CD Review: John Kraus and the Goers' Derelict broods about life on the water

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Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 07 August 2012 17:25

Written by Joe Follansbee

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Most modern renderings of maritime music--sea shanties, music hall ballads, forebitters, and the like--tend toward the cheery; it’s harder to tease out the darker side of life at sea while plinking a banjo. But a new album by LA-based John Kraus and the Goers titled Derelict has an almost brooding quality driven in part by its song selection and a mix that’s heavy with darker tones. “Derelict is not always celebrating the sea,” according to the band’s website. “There are more moments when fists are shook in the sea’s general direction.” The album’s 10 songs--four traditional, five original, and one by San Francisco folk singer Skip Henderson--explore the common sailor themes of loneliness, loss, and fear with a 21st century ironic authenticity.

John Kraus knows his business on the water; he’s captain of the Los Angeles Maritime Institute’s brigantine Irving Johnson, which sails out of San Pedro. (He’s in charge of “seamanship” in the album credits.) Derelict is his second and better effort after his 2007 collection of traditional song recordings, called Donkey Off a Dead Horse, and he also plays with some of the Goers in the “Los Angeles Americana” group Rose’s Pawn Shop. The sea-folk band describes its style as “off-folk,” perhaps referring to an interest in pulling in the acoustic sounds of brass and congas, which are not in the usual suite of trad instrumentation. David Dutton’s percussion gives many of the tunes a quirky flair, as does Bob Aul’s tuba in the bassline, but with less of a comic riff that low-end brass so often conveys. Tim Weed’s fiddle reminds us that it’s folk music, after all. Taken together, the music has the all-comers feel of an open-mic night, but with a true professional polish.

If you like songs on an album to hang together in some way, Derelict achieves this, though the band doesn’t want listeners to think of the CD as a “concept” album, along the lines of The Who’s Tommy or Jethro Tull’s work. A few songs stand out for me, namely “Farewell to Nova Scotia,” one of the better takes on the Canadian maritime folk standard, and “Roll the Derelict,” an original piece of tall ship power folk that could’ve been a new arrangement of an 1860s pump shanty. John Kraus and the Goers’ Derelict reinvents the shanty for a wired audience while honoring the traditions that have kept the maritime folk sub-genre alive.

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Connecticut's Sheffield Island Light undergoing new phase in restoration

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Category: East Coast

Published on Wednesday, 01 August 2012 09:16

Written by Peter Bondi

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Lighthouse enthusiasts in Connecticut are taking the next steps toward preserving the Sheffield Island Lighthouse, which marks the approaches to Rowayton and Norwalk on the Connecticut coast. The non-profit Norwalk Seaport Association is working with the state Department of Economic and Community Development, along with Feasy-Smith architects and the Cenaxo Company, on an extensive restoration project.

Phase 1, funded by a $250,000 state grant, includes exterior repairs of the lighthouse tower and the keepers quarters, such as wood repair and paint, re-pointing the masonry walls, stabilizing the structure and roof repair. Phase 2, which is awaiting funding, will consist of interior restoration and additional reinforcement of the seawall. The current work extends repairs and restoration led by the association in 1988 and 1989. In 1997, a group of volunteers working with a local contractor reinforced the south side seawall on the island to protect the property and the lighthouse.

Established in 1828, the original Sheffield Island Lighthouse tower was replaced in 1868 by the current structure. Around the same time, the government built five sister lighthouses: Great Captains in Greenwich, Conn., Morgan Point in Noank, Conn., Old Field Point in Long Island N.Y., Plum Island in Long Island, and Block Island in Rhode Island. In 1902, the government decommissioned Sheffield Island Light and built Greens Ledge Light, although the keepers of Greens Ledge used Sheffield as a shore station.

In 1914, the government sold the lighthouse to Thorsten O. Stabell, who along with his sons Thorsten and Anton Stabell, maintained the property as a private residence. The Stabell family still owns a small cottage on the island. In 1986, the Norwalk Seaport Association purchased the lighthouse and keepers cottage along with the two and half acres of property it stands on from the Stabell family. The lighthouse was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1989. The rest of the island is a wildlife refuge.

The Norwalk Seaport Association maintains the lighthouse and property as a maritime educational facility and museum for the public, ferrying them out to the island in a 49-passenger boat from the Sheffield Island Dock, located just outside the Maritime Aquarium IMAX Theater in Norwalk.  For more information on tours, visit www.seaport.org. Photo courtesy Norwalk Seaport Association.

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Review: South American 'revolt' figures in 13th novel of Thomas Kydd series

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Category: Fiction

Published on Thursday, 12 July 2012 14:49

Written by Joe Follansbee

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(Betrayal, by Julian Stockwin. U.S. release date: October 2012. Published in the U.S. by McBooks Press, 320 pages, hardcover, $24.00.)

Most authors of nautical fiction from the Napoleonic Era place their characters somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere, usually the Atlantic or the Mediterranean. That’s where most of the historical action was, of course. By contrast, the Southern Hemisphere, apart from the Cape of Good Hope, seems devoid of action. Julian Stockwin has found an exception to this rule, and he’s successfully exploited it in Betrayal, the 13th book of his series on the fictional exploits of Captain Thomas Kydd.

As commander of the frigate L’Aurore on station at Cape Colony, Kydd finds himself under Commodore Sir Home Popham, an able naval administrator and barely competent combat officer with a tendency to bend the rules a little too far, especially if there’s something to go in his pocket. Popham sees a chance east across the South Atlantic at the Spanish colony of Buenos Aires, located on the Rio de la Plata, a broad estuary known as the River Plate to the British. After hearing rumors of a discontented populace ready to throw off Spanish rule, the commodore hatches a scheme to invade the region with 1,400 soldiers and a few ships. Kydd, though skeptical, signs on, partly out of deference to his boss and partly for the chance to expand his country’s growing empire. Kydd’s best friend and sometime spy, Nicholas Renzi, familiar with Popham’s reputation as an opportunist, sees the plan as nothing more than a dangerous adventure.

The historical episode is real: In 1806, Popham invaded the colony, and the results were nothing less than a fiasco. I can’t help but think of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, when Americans were promised that the Iraqi people would welcome soldiers and marines as liberators. Exactly the opposite happened, and Popham experienced the same turn of events in Buenos Aires, as Stockwin tells the tale.

Stockwin is at his best when he places Kydd and the other British officers and soldiers in the thick of the action. But he stumbles with his local characters; a woman especially comes off too much like the “hot-blooded Latina” stereotype. And the ending of Betrayal is unsatisfying. The true ending of the story is in the Author’s Note, in which Stockwin details how a fiasco turned into an unmitigated disaster. One wonders what the fictional Kydd really thought of the unprincipled Popham, something Stockwin promises we’ll learn in a future Kydd tale.

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