|
 Peering around the giant black curtain, Shelby Means and her band mates watched as 30 Hungarian women wearing long dresses and floral bonnets danced to the accompanying 10-piece folk band. Looking down at her snug, modern black dress, Shelby was suddenly more aware of her nerves than 10 minutes previous when High Altitude was ushered backstage.
As the Hungarians took their bow and the mayor of Nitra finished his Slovak introduction, the five members of the American bluegrass band huddled together.
“OK, let’s do this,” Shelby said. “Let’s represent America. On three, one ... two ... three.”
“Country rocks, but bluegrass is better!” they shouted simultaneously. Shelby picked up her borrowed bass with the missing endpin and led the way onto the stage.
High Altitude, a bluegrass band formed specifically for the trip to Nitra, Slovakia, had 10 minutes to introduce bluegrass music to an international audience. As the only American band attending Akademicka Nitra 2008, an international folk music festival in Slovakia, High Altitude also faced pressure to provide a good impression of the U.S. to the Eastern Europeans staring blankly up at them.
They played two traditional bluegrass songs without pause. The audience, a mixture of local Slovaks and members of the twenty groups attending the festival, was completely silent.
“They were stunned, or something, while they were listening,” Shelby now recalls. “Then, when we stopped playing, they were silent for a second and then just broke out into clapping and screaming.”
Full of adrenaline from the warm reception, Shelby’s 18-year-old brother and the band’s mandolin player Jacob Means shouted, “D’akujem! D’akujem!,” thanking the audience with the only Slovak phrase he knew.
After successfully warming up the crowd, High Altitude played the last two songs of their set. The audience clapped along and gave the Slovak form of a standing ovation when the last notes faded.
“Instead of everyone standing, they start clapping all together on the same beat,” Shelby explains. “We were the first ones that night to get the ‘clapping ovation.’”
So how does a bluegrass band from small-town America represent the U. S. at an international music festival?
For Shelby, a business marketing major with a minor in music at the University of Wyoming, her musical path began on the outskirts of Laramie. Growing up without cable television, Shelby and Jacob, an architectural engineering major at UW, had to find other means (pun intended) of entertaining themselves.
Their dad, Warrie Means, an associate professor of animal science and extension specialist of meat science at UW, as well as a skilled banjo and guitar player, would invite other musicians over to their house for jam sessions, gatherings that continue today with hours of live music and tasty food made by Shelby’s mom, Sherri.
“Instead of being bored, we would pick up an instrument and try to learn it,” Shelby says. “I got into bluegrass music because that’s all we listened to growing up.”
“Our children were immersed in music from the time they could walk,” Warrie says.
Bluegrass is an acoustic style of music that blends country, gospel and blues, and is usually played on the mandolin, fiddle, banjo, guitar and bass.
Shelby picked the bass and strengthened her playing ability through involvement with several bluegrass groups, as well as a country band, high school orchestra and the UW Centennial Singers.
“All these experiences have made her a better musician all around,” Warrie says. “But bluegrass is her first love, all of that has just helped feed into what she can do now.”
However, not until approached by UW music professor Rod Garnett, known for his remarkable flute skills, did Shelby know her talents would cross international borders.
While in Garnett’s world’s music class in the spring, Garnett, aware of Shelby’s background and ability, asked if she would be interested in forming a bluegrass band to take to Slovakia.
Garnett traveled with a jazz band to the academic folk festival four years prior, an event he became familiar with during his research on Slovak flutes six years ago. The jazz group received such a good response that Garnett was invited back. This time, he wanted to represent American music with bluegrass.
“The beauty of bluegrass is it’s great folk music,” Garnett says. “It has great strings and great vocals, which is very much like the music of Eastern Europe.”
Shelby said she could put a band together and started making calls to musicians she knew from other bands and local festivals.
Coloradan Courtney Hartman signed on as the group’s guitarist, and Montana natives Reid Buckley and Sterling Masat agreed to play fiddle and banjo, respectively. With Jacob on mandolin and Shelby on bass, the completed quintet chose the name High Altitude to represent their geographic region while overseas.
On June 29, High Altitude departed for Nitra, Slovakia, a city of 85,000 people where they connected with Garnett. Once settled, High Altitude and Garnett met the mayor of Nitra and the president of the local agriculture university, as well as performed for the President of Slovakia during the many welcoming activities organized for the international groups.
“We definitely had to be aware of how we were representing America,” Shelby says. “We had to make sure we didn’t provide a negative impression.”
High Altitude made sure it took advantage of the experience, communicating across various cultures and making friends with the other bands.
“We met a lot of different groups just by keeping our door open for jam sessions,” Shelby says. “We couldn’t speak a lot of their languages, but we all spoke music.”
Overall, the language difficulties weren’t a big deal, although some cultural differences were strange to the Americans.
“We had cucumbers with every meal: breakfast, lunch and dinner,” Shelby says. “And a big part of the culture and the food is the alcohol that goes with it. They take it seriously there; you drink when you eat.”
“At the beginning of the week, they would give you huge helpings of everything,” Jacob says of the food at the festival. “But by the end, we only had bread, ham and cheese – but they didn’t let up on the cucumbers. We had piles of them.”
Upon returning to the U.S. in mid-July, the group members went their separate ways. However, a reunion European trip may be in order. After the festival, the members of High Altitude were invited by an Italian band to stay in Sicily for the remainder of their trip, where High Altitude played a few shows to warm reception.
“I definitely want to spend more time [in Italy],” Jacob says. “That was my favorite part.”
Shelby is also looking into a return trip to Sicily for the band. “The Italians told us that if we come back next August, they would have us play every night of the month.”
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
the author
|
Imagine a world where mice no longer cause women to jump in fright but instead teach important lessons about friendships, patience, and love.
“Ah woo, ah woo-ooo, ow, ow, ow,” five coyotes sing, looking over the burnt orange of the Western landscape. “Ah woo, yip, yip, yip, ow, ow, ow, wow.”
A touring photo-text exhibition will be featured at the University of Wyoming Associated Students of the University of Wyoming Gallery starting today. The display depicts a variety of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people of different races in familiar family settings.
The third annual Reel Rock Film Tour, an event that focuses on climbing and outdoor adventuring, is coming to Laramie.
“It’s great to have him here. Alpine- style climbing is basically having minimal supplies and flashing up a mountain at incredible speed,” McCoy said.