Eight Feet Tall performing at my house.
Before performing, dancer Jackie O’Riley of Eight Feet Tall explained that the Irish dance the audience was about to witness had been thought extinct. Then “it was discovered there was one guy still teaching this dance” to neighbors and students in West Clare. “He was outside of the realm of competitive step dance, which meant that he had held onto his old repertoire,” O’Riley said. Modern folk dancers who visited him discovered he had a “vast repertoire” of dances “that hadn’t been seen in decades.” The audience, at a house concert I hosted in Hamden, was going to have to a chance to see.
House concerts, in their modern American incarnation, have been around for at least decades. The roots of them go deep; as the New York Times wrote in 1999, “one could probably trace house concerts to any point in history, from recent research suggesting that Neanderthals were blowing flutes in caves to the classical recitals that continue to this day. In early America, the home was a cradle of music: there were soirees at antebellum plantations and dances at country cabins with local fiddlers. Before he found national fame as a blues musician, Muddy Waters became a local celebrity by turning his Mississippi Delta cabin into a raucous juke joint for music and moonshine.” The early jazz scene was full of house shows, including parties to help people make rent. Hip hop was born at a house show.
For the folk music scene — where playing unamplified to a smaller audience is baked into the musical style, given that the music existed before there was amplification — house concerts have been a staple for a long time. Since the 1990s, they have only become a more solid part of a working acoustic musician’s life, as the internet has made it that much easier to organize concerts, connecting performers to audiences. As the New York Times wrote in 2010, “home concerts are becoming the main stage for a growing number of singer-songwriters.”
They’re also tied to the strength of the local folk music community. Many house shows include potluck dinners before the show and open music sessions after the show, a chance for everyone to get together, say hello to their neighbors, and not just hear music, but play a little of their own. Some of my best gigs as a musician have been playing house concerts, on every count, from the attentiveness and enthusiasm of the audience to how much money ended up in my pocket.
Hosting a house concert is legal, provided one doesn’t fall afoul of local residential zoning regulations. In practice, this boils down to two big rules: the host can’t charge admission to get in the door, or take a cut of whatever the audience may give to the musicians. The host also can’t charge people for food or drink. For the host, throwing a house concert is like throwing a party, a thing done for the community, and because it’s fun. It’s also a good idea to give neighbors a heads up that a house concert is coming (and, better yet, invite them to attend).
Embedded in the regulations is an ethical argument about whether throwing house concerts undermines established venues by splitting audiences for that evening. That’s certainly a possibility for each individual show. In the long run, however, my own experience as a host has been that house concerts are a great way for performers to start building their audiences in a given area, which in the end can benefit venues, too. Musician Jake Blount’s first gig in the New Haven area was a house concert at my place. His next two shows were at Cafe Nine; most of the people who’d come to the house concert went to those gigs, and brought friends. He’s next playing the GuitartownCT concert series operating out of Cafe Amici in Hamden this Saturday. Likewise, musician Joe Troop brought his band Che Apalache to play a house concert at my place first. His next show, with Larry and Joe, was at Cafe Nine, and the next was at the MAC in Milford.
Because I don’t want to compete with New Haven’s bona fide venues, sometimes when a musician asks me to host a house concert, I direct them to any one of those clubs. Sometimes I say no to a group because I don’t know if I can make the show a success for them. But sometimes when a group asks, I see that they will be perfect for a house concert — that the intimacy will serve the music, and enhance the experience for everyone, and that it will be the kind of show that the folk community will show up for. Then I say yes, as I did to Eight Feet Tall.
Eight Feet Tall features multi-instrumentalists Dan Accardi and Armand Aromin and dancers Rebecca McGowan and Jackie O’Riley Together the group “approaches steps and tunes with both intense respect for tradition and keen sensitivity to the shared rhythmic experience of music and dance. Instruments, shoes, voices, and whole bodies enter into conversation with one another to create complex sonic textures amid vibrant visual interplay,” as the project’s website states. As is typical of folk musicians and dancers, the group arose from other groups, and social connections. McGowan and O’Riley perform as a duo under the name From the Floor. Accardi and Aromin are both in the traditional band The Ivy Leaf — as is Ben Gagliardi, who with Aromin forms the duo The Vox Hunters. This house concert happened in part because I had hosted the Vox Hunters pre-pandemic, so when Aromin wrote me to ask about Eight Feet Tell, both he and I knew what we would be getting.
In this case, that meant precise and energetic dancing, driving tunes, and an engrossing dive into the history of both, delivered with a liberal peppering of wry and hilarious commentary. For example, Just before performing the dance and tune that people had thought extinct, O’Riley explained that a specific tune had been matched to the dance, so that they moved together. Accardi then mentioned that this wasn’t always the case. For the previous tune they played, he said, McGowan and O’Riley “wrote an original step specifically to go along with that particular melodic phrasing.”
He elaborated further. “They’re doing all kinds of things. They’re improvising. They’re writing choreography. They’re dancing some of the old steps.” With a tone of voice indicating both knowing drama and deep respect for his bandmates, he concluded that “everything you can imagine, they’re doing it.”
“It’s amazing,” Aromin said, a sly grin on his face, explaining that they also found extinct step dances “in a piece of fossilized amber — in a mosquito — and now they’re just running amok everywhere.” They ended up having to wait until the laughter subsided to begin performing.
The audience members sat fully absorbed for two sets of playing, dancing, and history. In the second set, warming to the feeling of everyone becoming friends, they began to ask questions and make comments of their own. The small space and full sound contributed to senses of both immediacy and history. I was reminded, first, of just how rare it was to hear someone play in close proximity, voices and instruments unamplified, and how much richer and easier the sound and connection could be for it; and second, of how people had been hearing this kind of music, and seeing this kind of dancing, in just this way for a very long time.
Fully half of the audience had brought instruments of their own. After the show was over, those instruments came out of their cases, drinks were fetched from the kitchen, and performers and audience played together, swapping tunes and stories, with a few others who stayed just for the hang. I play a fair number of folk styles, but Irish music isn’t one of them. I don’t have the techniques down, don’t have the accent right. I realized that meant that, for me, the show didn’t need to be over. I could have started cleaning, or even made myself scarce. Instead, I took a seat on the floor, closed my eyes, sipped my drink, and just listened to the music swirling all around me.
