By Andrew Bryk, Friendship Community Group
This month I was lucky to sit down with Brian Junker, a Friendship resident since 1995. Junker will be performing alongside Nadine Douds at the Friendship Flower & Folk Festival colloquially known as “F4″, on May 10.
He comes to Friendship by way of Shadyside and Carnegie Mellon University, and before that, Illinois, where he did his graduate work in statistics. In his day job, he is a distinguished expert advising the government on such matters as the design of tests for the Department of Education, the LSAT, and Duolingo. We were delighted to discover we were both left-handed.
You could probably write a whole other article on Junker’s academic work, but I was speaking to him mostly to learn about his music and Pittsburgh’s folk scene. He comes from a family of musicians, some of them performers in various respects, but largely playing out of an intrinsic need to do it. Music was just something he always had in his life.
His dad played chromatic harmonica, and his mom sang, “not to perform, but in the way families sing for each other.” And while life got in the way at times, he says around 15 or 20 years ago he decided that if he didn’t start playing guitar again, “I would lose it,” and remarked on colleagues of his who wouldn’t pick up an instrument again for fear that they would not reach the heights of their younger selves.
“How sad is that?” he asked.
Junker says he’s probably not as good a guitarist as he was in college; the music is its own reward. And so he picked up a dreadnought, once the largest guitar known to humanity, and got playing. He has since sold the dreadnought in favor of an orchestra model guitar. He joked that the spouses of musicians must enforce a strict rule of “buy one, sell one,” and the dreadnought went on to have a productive career in the employ of a Point Breeze man around Thomas Street.
Pittsburgh’s folk scene is all around us. “You need to look under rocks to find it.” Jim and Louise Altes used to hold house concerts in Friendship, hosting travelling musicians and opening their living room to 20 or so people. Unfortunately, your author personally bought Jim’s house and has not (yet) reinstated this tradition. There are still house concerts elsewhere, and summer brings porch concerts at the intersection of Morningside Avenue and Hampton Street if you want to catch one.
These intimate spaces for collaboration are all over Pittsburgh. You can catch Junker most Wednesdays at the Starlite in Blawnox for open mic. He cited a number of other spots including Mondays at Mr. Smalls in Millvale, SongSpace at First Unitarian Church in Shadyside, and Calliope at the Pittsburgh Winery in the Strip District. These are places where musicians at all points in their journey can develop their sound, receive feedback, and gain experience. He also credited key individuals in this community including folks like Devin Russian, Mike Berkey, Brad Yoder, and Mirabelle Skipworth. These individuals organize shows, open mics and jam sessions where musicians can tinker with each others’ work; many are performers in their own right.
And in the collaborative spirit of this community, Junker makes contributions to the folk scene. He is affiliated with SongSpace and lends his ear as a sound mixing engineer. He sits in the audience and ensures the balance across a bluegrass ensemble – guitar, banjo, fiddle, mandolin, and cello – come through at the right levels. He also works on Art All Night, a 22-hour art festival usually located in a disused warehouse in the vicinity of Lawrenceville.
Junker has played F4 four or five times by his reckoning, sometimes with his band Joy Street alongside Susan Spangler, Deborah Brooks, David Bennett, and Jan Hamilton (some are themselves Friendship residents). The outfit could not make it to F4 this year due to scheduling issues. This year he will be performing at F4 with Nadine Douds for the first time. The two of them are working on their sound, learning each other’s style. “Nothing motivates you like a deadline,” he said.
I asked if he still gets nervous when he performs, and he said that while he’s become more comfortable over the years, he still has a little bit of nerves when he plays. “If you don’t have nerves, that’s a bad sign. No nerves means no skin in the game.”
If you would like to hear Junker’s music, you can check out brianjunkermusic.com for a full list of upcoming performances, including the schedule for Joy Street. Following F4, you can catch Brian Junker and Nadine Douds at Steamworks Creative in Gibsonia on May 31.
He also runs an art installation every year at Art All Night, which includes a rotating stage of 15-minute acts, meaning something like 80 different acts in total. Yes, they do sleep for 3 hours, and he will perform personally.
Junker explained the traditions of old-time Appalachian dance music, which are open jam sessions anywhere people can get together. You can find them at Schenley Park, East End Brewing, or the Starlite Lounge. There are somewhere between 20 and 100 standards played in this tradition. Someone takes the lead and picks a song. “Unlike bluegrass, which shows off your skill, this is communal music,” with most of the instruments playing in unison. The players talk and drink, and play, and do both at the same time, and even substitute one for the other so that the music is itself the medium of conversation. Not everyone in the group knows every song, or even the names of the songs. You have to follow along and learn as you go. “And this is how it ends;” which is when Junker kicked his foot out to show how you know to go on to the next song.
If you are interested in learning more about folk music and the arts in Pittsburgh, Junker suggested these links:
friendship-pgh.org/f4
pittsburghwinery.com
artallnight.org
uusongspace.com