Search - :: Cherry Picking Apple Blossom Time

IC B. (icberry)
Reviewed on 2/17/2017...

by David Greenberger, with music by Paul Cebar.

"[David] Greenberger is a musician – former bassist in the Boston-based Men & Volts – intimately aware of the power of music. And over the years, he’s created an amazing collection of spoken-word projects – including collaborations with Los Lobos, NRBQ’s Terry Adams, John Sebastian, members of the Sun Ra Arkestra, Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, 3 Leg Torso and the Shaking Ray Levis.

He doesn’t play an instrument on the CDs, though. He doesn’t sing. He doesn’t write the material.

He simply speaks. Reciting the words of others that he’s collected in interviews over the years, allowing his voice to be heard as the voice of the hundreds of everyday elderly people who we somehow never get a chance to hear.

The tales that he tells are in equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, and it takes a very empathetic, versatile batch of musicians to find the proper musical balance to match the stories.

Milwaukee music scene veteran Paul Cebar and his band of fellow Milwaukeeans play jump blues, jazz and R&B. And it just so happened that last year, Greenberger found himself as the artist in residence under the auspices of the Center on Aging and Community at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

The collaboration is sublime.

The music swings and clatters and echoes deep in the recesses of the mind of the listener, reinforcing anecdotes and stories pulled into the light and set in front of the microphone, often for the very first time.

This is sweet, sweet stuff."

https://web.archive.org/web/20121130111346/http://www.nippertown.com/2009/08/25/david-greenberger-and-paul-cebars-cherry-picking-apple-blossom-time/#more-8569


from 2009.