Featuring at the PCA, Summer 2009

My new CD, "I'm Taking My Time" has been released! I am very excited to see this labor of love take tangible form...

it has been in production on and off for the last two years, as finances dictated I booked studio time with Steve Friedman at Melville Park Studio, in Hyde Park, and his quiet efficient skillhelped me to get the basic tracks down.

Eric Kilburn of Wellspring Sound in West Acton was hired to help me realize the sound I was imagining... integrating some of my home recordings (overdubs of various instruments and vocal approaches) into the various song mixes. By the time we were ready for final mixes he worked closely with me, as we discussed the creative ways to make the songs work well.

I will tell you, it was my vision from the start to make this CD different and stand out from the current approaches to DIY recordings. Because certain musicians I had originally thought would fit the sound I was searching for were not available when I had time booked, I made the best of it, and friends from all over rallied to my assistance... I am very happy to list them here:

Edi Nederlander, who is a stellar talent, recording artist, songwriter and friend from South Africa. (I invite you to google her!) She came up with a wonderful guitar riff for one of my songs, which I arranged for flute and saxophones.

Andrew Sterman, a good friend from NYC, played phenomenal flute and tenor sax. He makes his living doing session work on Broadway, has recordings of his own unusual Jazz group, and who is most notably, a member of the Philip Glass Ensemble!

Oen Kennedy, who was leaving Wellspring as I was arriving for a session one afternoon, graciously added his amazing whistling talent to one of my tunes which I wrote at one of Bob Franke's songwriting clinics.

My son Jesse Aron, who when he isn't making amazing art installations for The Whitney, The Tate and other art museums... added his wonderful voice and harmony to a couple of tunes.

My steadfast accompanists, Eric Luskin added electric bass and some wonderful guitar, and also co-wrote a tune... and Paul Lee (A SAMW alum) played wonderful keyboards, and also wrote the charts for the other horn players.

Hector Hambides, another South African friend, added his very wonderful soprano sax and flute to a few songs.

Chris Botelho, the terrific drummer from New Bedford, plays on most of the recordings.

Eric Kilburn contributed his accomplished skills on Weissenborn slide guitar, electric bass, mandolin and brushes on snare drum.

And the guys I spend most Tuesday evenings with: my buddies from my folk-rock group, The Maple Street Project played on a new version of one of my songs. They are: George Pultz, guitar: who aloo co-wrote two of the songs with me, Bob Littman: mandolin, who also co-wrote one of the songs, and Jim Mavor, who played bongos and drums on a couple of the tunes.

Thanks to the many times I've attended SAMW since 2000 and all the great lessons and instruments I've learned from our wonderful instructors, I played a lot of instruments – guitar (6-, 12-, and electric guitars, some mandolin, ukulele, electric bass, percussion and some keyboard synth parts all over the CD.)

All of the songs are my original compositions,and some were co-written as I mentioned... for which I am most grateful to Bob Franke, Kate Campbell, Peggy Seeger and Cliff Eberhardt.

The photographs for the CD were by the extremely talented, Michael Maloney, who did the Digipak shots, and the lyric book features photos by Ann Sherman, (Bob Franke's sister-in-law), and by friends and family from South Africa, Australia and California.)

BIOGRAPHY

40 years after he first picked up a guitar, Mel Green is still at it, making every new day a learning experience. SInce 2000, after first attending Summer Acoustic Music Week, a locally sponsored summer camp, he decided to devote himself to singing again, and thanks to attending these camps annually he has learned to play many new instruments: mandolin, appalachian dulcimer, ukulele, electric bass, honed his song-writing and singing as well as diving into home-recording. In mid-2010, after two years of recording, he has released his first solo CD, “I’m Taking My Time.”

His earliest memories are of warbling along to hits of the 40s and 50s with his mother, who was an aspiring singer. He sang at school assemblies, at sing-alongs supporting his high school rugby team, and eventually he sang for his classmates when he picked up a guitar from a still-life arrangement at art school in Cape Town.

He borrowed a friend's f-hole guitar to ward off boredom after completing his homework assignments at art school. "The theoretical subjects, anatomy and art history, kept me occupied at home for a part of my time, the rest of the "alone time" was spent teaching myself to play guitar ... the term, fingerpicking, had yet to enter my lexicon, but that's what I was doing. Malaguena was the first tune I figured out by ear."

"One summer afternoon hunkered down out of sight on the balcony of our suburban flat I sang some songs, earning applause from a girl across the way." The applause was gratifying and ever since then he practiced and discovered folk music after transferring to the Johannesburg School of Art.

He transferred to art school in Johannesburg and some nights he dropped into the Troubadour Coffeehouse and became a denizen, hanging out almost every night and eventually became a waiter just to be there all the time, and all the while studying the guitar-picking styles of the singers playing on the little black stage with the hangman's noose suspended from the ceiling. He avidly watched and studied the regular performers: Des Lindberg and Keith Blundell, Leon & Mike, and others who stirred the attentive audiences. One night as he sang along, his loud harmony prompting British import Gary Bryden to pause in mid-song to invite Mel up on stage to sing with him. Mel never looked back, the bug had bitten him!

Soon after, Mel persuaded his art school comedian friend Mel Miller to join him at the Troubadour ... they sang their entire repertoire ...[ three songs] for manager, Keith Blundell, who promptly hired them to take over the Wednesday evening slot, which was soon to be vacated. The Mels played hooky, "bunking" art school for a month, and even then, when they took the stage at their first gig, they found they still had too few songs, so Mel Miller spontaneously filled in with the jokes and extremely funny stories he had been telling at art school. And thus their reputation as a folk-comedy duo took root.

Within a year, after featuring in the first Johannesburg Folk Festival concerts, they were signed to Columbia after being recorded with all the other performers for a compilation album. They had teamed up for the event with with Louis Meyer a banjo player. Soon after that, they left their day jobs to go pro, taking a residency at South Africa's top hotel, appearing as Mel & Mel. Their success in filling their own room six nights a week, prompted them to hire Julian Laxton as their lead-guitarist, with whom they made three albums and enjoyed a short but stellar career, during the time of the Beatles, Stones and the other 60s greats. (That's the short version of their group story... please visit www.melmelandjulian.com for more.

He loves performing in groups and writes and records with The Maple Street Project, a folk-rock quintet he co-founded in the western suburbs of Boston, and he previously sang with RiverSong, a now-defunct vocal group dedicated to promoting conservation of waterways... watch this space for more developments.

Nearly forty years later, Mel is still performing solo, writing and picking as enthusiastically as ever... and his first solo CD has been released! See GIG page for details.

 

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

After my group, Mel, Mel & Julian broke up in 1967, I returned to live in Johannesburg to work and to resume my life as a 9-5 citizen. I hung out at the The Troubadour and soon was in the thick of the folk scene, making my way as a solo performer. My good friends, Mike Dickmasn, Eric and Yonna Solomon, Andy Dillon, Colin Shamley, Estelle Orlin, Edi Nederlander and Keith Blundell and his family made my transition very comfortable. We played together a lot, hung out and listened to a lot of good music, and generally were very comfortable among "our own".

I was asked to feature at Pretoria's only folk club - The "Gorrelpot" (Afrikaans for Witch's Couldron) which later moved and was re-named "The Minstrel" and located near the University of Pretoria ... my good friend Theo Coetzee ran the place with a few other of the folk-faithful, in the heart of conservative Pretoria.

I became a favorite there over the next three years. That venue became the proving ground for my new-found confidence as a solo singer and guitar player... I was forced to improve my guitar playing, (there wasn't Julian to rely on for his amazing lead work...) and I was soon well-regarded as a crowd pleaser and entertainer - even telling stories and jokes!

Out of that newfound prominence on the scene I was recommended by my good friend David Marks to try out for a play in Johannesburg, acting and singing in the literary stage review "What is Love?" in which I was hired to be the interlocutor, to link the various segments with song or spoken word. Still under contract to CBS, (Columbia South Africa). I was asked to record a single ... My first solo, "Mr. Nico" and the title song from "What is Love?" both written by David Marks. That recording session was memorable! ... I was backed up by my friends, the Rock & Roll group, The Bats. (I am told that I was the first South African folkie to record with a rock band, which would make me the first folk-rocker in South Africa?) Since then, there has been a long hiatus between recording sessions...

I emigrated to the United States in 1970, with a letter of recommendation to the president of Columbia Records in New York from the president of CBS in South Africa. A meeting was arranged with a producer at Epic Records, which went nowhere. The current trend was to record singer-songwriters, and I was not yet writing at that time... The experience was humbling and disappointing.

After moving north to Boston in 1972, while I was looking for a job in the advertising trade, I spent many of my idle hoursin my rented room playing guitar, reading, writing and doing plenty of thinking... and that's when the muse appeared. Words flowed onto paper, and pretty soon I had a few songs to play and sing at the weekly Ceilidh hosted by Peter Johnson at Club Passim. The owners, Bob and Rae Anne Donlin liked my songs and my interpretations of some traditional folk songs, and thus encouraged, I became a regular at those weekly events, honing my material, and getting back into the folk scene. Lorraine Hammond, a regular, would invite many of us back to her house to continue singing into the wee hours after Club Passim closed its doors for the night. These more intimate songswaps with other enthusiasts again nurtured my love for the folk genre.

I learned a lot from my fellow singers and pickers. And I still do... I was a lucky man, because Rae Ann Donlin must have coerced Bob, her laconic husband, (and iconic figure on the Boston folk scene), because I was invited to open for Sandy Bull, the world-music multi-instrumentalist when he came to town for a couple of nights. My first paid USA gig!

And a few months later I was honored to be asked to be the opener for famous singer-songwriter Rosalie Sorrels, "The Traveling Lady". That gig was for four nights... a wonderful opportunity! Soon after that Bob Donlin attempted to persuade me to go back into folk music ful- time and offered to manage me. In retrospect, I wonder what might have happened if I had taken him up on his offer at that time, but marriage, children and work were the factors that kept me bound to the Boston folk scene.

Now after many years, I have been out and performing my old and new songs once again. The joy and sense of fulfillment one achieves from performing one's own humble creations is truly remarkable. The realization that one might have something meaningful to express is even more empowering.

Now that my new CD has been released, I'll be out there promoting it at venues all over the Greater Boston area, and hopefully beyond.

 

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