We’re in Newton this weekend for the Celebrate Newton crafts sale on Sunday.
Saturday night we went to Passim, I guess I should say Club Passim these days, to hear Tony Bird.
Passim, if you count Club 47 which preceded it in the same location, has been the place to hear folk music in Harvard Square forever. Well, “since 1951” is pretty close to forever. It’s half a floor below street level, packed with tiny tables, with brick walls and windows through which you can see shoes and legs of people walking along the alley between the two sections of the Harvard Coop (that’s Co-operative, but pronounced like where chickens live.)
Tony Bird sang a lot of new songs and only a couple of his older ones. When we first heard him years ago he was singing mostly songs about Malawi, where he was born, and South Africa. I really liked those. Arlene has always been fond of his long, rambling, image-filled songs which could go on for fifteen or even twenty minutes. Last night he had one new one of those, two songs about his mother (who apparently died not long ago), one really nice upbeat song “Let’s go play soccer” inspired by the world cup, and one about tennis star Rafael Nadal, and several others. He also did “Walkabout” about the Kalahari desert and the bushmen and “Mango Time,” which he probably can’t get away without doing (or maybe he does like the audience response which it always gets.)
I’m glad he’s still writing new songs, but I miss some of the old ones, the description of the Rift Valley, how he learned Bundu Music, all the wildlife Down in the Dombo, and the story of the time the leopard was sitting on the rock where they liked to watch the sunset from.