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New Denver Orchestra: lots to say, little to sell

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Contributed by: John Zwick, YourHub.com on 4/15/2008

You don't catch up with Laura Goldhamer. The most you can do is try to figure out where to position yourself so that you might occupy the same space long enough to talk. As the resident program director of Brooks Underground Teahouse, organizer of creative goings-on upstairs from the teahouse at Brooks Center for Spirituality and a musician in her own right, she helps to make sense of the swirling energy that encompasses big chunks of the Denver music scene and activist culture that calls the teahouse a home.

It was in that spirit of creativity that Brooks Center hosted the Bizarre Denver Bazaar on April 12, complete with live music, crafts galore by local artisans who've made bedecking every living moment in art their raison d'etre, community groups, local theater and more. One act in particular, the New Denver Orchestra, took that spirit and made it their own.

The NDO is a sort of living band - with a rotating lineup of musicians that has included Goldhamer, Ian Cooke, Gabriel Todd, Asia Wong, members of Paper Bird and others with a collective approach to songwriting and performance and what Goldhamer calls "an overwhelming sentiment of excitement about the wonderful musicians in Denver and Boulder."

That ethic was put on public display during a short set at the bazaar. While spectators filed in and out from the bazaar, a procession of music-makers filed into the Brooks Center sanctuary to the eclectic, mish-mashed sounds of a march, stripped of its martial tone by an accordion, banjo, melodicas and dancers. This was the sound of music shaped by consensus and chaos - soaring melodies, beautiful harmonies and everything in riveting counterpoint, while exploring the space of the Brooks Center sanctuary front to back.

Across a five-song set, they employed choir bells, creative percussion from splashing water basins and drumming on bike spokes and even Latin hymns.
And then, almost as soon as it had started, it was all over, lost into the ether and the memories of the audience.

In a sense, it draws the public, now forced to recreate the music in their memory, into the creative act.

Though she's careful to speak for only herself and not every member of the NDO, Goldhamer approves.

"You hear a recording and that's the authoritative version even though it's just a version," she says. "In a way, the music we are making resists mechanical production. We perform once a month in the spirituality center services, Sunday mornings at 10:30. A lot of the times we've had technical issues in the recording. It's a little uncanny."

That impermanence, that ephemeral, temporal quality of the New Denver Orchestra that ties it to a particular point in space and time, does recall a certain innocence of the folk music tradition, though.

For all the frustration and difficulty in trying to preserve a copy of the music in memory or explain the sound to a friend, there's also plenty to agree with.
Is the magic of the New Denver Orchestra agonizingly temporary? Sure. But it's also impossible to commodify. It's not copyrighted, recorded and reduced to a science that be duplicated at venue after venue, a characteristic Goldhamer puts stakes into.

It's also impossible to rip from a CD and transfer to an iPod, where it can serve as a musical shield of solitude from the city. It can't be reduced to demographic marketing as a marker of taste or a cultural shibboleth that keeps groups of music fans insular. If music on an iPod or a top ten list is a way for art to separate the individual from the crowd, tying the New Denver Orchestra's music to the here and now is a rejection of that - a deliberate statement that music is best when it brings people together, rather than encouraging them to set themselves apart.
As Goldhamer says, "Folk as a word is not referring to a genre of music. To me it means a evolving collective creation."

If you want a piece of it, you'll have to brave the company of your fellow man. The New Denver Orchestra performs monthly at the Brooks Center for Spirituality, 1819 E. 14th Ave. For more information, e-mail brookscenterarts@gmail.com and ask to be put on the e-mail list.

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