Camerata celebrates the holiday season at home

The Boston Camerata is a pretty big deal in early music circles. It’s a Boston-based ensemble with an international reputation. In fact, the Camerata is America’s “foremost early music ensemble,” according to Le Monde, the Parisian daily. Its album “A Mediterranean Christmas,” which explores holiday musical traditions from Spain, Italy and the Middle East from 1200 to 1900, was an international bestseller when it came out in 2005. Three years later, “A Boston Camerata Christmas: Worlds of Early Christmas Music,” a three-CD set looking at similar themes in American, French and Spanish holiday celebrations, also burned up the charts. But the Camerata is way more than just rarified, early music performance. “Simple Gifts,” its collection of Shaker spirituals and chants, topped the Billboard classical charts in 1995. And when the group performed at the Classique au Vert festival in Paris last year, they didn’t play madrigals or the like. They played a program of American music: hymns, patriotic songs and dances. Two performances of that show had a combined audience of 2,300, one of the biggest audiences in Camerata history. “That’s enormous,” says Boston Camerata director emeritus Joel Cohen, an Amesbury resident. “I mean, that’s rock concert stuff.” So when Cohen and his wife, French-born singer and musicologist Anne Azéma, who became the ensemble’s director in 2008, get past the jet lag — the group toured Europe five times in 2011 — and put on a local show, something they’ve been doing for the past few years, you might expect the air to come hissing out of their tires a little, psychologically if not in performance; that the rush level after so many big shows in big venues might go down when they play in smaller venues like First Parish Church in Newbury, where the Camerata will reprise “The Brotherhood of the Star: A Hispanic Christmas 1300 to 1700” this weekend, in the group’s only North Shore appearance of the year. And that’s fine.

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Roger Ebacher: Creating a world of sounds

Most of the time, when people talk about world music (or world beat or whatever), they’re usually talking about one very specific thing, a particular style or flavor, whether it's delightfully obscure, like, say, Tuvan throat-singing or Balinese gamelan music, or maybe something less specific, like Afro-pop or Latin-influenced jazz. But when Roger Ebacher says he's got a new world beat album, chances are the Port musician is gonna throw the whole world at you, all at once, one style at a time. Which is pretty much what he does on "Airstream," the fifth album from Air Department, a duo with former Amesbury percussionist Dennis Pelletier, which, over the past few years, has been throwing together some very different sounds that jell on an emotional, if not exactly stylistic, level. Released last week, "Airstream" puts the spotlight back on the melody flute, the unique wind instrument most often associated with the multi-instrumentalist, as well as the Casio DH-100 Digital Horn, another wind instrument whose limits Ebacher has pushed the limits "beyond all reasonable expectations," as he puts it, while managing to find a cohesiveness in the music. The digital horn is also the reason this duo is able to make such a big sound.It’s a six-song collection of music with earthy grooves and deep textures. It's a little Brazilian, a little Middle Eastern — even a little Indian. It’s mostly a solo album. Scheduling and geographic issues made it difficult to collaborate with Pelletier, a former Amesbury percussionist now living in western Massachusetts, who goes back with Ebacher to the 1970s, when they played together in Timestream, a seven-piece jazz band with a punk attitude. "So I just kind of went for it, seizing the moment," he says. "That's how this one came to fruition."

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Tucker settles in with the NSJP All Stars

Crazy career that Mike Tucker has: You just never know where the Beverly saxophonist will turn up — or whom he'll be playing with. He's on the road, often out of the country, three or four months every year, sometimes stomping through Europe with red-hot soul act Robin McKelle and the Flytones, managing to slip away just long enough to play the Toulouse Jazz Festival with Mike Tucker Organ Trio, one of the dozen of bands he plays in or leads — a slight exaggeration there, but only slight. Or in Japan, where he tours — and teaches — with jazz trumpeter Tiger Okoshi, a bud from Berklee. Or suddenly packing his bags for Vienna, for three unexpected fill-in dates with Gansch and Roses, the seriously entertaining Austrian "little big band." Or playing in Rio with Mingus Bingus, the Brazilian version of his regular trio — playing the music of jazz icon Charles Mingus, natch. Or, much closer to home, when schedules jibe, you might find him sitting in with Dub Apocalypse, the experimental dub band with musicians from John Brown's Body and Morphine, among others, tricking out his tenor with electronics to create a wild new sound. Or, these days, playing with Classic Headshaft, a back-to-the-future incarnation of the old Dodge Street Bar & Grill house band, whose rotating membership represents the cream of the North Shore. The travel? Yeah, it gets to him, especially these days, but it goes with the territory. "Local gigs don't pay what being on the road pays," Tucker says. Or get you the kind of numbers you get in Europe. Over there, you'll get maybe 3,000 people in a theater. Here? Not so much. "It's all part of being a musician," he says. "It comes with the job title."

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Jozef Nadj: Hitting all the right notes

Jazz violinist Jozef Nadj’s got his funk on. He’s moving, grooving, despite the fact that he’s still getting used to real time after a trip back home, his first home, to Central Europe. So he rolls out of bed at the ungoldly hour of 5 in the morning, still hobbling around the house, nursing a foot injury from a pick-up soccer game, which delayed his return stateside by almost a week, leaving him barely enough time to prepare for the first day of classes at The Musical Suite, where the Lynn resident has taught for three years. He puts on some Maceo Parker and shakes off the cobwebs. Not that the violinist, who brings his band, the Jozef Nadj Fusion System, to the Firehouse next week, is especially heavy into the funk thing. Fact is, Nadj, whose name rhymes with "lodge," could, and would, play pretty much anything, as long as he finds something intriguing at its core, some challenge, something interesting to latch onto, to explore, an attitude perfectly illustrated by the classically trained musician’s two current, competing projects: the first, a rock album of original music somewhere in the vicinity, musically, of his favorite bands from back in the day: Guns N’ Roses, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica — itself a significant departure from JNFS’s 2009 debut, "Digital World," which finds him in the neighborhood of Jean Luc Ponty (natch) and Miles Davis (the fusion years). And then there’s the other project, an album of tunes by Charlie Parker. By a band that does not have a tenor player — any saxophone, in fact. Yeah, Bird, the guy who all but invented the instrument. A god in jazz circles. Untouchable, unapproachable. An album with violin as its main weapon, its ax of choice. Granted, a hopped-up violin. Electric, with all the gear, pedals. Which adds another layer of controversy for purists.

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Amazing journey: Dunphy, Epomeo, the Dreadnaught

Melissa Dunphy is a classical composer with, um, some unusual influences, touchstones, like her stubborn, lingering obsession with Nine Inch Nails, which led her to re-imagine NIN’s “The Frail,” which she named “Variations on a Theme by Trent Reznor” and which she arranged as an Elizabethan madrigal, of course. And this is probably the most “normal,” the most standard repertoire thing she’s done lately. She’s 32, an Australian transplant. She’s a fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, a PhD candidate in composition, on a Benjamin Franklin Fellowship. She’s currently working on an opera based on the writings of Ayn Rand. Not the (yawn) important philosophical underpinnings of her fiction, what the Russian writer called objectivism. No, she’s zeroing in on Rand’s nasty, completely over-the-top depictions of sex that read like rape fantasy, or, in the case of “Fountainhead” hot-to-trot protagonists Howard Roark and Dominique Francon, sexual assault committed during the course of a home invasion. “I’m amazed that no one has made an opera out of it yet,” she says. Then, pausing, she adds, “Hopefully I won’t get sued.” 

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It ain't easy: Benefit concert leads to CD

Nothing worth a damn comes easy, does it? Just ask Gary Shane. The North Shore rocker, a fixture on the local music scene for, like, evah, decided to put together something for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, a benefit concert. Raise some bucks for the organization, you know? About time, right? I mean, the guy has been living with MS since the mid-1980s, when his band, The Detour, broke with the monster hit "Shadow World," and over the past few years has organizaed multi-band benefits for disaster relief in Japan  and Indonesia, so it makes sense that he would do somethng a little closer to home, so to speak. So, in April, Shane put together a bill that combined local scenesters like EJ Ouelette and Crazy Maggy and Wade Dyce and Imojah and the Skylight Band with the crowd from Tavern at the End of the World, the Charlestown venue, Natalie Flanagan and Trusty Sidekick, as well as the current versions of Shane's Detour and Silvertones bands and the Heygoods, a country-soaked duo featuring Dave Champagne, who goes back with Shane to the pre-Detour days, who played with Boston blues legends, and Morphine prototype, Treat Her Right. And, for whatever reason, and we're not pointing fingers, the benefit didn't do quite as well as everyone had hoped, pulling in only $800. Which, although more than a little bit disappointing, financially, especially considering the amount of work that went into putting the thing together, did help finance a live recording from the show, which will also benefit MS. And that's when everything started falling off the rails and, unexpectedly, opened the door for something truly special.

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Fan-tastic: Bruisers back together ... for one night

Face it, it’s a fact of life. Sooner or later, you’ll have to drive too far and pay far too much money to see a band — you know, someone from back in the day, one of those bands that struck a nerve, that makes your heart go thumpa-thumpa still, that makes you grit your teeth and  feel those feelings again, the ones that made you feel alive, lighting you up in a way you barely remember now, with the mortgage and health insurance to deal with, right? Even if you weren’t really there, like Dropkick Murphys frontman Al Barr intimated in an interview about, among other things, the Bruisers, the Portsmouth/Newburyport punk band he founded back in 1988, a band that bashed its way out of regional obscurity with a brutal, punishing, as-hard-as-you-can-get street punk sound, a band that built a name for itself here and a virtual cult-status in western Europe. Which is not to say they ever achieved mass popularity of any sort, because they didn't. Despite the legion of fans the Bruisers have now. Which was Barr’s point exactly when he was talking about the last Bruisers reunion. Which was seven years ago, at this point, when the band filled the Roxy, drawing close to 1,000 fans — unheard of in the day, like five times what the band would get, on a good day, back in the day. ”It's cool to like a band when they don't exist anymore, as long as they're not popular," he said earlier this year in an interview for the gimmenoise blog.

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It's in with the new at NCMF

What's new with the Newburyport Chamber Music Festival, the intimate classical music series with a rock and roll attitude, as it digs into its second decade? Plenty, says NCMF Artistic Director David Yang in an e-mail exchange from Calabria, Italy, in the Bay of Naples, where the violist chills, so to speak, every summer before the Port music series kickoff, at Festivale d’alla Musica da Camera d’Ischia, a week-long chamber music festival and intensive workshop where Yang has been a coach and performer for years — a cool retreat, he says,  but “hot as hell, actually,” he says, “but a dry heat,”  not that dry heat is much of a comfort. New? There will be new players, in the festival quartet, which will feature two new violinists, and at large, with two hired guns in the house to perform the much-loved Brahms Sextet, among other pieces. There will be new venues, as organizers reach across the river into Carriagetown for its first-ever non-Port concert, a performance benefiting the steeple restoration fund for the historic Union Congregational Church, as well as an open rehearsal at the 14 Cedar Street Artist Studios.  As in the past, there will be a world premiere, another piece highlighted by local texts, this one with Port poet Rhina Espaillat’s  “Three Tenses of Light,” inspired by the paintings of Ipswich artist Andrew Anderson-Bell, which will be lit up by Philadelphia composer Andrea Clearfield, who composed  it specifically for the Port-based  Candlelight Chorale, a 30-voice chorus. Which is certainly new for NCMF.

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The (classical) beat goes on at NCMF

You never really know what the Meehan/Perkins Duo is going to throw at you, or even what instruments they might be playing, until the program is in your hand — and even that might not help because the music tends to be, well, either a bit obscure, or so aggressively modern that it’s not even on the pop culture radar. The music could be anything from Joanna Beyer, the grand dame of American percussion music, or, for that matter, anyone from that circle of, sadly, largely unknown composers from the ‘30s, to new music guru/composers like David Lang, best known for his work with Bang on a Can All Stars, or the “superstars” of new music, people like Steve Reich or John Cage, both of whom will be represented when the duo pulls into town this weekend to kick off the second decade of the Newburyport Chamber Music Festival with a slightly stripped-down concert at St. Paul’s Church, a decision based on the size of the venue — or, more accurately, "how big of a box it is, how many of my toys I can fit on the stage," says Todd Meehan.  The instruments could be marimbas, could be gongs. Could be congas, could be flowerpots. Could be anything they can get their hands on. Could, in fact, be their hands. The duo has a “big tent” view of percussion. Anything is possible. 

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The funny thing about signal2noise?

Doug Blair and John Anthony hope to bump up
the signal2noise profile ... well, maybe after Blair
gets back from the 30th anniversary W.A.S.P. tour.

Funny thing about this band? There’s lots, actually. Like the name, signal2noise, with its stubborn insistence on the lower case. Or, more significantly, how frontman Doug Blair who, since 2006, has been playing that mad, custom-made guitar with the buzzsaw blade and lasers that track his fretwork with W.A.S.P. — that in-your-face metal band with a perfect PMRC pedigree, a band that has been scaring the dickens out of American mommies and daddies for three decades — ever ended up leading an essentially progressive classic rock act, heavy but “Beatles-ish underneath,” in the first place. Or how s2n (hmmm, the name even looks funny when it’s abbreviated) started out as an ambitious, if ultimately, neglected side project of not one, but two bigger acts, shunted aside before getting out of the musical gate. Which, and this is kind of funny, may have been a good thing, the delays giving the band a chance “to develop, to percolate,” says Blair. Or, how it started out as a power trio, facing all the problems associated with that form, like trying to fill the space after the guitarist takes off to solo, but fixes the “problem” by morphing into a power duo. Or how s2n has put out one album, “Fight Mental Illness,” and has done most of the grunt work for a follow-up, but has no firm plans about what to do with the final product when it’s done: Maybe doing it the old-fashioned way, maybe linking directly to metal news websites, getting the music directly to the fans. 

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Babes in Boyland: Looking at women in jazz, pop

This is a tale of two photographs. This first shows a fresh-faced hippie chick with flowing hair and clothes, straight outta Left Coast counter-cultural lore, stubbornly naive, still not broken by the world. She's got an acoustic guitar. You can almost hear the soundtrack of the Great Folk Scare in the background. The second, taken in 1991, about a decade later, shows the Bangkok babe, a jazz singer, a girl singer, as they used to call Rosemary Clooney, wearing a slinky black sequined cocktail dress and an upswept hairstyle. She’s surrounded by a trio of local musicians. It’s taken at the Bamboo Bar in Bangkok, in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, where guys like Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham used to hang, in another era, where she played four sets a night, six nights a week during a seven-month run. Very different scenes, worlds, right? So, then, what happened, Celia Slattery? “Some very serious drastic changes," says the Boston-based singer/actress, who will bring “First Ladies of Jazz and Pop: Voices of Change,” her one-woman show, to the Actors Studio this week.

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Look, it's Tiger Saw. Wow, it's been a while.

Tiger Saw will play its first local show in seven years
March 24 at the Firehouse.  Photo courtesy Jon Donnell.

Well, anybody hoping to dig into a heaping helping of fresh, interesting news about Tiger Saw, information in advance of the band’s March 24 show at the Firehouse … well, sorry man, you gonna be disappointed because there’s not a whole lot happening with Tiger Saw right now. No tour on the immediate horizon, no new records since “Nightingales,” ten tunes about, or, at least, inspired by the night, and a return to the band’s slowcore/sadcore roots in late 2010, and, so far, no plans to head back to the studio any time soon. Yeah, an unusually slow period for the band, which constantly shifting collective that has zigged and zagged, musically, from the beautiful, hushed, slowcore sound of its early days to indie pop singalongs and basement over the course of its decade-long, 1,000-plus concert existence. Because, truth be told, Tiger Saw founder Dylan Metrano has been dogging it a bit, spending most of the winter on the road, in warmer climes, enjoying some down time, and his friends, and the calendar is quickly coming up on his standing date, his pause/refresh time, when he hides out on Monhegan Island, the artist colony outside Boothbay Harbor. Or, at least, that’s one way of looking at it.

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Mara Flynn back in the local spotlight

Singer-songwriter Mara Flynn performs with Tiger Saw
March 24 at the Firehouse.

It's not like Mara Flynn fell off the face of the earth. She's been around, over there, at the Tannery, running Acting Out Productions for the past decade. And it's not like she made a conscious decision to walk away from music, from the stage. Not at first, anyhow, although it almost ended up that way, but not because she had grown tired of it. Life just took over. Her focus turned to family, the day-to-day and, after a while, she just didn’t feel the need to pick up the guitar. Maybe once a year, when she would have to play camp songs at summer theater workshops for kids, but that’s it. And the stage? That would have been way too much of a commitment, with rehearsals and performances and all. All things considered, life was good and, just when things started getting comfortable, real life came tumbling down on her, big time — a health crisis, an ectopic pregnancy that nearly killed her. Which got her attention. And, after dealing with the physical realities, left her holding the existential bag. She had to figure out what all of this meant, which, for Flynn, meant creatively. She started writing, not for anybody in particular, just writing to process, writing from “a place of deep grief and solitude,” she says.

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Strange Brew: Band reveals new drummer

That's the guy, on the right: Aaron Zaroulis.

It didn’t look or feel like a Monday night at the Grog, especially one in the dead of winter. The place was packed, the base coming out hard to give The Brew a proper sendoff for its national tour to support “A Garden in the Snow” and “Light from Below,” the first two discs from “Triptych,” an insanely ambitious three-disc unboxed boxed set.  Final tweaks for the third are going on now, for "Hard Enough to Break,” the third album, for those of you keeping score. By this point, everyone had heard the big news. Kelly Kane, the Brew brother, charter member, who had been with the band since the beginning, fresh out of high school, back to the Blue Fungus Brew days more than a decade ago, would not be joining the band on this stomp through the country, and, in fact, had played his last date with the band, and would be hanging up his drumsticks for a while. Why? Sorry, no big scoop here. No personality clashes or creative differences or pilfering or girlfriend stealing. Simple economics. For an emerging band, touring requires a financial as well as a personal and artistic commitment. It costs money, in other words, and when you have a mortgage to deal with, taking off a month and hitting the road, bringing the music to the people can be, well, let’s just say that sometimes the romance of the road sometimes bumps up against some ugly realities. 

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Miller time: Busy cellist back ... with some surprises

Kristen Miller kicks off Women's History Month at the Actors Studio.

Been a busy time for Kristen Miller, even by the Georgetown cellist’s crazy standards, all quite possibly explained by her previously undisclosed and apparently unquenchable jones for tea, although, granted, she did hint about that as far back as 2003, on "Later that day," her debut album: The past two years have been steeped in creative work.  She's released two albums — “Walk,” a distinctive solo release that mixes world beat rhythms and Eastern melodies with a rock attitude and a beat sensibility, something she calls "cellobrew," and “Winter Loves Company,” a collaboration with Port sound guru Tom Eaton that mixes cello and piano with a Windham Hill sensibility. She’s also written soundtracks for three Maya Deren films, fascinating, mesmerizing silent films that are stubbornly interior, with little in the way of linear plot, and even toured with them. She's also created an original score for “No More Gloomy Sundays,” a short film by Robert Newton documenting the history of the WPA murals in Gloucester, and kept up her own busy performance  schedule. And toured with Ken Bonfield, a Gloucester-based multi-instrumentalist who, like Miller, has developed a style that's difficult to pin down, combining elements of folk, Celtic, classical and blues for acoustic guitar.  And, considering the creative workload, Miller has decided to take a short break from writing,  to catch her breath and regroup before the next big thing, whatever that might be — and if she knows, she’s not telling. But it will be only a break of a sort, seeing how she’s got session work lined up with Liz Mitchell, Conor O’Brien and What Time is it, Mr. Fox? And, before that happens, she’s got something else going on, something that incorporates all the disparate elements in her work, and throws a couple more into the creative stew, for the Actors Studio celebration of Women’s History Month, four weekend performances putting the spotlight on wimmins. And she’s happy to report that a few days ago, when she sat down for, errr, a cup of tea, she “realized how insane that is.” Which, of course, is the first step toward recovery.

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Blair ax project: Making guitars, making a racket

W.A.S.P. guitarist Doug Blair and his Blade guitar.

OK, class: settle down. Hey. I. Said. Settle. Down! Now! … OK, that's better. This week in Port Rules: Our Impact on the History of Rock and Roll, we're going to look at "Babylon's Burning," a video from W.A.S.P.'s 2009 album "Babylon," That, of course, that's the infamous Blackie Lawless center stage, playing bass and singing. Nope, no mistaking that melodic howl. He's the only original member of the band, which is celebrating three decades of scaring and creeping out American mommies and daddies with his rude and crude lyrics, adding fuel to the obnoxious fire, especially during the early years, with his in-your-face antics, like throwing raw meat into the audience or firing up the old flame-throwing or buzz-sawing codpiece or using bound-and-gagged women as props. Cute, eh? All of which earned the rockers, who emerged from the metal stew with bands like Motley Crue and Quiet Riot in the early ‘80s, a big old target on their backs from self-righteous censors like the so-called Parents Music Resource Council. And, in the spirit of the PMRC, a word of warning about the video: Try not to focus on the ridiculous Raiders’ T Blackie’s wearing, or, for that matter, the Raiders emblem on his bass. Poor guy's from the West Coast and doesn't know any better. And, to be fair, the Raiders did manage to win as many games as they lost this year — finishing the season a full game better than the bottom-dwellers. Which is playoff-worthy in that division. Besides, this time the spotlight's not on Blackie. We're looking at the guy stage left. That's Doug Blair, a Newburyport resident for about a decade and a three-time member of the band. That's him playing the crazy-looking guitar, which, like the guitarist, has roots in the city.

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American classical music finds its voice, old school

Strictly speaking, there's still nearly three decades left of the so-called American Century, the somewhat jingoistic phrase coined in 1941 by Henry Luce, the American Century's first multimedia mogul, to spur on the good old USA to dominate the world stage in politics, business and culture, not necessarily in that order, just the way God wanted it. But, truth be told, it looks like our century has passed in everything but the cultural realm and, while we may make it to the finish line of our designated time, we will probably be limping and hurting and gasping for breath, impressing no one, save for the cheerleaders for the power de jour and its hangers-on. So, the Boston-based collective Amercan Century Music seems a little unstuck in time, historically speaking, seeing how much, if not most, of its programming comes from before our self-proclaimed time — and far more benign, referring to the period when American classical music found its own voice, but not shouting at people with it. In fact, all three pieces in "Voices of the Early American Century," the ensemble’s second performance in Newburyport, were created and performed before Luce ever shot off his big mouth. About that, anyhow.

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The Camerata's gonna get medieval on your holiday

... and speaking of cool holiday music, the kind probably won't be subliminally torturing you in elevators or department stores,the Boston Camerata is about to get all medieval on your holiday. Just back from a tour of northern France and Belgium in November, the early music group will perform “A Medieval Christmas,” a program of song and poetry from France, Provence, England, Spain and Germany performed by a virtuoso consort of voices and instruments, including harps, vielle, lute, recorder and flute. Selections range from a very early Hebrew chant and 10th century Spanish Sybill’s prophesy to 12th-century Aquitanian (French) tales of the Wild and Foolish Virgins, to 13th- and 14th-century English and 15th-century Dutch songs. Program notes include contemporary English translations of the texts and lyrics, much of which will be quite familiar to the audience.The only north of Boston performance will take place at 3:30 p.m. Dec. 11 at First Parish Church, 20 High Road, Route 1A, Newbury. The performance will be recorded by WGBH for a commercial release ... well, as commercial as medieval music gets.

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A rockin' Christmas with Zuni Fetish Experiment

.... And speaking of free stuff and Christmas spirit and all the rest of that holiday hockum, here's something to jump on before the season completely overwhelms you: It's a haunting from holidays past, holiday music for those of us who can't stand holiday music, or the holidays, especially, an album guaranteed to put the affect back into your seasonal disorder. Or get rid of it. Or something. It's "In the Christmas Spirit," 30 minutes of ramped-up seasonal selections from Zuni Fetish Experiment, Jeff Morris' gritty, in-your-face, improvisational power trio that wreaked sonic havoc at the nexus of jazz and rock, a kind of no-commercial-potential, Miles-meets-Jimi vibe, a band that morphed into the far more radio-friendly Death & Taxes after clearing venues for several sizzling years. Morris, the Port guitarist probably best known for his work with the Bruisers, blew town last year and set up shop in Chicago. He's put up "In the Christmas Spirit," and lots of other goodies, online for free download. But, given the clock ticking down on the most profitable, I mean the most wonderful time of the year, we're gonna focus on "In the Christmas Spirit," an album that teaches us the greatest Christmas lesson of all: that Christmas music doesn't have to be syrup, schmaltz and pseudo-solemnity, that it doesn't have to be endured, that it can be fun, that it can be smart, that it can sizzle.  

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Miller, Bonfield and the sounds of the season

Kristen Miller and Ken Bonfield perform 'Soulful Strings' Dec. 4.

Kristen Miller is a cellist who has been turning the instrument on its head for years, mixing hypnotic African rhythms and Eastern melodies with rock attitude, vocabulary and gear. Ken Bonfield is a Gloucester-based multi-instrumentalist who has developed a style that's difficult to pin down, combining elements of folk, Celtic, classical and blues for acoustic guitar to create a mash he calls, for better or worse, fojazzical. They've both got Christmas albums out: Bonfield’s subdued, introspective “WinterNight,” coming out more than a decade ago, and Miller’s 2010 “Winter Loves Company,” a collaboration with sound guru Tom Eaton, a sweet mix of cello and piano with a Windham Hill sensibility. Both include fresh arrangements of traditional carols as well as original seasonal compositions. They'll be playing a holiday show together next week, but, given their idosyncatic musical histories, it is unlikely that their “Soulful Strings,” show at the First Religious Society Unitarian Universalist  Church in Newburyport next week will be your traditional rum-pa-pa-pum kind of show, but it’s gonna be nice.

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