your ears, hearts, souls and minds with echoes of the once and future truth of syncopation & hard-driving swing!  And just dig this crazy music!