• `Til It Happens To You is our newest CD. MP3 samples and purchasing information is available on the Downloads page. Enjoy!


• Earlier in the year we received a call from filmmaker David Wittkower who was making a rodeo documentary. He had heard one of our songs and asked if we had more rodeo or bullriding songs. After a few seconds of panic, Curt answered “Well, uh...yeah...sure we do," so we made some up! The result is a CD called Cowboy's Dream. We've made samples available for you to check out on our Downloads page .


• On October 6th this yearTheDay newspaper in New London, Connecticut published the following article about the Village Jammers. Many thanks to Rick Koster, the writer, for taking the time to listen to our stories and music .


No Overnight Sensation

After 20 years, the Village Jammers
just may be making it big

By Rick Koster, The Day


Curtiss Thompson eyes his bottle of Budweiser speculatively. “I think our future is in house calls,” he says. “We'll be the first band to make house calls.”

Seated around him in a booth at C.C. O'Brien's pub in Pawcatuck, Geoff Corkhill and Mike Palazzolo laugh. Thompson nods. “Why not?” he says. “Any family can afford $50, right? We'll play in the kitchen while they make dinner. We can't stay for the whole meal, though. It gets too late and we're too old.”

That one snapshot moment captures the essence of the Village Jammers, whose median age is 46. The bluegrass-folk band also serves as a gentleman's drinking organization, a debate society, an ongoing musical experiment whose stylistic evolution mirrors the life-changes of its participants, and a sort of goofy Boy's Club, wherein no one told the members that, technically, they stopped being boys about, well, 30 years ago.

That the four band members (Dan Ravenelle is absent this night) have managed to maintain this fellowship and affection for making music is what gives the band a Peter Pan-like quality, one that's exceedingly rare in anyone over 25 who hasn't scored platinum success and been the subject of a “Behind the Music.”

The band is now creeping towards two decades together (founding Jammer and harmonica wizard Rene Brisson, who died in 2000, retains permanent in-memoriam membership), and it's hard to tell whether the music revolves around their collective friendship or if it's the other way around. And, as they're quick to point out, who cares?

They're certainly jazzed that several of their songs recently have been included as soundtrack material in “Cowboy Up,” a new documentary by filmmaker David Wittkower about professional bull riding. And their own debut CD, “Cowboy's Dream,” is completed and will be available shortly through their www.villagejammers.com Web site.

But they react to these significant bits of good fortune as they would to almost any development. There are wisecracks, head-scratching, laconic bemusement and a codgerly way of slowly digesting the implications over days or weeks of shared 12-packs, beef jerky, rehearsals — and gatherings that were supposed to be rehearsals but actually spun off into spontaneous boat rides to Fishers Island or attendance at just-released motion pictures.

“By this point, that's just the way we do things,” Thompson says. “We never wanted to do the star thing. We've done prestige gigs that indicate we probably could have done it, but that was never really the goal.”

In fact, the whole soundtrack thing came about in a whimsical moment.

While writing a rodeo song, Thompson had checked out a Web site devoted to the late bull-riding star Lane Frost to make sure he had the lexicon down. He stumbled across the fact that Wittkower was making a documentary about professional bull riders. He e-mailed Wittkower, whose previous documentary, “Firefight: Stories From the Frontlines,” had aired on The Learning Channel, to say he had a song about Frost. Did the filmmaker want to hear it?

“It wasn't exactly what I wanted for the documentary,” Wittkower says by phone from California, “but I thought the music was amazing and that Thompson was extraordinarily talented.”

Wittkower asked whether Thompson had any other material lying around, either bull riding songs or thematically appropriate instrumental music.

“I told him, ‘Sure, we've got plenty,'” Thompson says. “Then I hung up and started writing 'em.”

Thompson cranked out a volume of material and, after learning the director's time constraints, gathered the rest of the Jammers and prepared to go into the recording studio. One problem: Ravenelle was out of the country. As soon as he got back from vacation, Thompson called him. “Hey, Dan, you know that record we've been trying to make for 15 years? We've got two weeks to finish it!”

And they did. The Jammers are one of three acts prominently featured on the soundtrack and, with the recent release of “Cowboy Up” on video (go to www.lanefrost.com for more information), they've reached thousands of folks far beyond their hometown boundaries of Stonington.

The film — narrated by actor Luke Perry, the star who portrayed Frost in the movie “8 Seconds” — comes out at a particularly appropriate time. The Stonington-based Jammers hope to perform in some capacity when the Professional Bull Riders' Mohegan Sun Invitational takes place in the Sun arena Nov. 16 and 17.

“I couldn't pay them for the work,” Wittkower says, “but I hope the exposure helps. They put their heart and soul into the music and it comes through really well in the film. If their music was in a store, I'd happily pay $15 for it. It's that good.”

Melding traditional bluegrass and folk with a variety of tangential and indigenous American acoustic styles, the Jammers emphasize musical dexterity and Louvin Brothers harmonies on riverine songs like “To Walk the Line,” “7 Seconds,” “Morning's Call” and “Till It Happens to You.”

Thompson's signature mandolin and voice are augmented by spiritual leader Corkhill on rhythm guitar and vocals, bassist/vocalist Palazzolo, and the dexterous flat-picking and Dobro slide work of guitarist Ravenelle.

“The whole thing about ‘Cowboy Up' is that it's a great theme,” Thompson says. “We've always tried, musically, to get across the idea that the world would be a better place if everyone watched Roy Rogers movies. Maybe it's the nostalgia of us getting older, but it's nice to think about the days when it all worked out.”

There is a sense that all of these developments weren't preordained as much as earned, but there's no bitterness about the tardiness of success. ‘We weren't in any hurry' “It just took a few years to get here,” Palazzolo laughs. “We weren't in any hurry.”

Gradually coalescing throughout 1985-86 at a series of jam sessions at the Village Pub in Stonington, which gave the band its name (the Pub was in the location now occupied by One South restaurant), the group's foundations were centered in the typical early neighborhood rock bands all young musicians go through.

At a certain level of proficiency, they moved beyond the garage and all save Thompson played in a locally popular Southern rock act called Franklin Lymestone.

And, as those inaugural days shifted into that stretch known as Adulthood, marriages and jobs — Ravenelle, Corkhill and Palazzolo install cable television; Thompson is a land surveyor — short-circuited rock ‘n' roll maneuverings. Corkhill discovered Doc Watson and began to proselytize to his pals on the seductiveness of the indigenous acoustic music as well as tangential styles ranging from flatpicking to jazz and country blues.

“One night,” Corkhill remembers, “Dan showed up on my doorstep. He was no longer romantically involved, so I played him some Doc Watson. That's when it started to shift into the adult music phase.”

Gradually, through the efforts of Brisson, the band formally regrouped with the fresh direction. Longtime friend Thompson, whose musical tastes had run counter to the others' earlier, rock-happy tendencies, suddenly became an integral part of the new sound. With a launching pad repertoire that would scarcely fill up an entire night's work, they nonetheless set up shop in the Village Pub, the Town Green Tavern in Ledyard, the Steak Loft in Mystic and Billy Wilson's in Norwich — counting on a variety of pals to show up, sit-in, and fill up the time.

Due to their lunatic stage magnetism and musical chemistry, and the fact that they have a lot of really talented pals — local favorites the Full Dempsey, with players like Jimmy Carpenter and Jay Dempsey, as well as Bill Light, Vince Thompson, Steve Jakebelski and Tommy Giarratano — evenings with the Jammers became a de rigueur regional event.

Only with time and the death of Brisson did the band cut back on the tradition, ultimately settling into the now comfortable groove, threatened only by the “Cowboy Up” good fortune.

Though the band hasn't actively sought regular bookings as in days of old, they suppose they could.

“Our original songs are very marketable,” Corkhill says, “and I think we've done some original things with folk and bluegrass. The problem is, we just keep getting older. The best thing is, though, that the band was always and is always family.” •


(article: www.TheDay.com: Eastern Connecticut's News Source)


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