Strings attached
Bearfoot puts its own imprint on bluegrass and roots music
ROWAYTON, Conn. - Never mind the approaching wall of clouds. Forget the electricity in the air and the way it makes picnickers' hair stand on end. The five young members of a rootsy band called Bearfoot - having flown more than 4,000 red-eyed miles from Alaska for a beachside show in this southwestern corner of Connecticut - want to play.
"Which one of you is the front person?" asks a photographer.
"There isn't one," says fiddler Annalisa Tornfelt, 26. "It's kind of mix-and-match."
Indeed Bearfoot, which plays at New Bedford's Summerfest on Sunday, is an egalitarian sort of band with a taste for switching things up. Mournful country ballads led by Tornfelt give way to folksy three-part harmonies, which in turn make room for romping, bluegrass-inspired instrumentals.
"You're not listening to the same person singing all night long," says mandolin player Jason Norris, 25, who has a tendency to shake a mop of curly hair and grin during his most frenzied music-making moments. "It keeps it interesting."
The Alaskan band's style has grown out of its history - a "five-person marriage," says 24-year-old fiddler Angela Oudean, that's outlasted the tumultuous late teens and early 20s that can put an end to even the closest relationships.
They met in 1999 while working as counselors at a music camp in Alaska, when bassist Kate Hamre, the youngest member, was just 14 years old. Two years later, these emissaries from the Last Frontier swooped south and - following in the footsteps of the Dixie Chicks and Nickel Creek - became Telluride Bluegrass Festival band champions.
Since then, they've surpassed the legal ages for voting and drinking. Two have left Alaska - Hamre for San Francisco and Tornfelt for Portland, Ore., where she gave birth to a son. Some have graduated from college, including guitarist Mike Mickelson, 25, who bought a boat last year and started commercial salmon fishing between tour dates.
Their music, too, has grown up.
"They've really not been afraid to follow their own direction," says Steve Szymanski of Planet Bluegrass, which produces the Telluride festival where Bearfoot made its early mark. "They used to play a lot of bluegrass standards, but now they're into writing their own songs and creating their own sound."
Tornfelt, who has released two solo albums, has become a particular songwriting force. Her lyrics, including those for the haunting narrative "Just Stay," fill the liner notes of Bearfoot's most recent album, "Follow Me," released in 2006.
In the year since the band started touring year-round, its distinctive sound has earned it performances at MerleFest, one of the largest American music festivals, with an audience of 80,000, and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Last August, Bearfoot opened for country singer Lyle Lovett.
But playing music is only one half of being Bearfoot. The other half? Teaching it. The band has carved out a niche offering three- and four-day summer bluegrass camps across the country for children ages 5 to 17.
"It's pretty important to all of us to keep music education going because that's how we grew up - that's how we started this band," says Hamre, 23, a certified elementary school teacher.
Many of their campers arrive with zero experience, but by the final day they are playing in small groups, performing for their parents. Nancy DeCherney, the local arts council director in Juneau, Alaska, credits Bearfoot with sparking the interest of an entire generation of young fiddlers there. And the band is one of a group of teachers that attracts more than 250 music students of all ages to Colorado's RockyGrass Academy each year.
When they ventured across the Atlantic in 2006 to run a camp in Ireland, the band members found young people mad for American roots music. Their enthusiasm is surpassed only by native teens in the tiny villages of interior Alaska, said Mickelson, where "Hank Williams is on every iPod."
Back in Rowayton, with rain threatening, band members shuttle microphones and instruments from the outdoor stage to a roofed pavilion overlooking the ocean. Their audience follows with lawn chairs and bottles of wine. As the clouds open up, Bearfoot settles in, offering up tales of Alaskan life alongside original songs and adaptations of old favorites by the likes of Doc Watson and, of course, Hank Williams Sr.
"There were 28 boys and three girls in my high school graduating class," says Mickelson, by way of introducing "I Know What It Means to Be Lonesome," a tune by the early 20th-century songwriting team of James Brockman, Nat Vincent, and James Kendis.
He steps to the microphone to sing and the band erupts into rhythm. Norris's nimble picking sets the pace, held steady by Hamre's bass and punctuated by the singing fiddles of Tornfelt and Oudean.
In a nod to traditionalists, the band has dropped the second half of its original name, Bearfoot Bluegrass. There's no banjo, after all, and you can hardly have bluegrass without a banjo.
But this audience doesn't care what Bearfoot's music is called. Old time, roots, Americana, folk, bluegrass - whatever. When voices rise and the fiddles soar, and children - including pigtailed girls, mostly bald babies, and bespectacled young boys - can't keep from dancing, it's just plain old pleasure.
Emma Brown can be reached at ebrown@globe.com.
