5959 W. Brown St. Glendale, AZ FREE!

3:00 pm Sunday, Oct. 22, 2006 at Sharlot Hall Museum

415 W. Gurley St., Prescott, AZ FREE!

Accidentally Live

featuring Arizona harp & guitar duo

D-SQUARED

(Don Charles & Deb Gessner)

Available today for only $15 at CD Baby (link opens a new window) or by calling 1-800-BUYMYCD – they can accept your credit card or PayPal.

We are planning one CD Release Concert at the Glendale Library for Thursday, October 19, 2006. Details will follow in a subsequent message.

The Story

And how can this be, you ask? A couple of years ago we did a show connected with a sustainable lands exhibit by the Smithsonian at the Glendale Library. We loved the premise, thought we had a bunch of stuff that fit, and that room has always had a good feel to it – our Phoenix “Big Sky” CD release there remains one of our favorite shows. We had Kyle Harris from PlayR Recording to do live sound so we know it’s going to shimmer and we had a production team from the Glendale Cable Access Channel shooting the show in the hope of gleaning some video footage for promotional use.

It was a fun night. Much of the material for the show was brand new at the time with a few “matter of life & death” standards thrown in for good measure – all very land-connected stuff. It begins with Deb’s spacious harp & guitar instrumental, “The Thirsty Land”, then moves through “Rain”, “Sticky Thighs” and “Mama Start the Fire” to a haunting rendition of her concertina tune “In the Cool Green Shade”. At which point Don takes over with the very first performance of the “Kiwi Story” followed by the very first performance of “Kiwi Blues”. We were starting to have a lot of fun by then.

So we quiet it down with a mandola & harp instrumental called “El Dia de los Muertos”, a tune commemorating the passing of our dear friend and avid contradancer, Rissa Miller. We medley this with a song we co-wrote on one of our infamous Great Plains tours when we were pretty sure we were going to die, it’s called “Owlsong” and is our pick on the CD.

Deb follows with a gorgeous harp solo on the traditional French tune “Chateau Chervix” then does a particularly moving version of Don’s song, “High Ground”. Bette Mirgon, another recently departed friend, always requested this song causing Deb to go back and pick it up after Don quit singing it. The CD is dedicated to Rissa and Bette.

A mouthbox/banjo/harp/bodhran tune called “Stormhorses” is probably the most exciting piece on the CD, calling to mind visions of spring storms in the mountains. All that rain has to go downriver at some point so we end with “Row” and the audience helps out.

The CD runs 51 minutes, the sound is dead-on true and edited only to eliminate extraneous tuning patter.

The Rest of the Story

OK, the video doesn’t turn out because we had not paid enough attention to lighting before the show. Bummer. A couple of weeks later we’re at a birthday party for Deb where Kyle hands us a CD from the show declaring, “I think this is your next CD”. “I doubt it,” says Don, ever the optimist. “Listen to it,” Kyle insists. So we did. Kyle is often right. Happy Birthday, Deb!

Now even with a master in hand we did not have the funds available to produce the CD but we bootlegged ourselves and sent some copies out to friends and family. They responded most favorably and wondered why we didn’t have it out yet. Well … money, we said. So they sent some. Then when they asked why it still wasn’t out yet we said we have to learn how to do the graphics. And they waited patiently while we learned and that pretty much gets us to now.

The reason for telling you this is simply to point out how indebted we are to a whole slew of angels – some of whose names appear on the CD, some do not. Perhaps the person we need to thank most is the guy who humped the gear in that night to do the live sound and, unbeknownst to us, also brought his recording stuff and managed to get both of them right. Thanks, Kyle. That was quite a performance.

For years people have asked us for a live CD. Here it is … by accident. Accidentally LIVE. We are very proud of it. We hope you like it and we thank you for the interest, love and patience that you have shown us and our music. Without you, we’re just playing in the kitchen.

Thank you, Don & Deb, D-Squared

Hundreds of hours of fieldwork provided the foundation for the CD, which is produced by the Western Folklife Center’s Hal Cannon and Taki Telonidis. Cannon says of the CD, which was five years in the making:

This recording is a rare look at how people who live here, year after year, have interpreted the Grand Canyon in story and song. We don’t know of another recording like this and hope that it will be the first of a series that explores the music and stories of America’s most treasured places.