Marisa Anderson 6/8/26 Spaceland

 Portland Oregon based guitarist Anderson plays the intimate front room of Spaceland for an excellent set of music. A climate and social activist, Anderson has been forging an eclectic body of work over the past fifteen years. I was enamored with her early work excavating and polishing public domain material into modern instrumental jams. Gorgeous collaborations with the drummer Jim White and fellow axe-wielder William Tyler followed. She starts her set on solo electric and some older material, a nice reading of the old blues number Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning was great. Marisa says the song has relevance in today’s world as a call to readiness. The next section of the performance pulled songs from her recent recording The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music. The title is a nod to Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music considered a Rosetta Stone for folk artists in the 60s and 70s. Smith was a kook, junkie, song collector, who traveled the world collecting field recordings, indigenous music made by amateurs to get a feel for the cultural roots of song. When Smith died, his belongings were auctioned off. Turns out the University of Oklahoma was the recipient of the detritus. Inexplicably, they had no ability to store the material and called the Bob Dylan center in Tulsa for help. Marisa wrangled some alone time with the archive and her project was born. While Harry focused on America, Marisa culled music from UnAmerican sources. She copied recordings of  900 songs and spent nearly a year just listening. She whittled the trove to a dozen songs, five of which she performed. Beautiful haunting melodies ensued. Marisa performed some on a classic resonator guitar. One from Turkmenistan, one from Pakistan, one from Afghanistan, one from Tajikistan, and a final one from Syria. She explains that the field recording from Syria left a big dent on her. Upon close listening, she said she could hear the building. In context, that building is almost certainly destroyed as are the instruments and maybe the relatives of the musicians. She closed the concert with some older tunes, one dedicated to her sister and another written for her dog. As we bear down on the 250th anniversary of our nation, it may be antithetical to revel in UnAmerican music, but I will follow Harry Smith whose eyes may have been red, but wide open.