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Gig Calendar: Current Specifics and History(Click on the red dates or scroll down for specifics)
Once again, we'll caffinate and stridulate at our favorite South Bay venue. Come on down or up and rub your vocal chords in time with ours at this cozy, chummy space. And if you aren't familiar with this series, definitely check out some of the other great acts that make the Fiddling Cricket home. These folks are a great traditional music resource for the entire Bay Area....and they make great brownies....AND they serve widget Guinness to wash them down with!
Come help us welcome in the New Year and blast the detritus of the old year out of your pipes with song and ... sparkling water. The Freight being a dry house, we just have to fall back on hypoxia for our altered states--but we have to admit it works a treat and is free to boot. Many's the time our tankards have run dry (well, not many, but Hyperbole is our middle name), and a sprint through the verses of The Barley Mow has been all that stood between us and sobriety. We'll be onstage with all the old standards and a few new hopefuls, so bring whatever little grey cells you have left after the holiday potlatches and make sure your airways are free* to sing along with your usual élan and verve. *Dave, as a trained paramedic, will provide Heimlichs on demand should the need arise. The manuver, not the Pixar caterpillar. Doug and I will stand well back and attempt to protect the rest of you from the ejectae. And We're Sorry If You Missed...
OAT will be back again at this wonderful potlatch of folk heritage. Come join us and a host of other performers and enthusiasts in this massive free-for-all of workshops and jam sessions. The OAT Sing-Along workshop at 3pm will be an attempt by Tom to convey a basic vocal toolset for building harmonies on the fly, with Doug and Dave either getting in the way or saving his bacon, depending on who you talk to afterwards. The boys will move to the auditorium for a half-hour performance later that evening (6:00-6:30)--your chance to bring your new vocal armament to bear on their carefully crafted (sic) harmonic fortifications.
Ahoy lubbers! Time again to roll on down to Old SF and join us and a select crew of other a capella and otherwise al fresco musicians at this annual festival. We'll be swabbing the sonic decks with the likes of Alisair Fraser, Shay Black, John Roberts, Kate Brubeck, Mariide Widmann, Riggy Rackin, Holdstock & McCleod, Dogwatch....the archipelago of talent stretches from here to the Antipodes and back. Join in gale force chanteys, cut a hornpipe or two on the deck of the Balclutha, splice a mainbrace or (wo)man a halyard under the careful tutelage of the Park's master seamen. We'll be on the 'mid-pier stage' from 2:30-3, returning later for an 'all hands' blow off with the rest of the performers and staff around 4:00.
Summer is icumen in, lude sing Cuckoo!! Join us as we 'bloweth seede and groweth mede. Thus spring'th th' wold anew as we sing songs of fructification, ripeness, and reckless irrigation appropriate to the season. The Freight has been our 'home from home' through the years and we can guarantee you a fine, roaring singalong--regardless of the Alert Level. (If we haven't been hauled in for sonic terrorism by now, it just isn't going to happen.) Peace and Oil for All, My Fellow Inebriates. Ask not what you must do for your next beer, but rather what your next beer will do for you!  And,
as a special treat, we've asked Shay Black--well-loved local vocalist and
sessioneer, our friend and friend to all who love good beer, trad-tunes, and
woolly hats--to grace us with his presence for a portion of the
evening. Shay will open the show with a few tunes from both sides of
the Irish sea; some of his rakish youth was spent in Liverpool and its
environs. Then he'll add his pipes to the mighty OAT organ at
various points throughout the evening. Heck, you might want to make
a weekend of it--Shay hosts the famous seisun at the Starry Plough on Sunday
nights in Berkeley. If you still have voice and ears left after the
Freight, you might want to come out for blazing Irish rigs and jeels, creamy
Guinness, and more songs Celtic and otherwise the following night!
We'll be visiting again with JoAnn and Bob, and singing some seasonal and perennial favorites from the OAT repetoire. Dial on over, or use the hyperlink above to listen in over the 'net!
Time once again to lift our voices and tankards in this oldest and best of Bay Area folk venues. We'll be slinging--er, singing-- antique songs of the season: odes to rising sap and sun on the barley, songs of young love and spousal abuse, of marital discord and bibulous concord, bucolic epiphanies and agrarian angst. Songs, in short, of the Folk. And as always, we rely on you for pulmonary if not moral support as we reel from tune to tune. A good time will be had by all...assuming we remember any of it next morning.
And speaking of next morning... OAT will attempt to blend our raucous roarings with Mr. Thompson's mellifluous baritone (read: Sedge will try desperately to make himself heard over our usual din of breaking glass, deflating pig's bladders, and imitations of a Moose trapped in a stairwell). Turn on, tune in, and pray that our brains drop out into our coffee cups and not on to the floor.
Arrrgh, you Salts and Swabs! Join us on the shelterdeck (inside on the blunt end) of this 1886 Glasgow-built square rigger for the second in a series of four Music of the Sea concerts. Once again, we'll be concentrating on things nautical, with the odd sprinkling of just plain bibulous that you our audience have come to demand by the hogshead. Three other excellent nautical acts will hold forth in this venue on the other dates in this series; a discount ticket for all four is available for $40! Our sponsors here are the National Clean Boating Campaign, The Port of San Francisco, and the SFMNHP. Come on out for a day of glorious sun (or fog) on the water and revel in the snapping breeze blowing off the stage as we alternate sea-chanties with our usual nautical set (e.g., songs of whaleing, drinking, whor...whaleing, poaching, transportaion (judicial) and drinking). Free swabs and buckets will be passed out for mop-along choruses, and a chatauqua presentation Scuppers: Threat or Menace will be delivered by Doug to anyone who will listen.
Back again at our Home from Home. We'll be singing songs from the new CD, Old Enough to Drink; which was recorded in part our last Freight concert--as well as new material and old favorites from previous pressings. Bring your best set of lungs and loosen your uvulae for the usual sing-along fest, and ... please, this time let us get in a few of the punch lines!
Hosts Dave Stafford and Mark Cook host the Friday Folk Off from 3-6pm every
week. It's "...an unpredictable mix of
Come join us at this great traditional and eclectic music venue for an intimate evening of song and the usual foolery. Fiddling Cricket Concerts are held in a cozy, 80-seat venue in this well-known South Bay watering-hole. The acoustics are excellent, as is the java. They also have wine, beer, and nosh so bring all your appetites along.
Home of iMusicast™ webcasts and a comfortable little club just made to order for our avowed purpose of capturing the 'Live OAT' experience, with a studio attached containing everything a demanding(sic) group like OAT could want in the way of audio production equipment. (You all sound great, but we need all the electronic help we can get.) While this venue stretches our recording budget a bit, we hope its size will ensure that we won't need to turn folks away from this studio gig. (The successive sell-outs at the Freight have taught us something!) We also anticipate full catering at this site, so you can drink as well as sing along (There'll be cupcakes and caviar, and an unlimited bar tab in Heaven for the designated drivers.)
The owner of this cozy venue has a delightful little hall that he built into his renovation with the idea of giving itinerant folk bands an intimate place for house concerts as they pass through the Bay Area, or as an alternative to larger venues like the Freight which may not have room on an already crowded calendar. We'll have the techlords from Skyline Studio ensconced in the back of the hall, reels reeling and needles pinning. This will be a chance for us to get up close and personal with a few of you, and hopefully nail some CD tracks in the process. We started the evening off with serious mic-fright. Our trusty, battered Shure 502s were gone, replaced by steroidal brushed chrome cardioid muscle-mics that could pick up the sweat popping out of our pores and the gentle ping of dying brain cells as Dave and Tom pushed out their highest notes. It was disconcerting to actually see the technicians wincing and banging their headsets against the wall as we tucked into the chorus of The Brave Dudley Boys . Once the audience joined in however, with their usual bonhomie and enthusiasm we found ourselves more or less back in the saddle and riding with the wind at our backs. The setting helped marvelously as well. Stephen Freidland's little beam-ceilinged hall seated our limited (approx. 40) audience comfortably and gave back warm, acoustical highlights for our combined tunings. We began the evening with some trepidation regarding our audience's response to the varied demands of a session format. False starts, re-takes, and notes from our producer, Danny Carnahagn, might be likely to contrast poorly with our usual flawless(sic) stage presentations. We shouldn't have worried. The audience took it all in stride, and opened their throats like a Russian Easter chorus in all the best spots. Although tickets were sold strictly on a first-come first-served basis, we couldn't have hand-picked a better set of voices for this endeavor. Thanks again to all who attended. For those who missed out, a short video clip is available (about 6 minutes packed into 36MB) on the Audio page of this site. Saturday Come join us in bidding a final farewell to the old Millenium (depending on where you started counting), and help us get a head start on the new with all the old tunes and a few new ones, just to keep you guessing. You also get a crack at immortality--or what passes for it these days--as we'll be recording this performance with an eye to taking cuts for the new OAT CD Old Enough to Drink. Sing out, and help us pin those wimpy little needles firmly in the red. Thanks to all who showed up to help us see out the old Millennium in style. It was another sold out house: a great thing for us and the Freight, but certainly no fun for those who showed up early only to find that it was already SRO and precious little of that. We have begun talks with the Berkeley Planning Commission and OSHA to see about rigging hammocks and trapeze seating for our next appearance here. Our apologies again to those of you who could not be accommodated. Please don't give up on us. We continue to be deeply touched an more than a little overwhelmed by the response we've been getting from you all, and one of our New Year's resolutions is to appear more often in smaller venues around the Bay to hopefully help alleviate the crush at our larger venues and satisfy both your thirst for a cappella traditional music and our thirst for approval and notoriety. Also, thank you all for bringing us your voices and high spirits. Your rousing accompaniment to our efforts on-stage were duly recorded by our crack technicians (once they made the connection between the red lights on the board and our confiscation of their beers). We should have a number of CD quality cuts from this gig, and you helped immeasurably. Saturday Join us for Chanteys and Sea Ballads on the Weather Deck (I hope that means the one with a roof) of the venerable Balclutha. We're there by invitation, infesting the brisk sea air with verse and chorus along with the likes of Peter Kasin, Ricky Rackin, and other salty dogs. Bring your best set of lungs and sing along! Friday We'll be singing Francis Scott Keye's broadside lyrics to the famous Anacreontics' Society Song at the opening of this heroic contest. Doug has been roaring "Play Ball!!" as the tag line for this ditty in our performances for years now. Finally, he'll get to do it for real... We had the muzzle ready for Doug at the end of the tune, but he restrained himself manfully. It turns out "Play Ball!" is reserved for the umpire and the umpire alone. Must be an American League thing. Now, we don't want the rest of you to take this wrong, but...that was a loud singalong audience! But you folks at the smaller venues do a much better job of remembering the words. It's also the only time we've been stopped by Security when trying to come back for an encore! Sunday We'll be privileged to open the show for this archetypal English Traditional family of singers. The Copper family has an unbroken tradition of folk music performance stretching back for 7 generations. They are a "primary source" for English Traditional musicians the world over and a warm and genuine voice of the English countryside embodied on stage. We are deeply honored to be a part of this evening with them. What a great show!! And how wonderful to finally meet the people who's songs we've been 'borrowing' for so many years. The Coppers are just as kind and generous as their music. During the inevitable elbow-and-chin wagging after the performance, we got to hear a few more snippets of tunes and page through the family's songbooks (some of them in cuneiform on the original clay tablets)! Maybe we could get leather binding for our ring binders... Saturday Thanks so much for the overwhelming welcome back to this great venue! You were all in such fine voice...and there were so many of you!!! Your help on the chorus of 'Maui' pinned out at a 4.2 on the Richter Scale according to UCB. F&S tells us that they're going to have to re-do their seismic retrofitting after this gig. To paraprhase 'Derek' of Spinal Tap: "...but, these fans go to Eleven!" Our abject apologies to any of you that the Freight just couldn't pack into the hall, and to those who had purchased tickets in advance but arrived spot on 8pm to find only standing room. We should have noted here on the site that there is no reserved seating at the Freight, and will certainly do so in future. Saturday Chatting with host JoAnn Mar and singing some new material, as well as old standards in this segment of the weekly folk music offering at KALW. Saturday
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