History, Harmony

The Coverlets open Main Street Music Nights

Leo Mazow is, first and foremost, a historian. He uses "art and architecture as a primary source to understand (periods and events in) American history."

Over the past year, he's been using music to share that understanding with a different audience.

FAQ

The Coverlets

In Concert

WHEN — 7:30 p.m. today

WHERE — Arts Center of the Ozarks, 214 S. Main St. in Springdale

COST — $9-$16

INFO — 751-5441 or acozarks.org

FYI

Pick 3

Serendipity Pick 3 tickets are still available at $30 for ACO member adults, $20 for member students, and $24-$40 for the public

Serendipity Season

Tonight — The Coverlets: Music to Rob a Train By

Nov. 14 — ACO Chorale

Nov. 22 — Brick Fields: Up Close and Soulfully Personal

Dec. 7 — Arkansas Winds

April 25 — Arkansas Winds

May 2 — ACO Chorale

"Music is just a very deep love of mine," says Mazow, who is an associate professor of art history at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. "I've been playing guitar since about the ninth grade."

The Coverlets is not, he says, his first musical venture, but it is "probably the most prolonged and focused of them." When he and Brittany Stephenson met about 18 months ago, "we realized we had some similarities in musical tastes. The kind of music we both like is folk music and rock music with a little bit of an edge."

By "an edge," Mazow says, he doesn't mean "crazy punk or anything like that."

"There are two kinds of songs we're interested in playing and, to some extent, writing," he explains. "Songs that are really heavy on the narrative side -- classic American folk music and pre-commercial country music, which pretty much ends with Patsy Cline and Johnny Cash, and songs that have that narrative, that storytelling tradition, as it plays out in more recent music as well."

Mazow cites "Jesus Etc." by Wilco and "Roxanne" by the Police as songs that might find themselves performed next door to folk songs like "Jesse James" or "The Wreck of the Old 97" by Vernon Dalhart.

"We might take a slow song and pick up the tempo or take a crunchy rock song and slow it down," he says, "not just to leave our own stamp on things but to make the story stand out."

When The Coverlets kick off the Main Street Music Nights Series tonight at the Arts Center of the Ozarks, the show will be titled "Music to Rob a Train By." Mazow explains what that title means.

"A lot of people perhaps don't know this until they actually study it or really listen to it, but so much of American folk music deals with clandestine operations like train robberies and bank heists, drought, unrequited love or crazy jealousy, and often the songs are the authors' and performers' way of working through those things, dealing with and coming to understand those hard times," he says. "One of our favorite songs to play is an early 20th century song called' Jesse James,' a story about how he and his brother and a couple of other guys robbed trains in rather theatrical, kind of Robin Hood, fashion.

"He managed to have a cult following, and yet this was a guy who certainly did his share of psychopathic things. But he did this in reconstruction-era Missouri, where a lot of other people also felt great animosity toward banks, corporations, railroads and other large entities he felt were sticking it to him and the class of people he saw himself as standing for.

"Instead of speaking or campaigning, instead of being an activist, he let his guns do his speaking for him," Mazow says. "And when we play that song, we're kind of channeling a criminal's version of a complaint many Americans had in the later 19th century, symbolized by a train robbery."

But Mazow promises the show at ACO won't be "a lecture punctuated by music," as might be the case in a classroom, but "a concert punctuated with some historical commentary. We don't intend to drive a history lesson home. We're just there to have fun, play music and give our audience a taste of some recurring styles and stories in American, folk, country and rock."

At this point, that's about as far as Mazow will commit to music.

"Our goals are to continue performing a show or two per month and to expand our repertoire, both covers and originals," he says, speaking for The Coverlets. "A lot of people have been doing this 5, 10, 15 years, and you really can't compare yourself to them. But we really like to let these songs inspire us and try to inspire with them -- as immodest as it sounds.

"For me, music occupies a yet-to-be-defined midway point between vocation and avocation."

NAN What's Up on 08/08/2014

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