Dear Readers: I am at La Guardia Airport about to embark on a monthlong tour of Central America! If you’ve been reading this you know it’s the Hoppin John String Band and we’re going to play old-time music for people in Nicaragua, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, as musical ambassadors for the US State Department…!

For this trip I"ll be blogging at:
www.violinistalibre.blogspot.com
Please follow me there!

Also twitter: ohaliciajo is my username.

Time to board!

Girls in Trouble played our large-venue debut (and, um, fourth show ever!) at Webster Hall on Monday night, opening for Yael Naim. There were seven hundred people there to see Yael, and they listened to us too, sitting cross-legged on the floor looking up at us. It was beautiful to see this sea of upturned faces from stage, and strangely sweet to play for a bunch of people sitting on the floor - it made Webster Hall feel like a giant living room.

I have an amazing brand new amp (which will henceforth be referred to as The Little Red Monster) which a friend-of-a-friend in DC kindly built for me. This was its inaugural use and it went swimmingly. The only technological problem involved me forgetting to take my capo off, which I can’t really call a technological problem (unless it’s brain technology). Oops. Still, the show was great, and then it was over. Afterwards we watched Yael Naim sing, play, twirl and glow from our perch backstage (at Webster Hall, backstage actually overlooks the stage and is the perfect place to see a show). I know I’m obsessed with clothes, but I have to mention how much her outfit impressed me - a poofy one shoulder white dress with red polka dots, and huge slippers. Anyone who wears woolen moon boots onstage wins my immediate respect. Anyway, the whole night was like a dream, but I didn’t even have time to think about it too much, because I had to run…..

back to Brooklyn for a few hours of sleep and then up very early to return to Manhattan, but midtown this time, for this musical ambassadorship audition at Jazz at Lincoln Center. (If our bluegrass quartet, Hoppin John, gets it, we’ll go far away for a month in the spring). Honestly, I never thought I’d be auditioning in Lincoln Center, playing old-time music; so although I’d been awake most of the night and was tired, the novelty of the whole thing was enough to wake me right up. A representative from the State Department sat us down and very seriously explained to us how harsh the tour will be if we are indeed accepted. (Stomach bugs; armored vehicles; three-performances-per-day; embassy dinners. Just another day on the road, I guess.)

We were, or at least pretended to be, totally nonchalant about the whole thing. We managed to get the judges - a panel of jazz experts - to sing along with Sail Away Ladies; we held up a map to show immigration patterns; we taught them about Woodie Guthrie and the Dustbowl - in other words we gave it our best shot, and we’ll find out in a few days whether we will indeed be embarking on some crazy tour. I’ll let you know.

Girls in Trouble, if I haven’t already mentioned it, is my new band; our third performance got a really great review by the Berkshires’ music critic Seth Rogovoy. Here it is for your reading pleasure!!!

(GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass., October 20, 2008) – It’s rare for an audience to get in on the ground floor of a new musical project, and it’s even rarer when, as was the case last night with Alicia Jo Rabins’s GIRLS IN TROUBLE ensemble at Club Helsinki, it’s on an elevator that seems destined for a quick ride to the penthouse suite.

An outgrowth of her graduate studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary, GIRLS IN TROUBLE is Rabins’s unique fusion of musical and Biblical midrash. It’s also the
first fully developed, entirely personal work of creativity sprung from Rabins’s voracious and eclectic appetite for all things musical, intellectual, spiritual, and poetic, and, still in its infancy, a remarkable, jaw-dropping success that had listeners in the club mesmerized by the awesome implications of Rabins’s talent and idiosyncratic creation.

Both the name of the band and the project, GIRLS IN TROUBLE is a song cycle revisiting the stories of mostly forgotten Biblical women, including Dinah, Miriam, Tamar, and Samson’s first wife. In story and song, Rabins explores the
harrowing stories of these women, mining them for their oft-overlooked lessons of courage and heroism as well as their more ambivalent messages of weakness and surrender.

Rabins doesn’t shy away from the uglier lessons inherent in some of these stories and the behavior of their heroes (or anti-heroes); neither is she didactic about any of this at all. Rather, she is pulled off the seemingly impossible: a song cycle as serious as anything in 19th century music that also functions entirely as entertainment: think Liz Phair crossed with Camille Paglia, or Regina Spektor channeling Susan Brownmiller.

In other words, Rabins rocks.

That, in itself, was one of the revelations (pardon my Judeo-Christianity) of the evening: those who have followed Rabins’s career have enjoyed seeing her talents evolve as a founding member of the folk-roots group the Mammals, for which she played fiddle and sang a little, through various other string-band and Appalachian folk efforts, in concert and on record, and, most prominently, her role as the fiddler in the popular Yiddish-klezmer outfit Golem.

While there are hints of all this in GIRLS IN TROUBLE, the project introduces an entirely new side of Rabins, one that for the most part has never before been seen or heard. Here she is an electric guitar-wielding bandleader, front and center, singing and performing her own songs that defy categorization but are essentially indie-rock songs in sheep’s clothing.

Backed by an ace ensemble including Golem bandmate Tim Monaghan on drums, organist Jascha Hoffman, and bassist Aaron Hartman, Rabins was a compelling frontwoman, her vocals veering from soft, tender balladry to soaring,
keening wails, borne by music that took daring, inventive, chromatic leaps that surprised listeners as they betrayed Rabins’s compositional studies in conservatory. The musical and rhythmic arc of several of her tunes suggested a
firm grounding in the works of Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell, while the greater aspect of what she was accomplishing through her poetry – which, while serving
the stories, stood entirely on its own through its riff-based imagery – and music suggested a female version of Leonard Cohen.

A solo tune with looped violin parts was a clear homage to one of her musical heroes, Laurie Anderson, and suggested that in more than one way, as much as GIT functions simply as an indie-rock band, it’s subsumed under an umbrella of
performance art. But this is just more of the beauty of what Rabins accomplishes here: she has created a musical form entirely suited to and based upon the content, yet a mutable one that can prosper as easily in synagogue as it can on the rock stage.

GIRLS IN TROUBLE is in its earliest stages, with less than a handful of public performances behind it. The group will head into the recording studio in late November to turn Rabins’s creations into digital bytes that will see the light of day next spring on JDub Records. Those in attendance at Club Helsinki last night got an early taste of what is undoubtedly going to be an exciting musical
development, certainly in the Jewish music field, but more rightly in the indie-rock field at large, once it gets before larger and more diverse audiences that will flock to the group for its many faceted pleasures, including its grit, melodicism, wit, intelligence, groove – and no shortage of sex appeal. After all, these are GIRLS IN TROUBLE.

Seth Rogovoy is an award-winning music critic and author of THE ESSENTIAL KLEZMER and the forthcoming TALMUD OF BOB DYLAN. (This review originally appeared on Mr. Rogovoy’s excellent website, www.rogovoy.com)

This summer I am living on the third floor of an 1880’s house in Bushwick, Brooklyn. It is a summer of strategically placed fans, of tomatoes from the garden grown by my downstairs housemates, of reading about Keats and writing songs. As I write this blog, my sister’s band Company is recording in the living room.

Golem is going on tour next week opening for the Walkmen and returning to record a new album. Then Girls in Trouble is planning to go into the studio in late November, as a full band. (Thanks to Aaron, we now have a myspace with demos up - not the full band but you can hear the songs - www.myspace.com/girlsintroublemusic). A busy fall full of music.

Golem has traversed Alligator Alley twice in the last two months, which is a good thing.

The first occasion was the Langerado festival. A huge outdoor music festival, with tons of acts—everyone from us, to the Beastie Boys, to Vampire Weekend.

The only problem was that this huge outdoor festival happened to be taking place on an Indian reservation in the middle of the Everglades, and there was a twelve-mile two-lane road to get in, resulting in a twelve-mile traffic jam. Traffic was completely stopped, and didn’t seem likely to move anytime soon.

But Golem had to play at 7:30 pm, and it was about 6:45. There was absolutely no way we could wait in that line and make it to our show. Also, cellphones didn’t work out there.

What was there to do but put on the highbeams and hazards, and drive twelve miles on the wrong side of the double yellow line, going the wrong way, dodging water bottles thrown by angry hippies, and sometimes veering onto the swampy roadside to let an oncoming Mack Truck by?

“Hold on,” Tim said, and crossed the double yellow lines, while Annette and I screamed encouragingly. By the time we got there it was raining, and no one working there seemed to know where we were supposed to be playing, but by some miracle we were whisked away to the stage in a kind of golf cart driven by a woman named Scarlet, who took good care of us, and was excellent at maneuvering through quicksand while we clutched our instruments.

I did enjoy the most delicious vegetarian corn-dog of my life.

We had planned to go back and see the other bands, but by the time we made it to the place we were staying – muddy and exhausted – we realized that what we needed was a good old-fashioned day at the beach, with tequila, limes, pretzels, and melted chocolate bars.

We returned to Florida a month later, and played three shows. Tampa (at Skipper’s Smoke Shack: “We Smoke Everything"; Sarasota (at the Sarasota Film Festival), and Miami Beach (in an art-deco outdoor bandshell on North Beach.) Very different shows but what they had in common was that they were all outdoor, being in the glorious state of Florida. So I had the rare and delightful opportunity of watching the moon overhead while performing – three nights in a row. Not to mention trying a bite of fried alligator tail.