Lyrics -

Didn't See the Rope

Fire Fire

Baby-O

Lost Moon

 

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Cajun and mountain musicians have always understood each other, sharing a deep love for groove and melody and an aversion to gilding lilies. We love modal tunes and crooked time. We love the sounds that came from that other planet Earth - where reality wasn't polished out of music.

The Louisiana crew didn't try to cajunize James Leva's songs. All we did was play them, and join in with the heart that pours out of them. It was surprisingly easy, and immensely satisfying. If we made something new, well, that was James' plan, and he knew even better than I did how well it would work. He told me in French.

- David Greely

 

I was no more a fan of simple, elegant songs of loss than I was of any other kind, so I was startled by what came over me when I heard "Where Did You Go?" from Jones and Leva's Journey Home. Here is a man, I thought, who can get blood on the walls while singing about bird songs. And of course he wasn't singing about birds - great songwriters don't just sing about birds, they push their image through the bones of your chest until you feel perhaps a little something of the fire in the guts that Saint Teresa of Avila felt in her vision of being pierced by an angel's spear.

Maybe I'm over the top here, but this thing passing through our bones the hard way is why musicians still play, songwriters still write and listeners still listen. I'm in it for the glory myself, but still, I've noticed even in the midst of all the glory and Riviera vacations that life gets harder as we age. I guess it's just a matter of constantly updating our coping skills.

When James gets up from the floor - dusty but defiant and happy to be here with the rest of us - he writes. Others do it, but few of them can tell stories like James can. He starts with tradition - and there are several of them on this album - but he ends by putting you there, and all of a sudden you are the child in "Family Again," or the hopeful voice in "The Music's Over," both contained herein. The stories are wrapped within the organic traditions that James the musician commands so well, but in the end it's going straight in, and I never care how it got there.

- Sam Broussard

Memory Theatre

James Leva

During the Renaissance Giulio Camillo Delmino (1480-1544) a Hermetic philosopher, designed and constructed what he called a Theatre della Memoria, or Memory Theatre. Upon entering the structure, one stood on the "stage" and looked out to the symbols and images, carved from wood, which surrounded him. In addition to the images, the walls were replete with little boxes, all arranged in various orders and grades that represented the expanding history of divine thought.  the theater was an elegant mnemonic device, designed to provide the spectator with access to the totality of human knowledge. As such, it could be said that it was meant to serve the same functions as computers do in our time.

Computers do provide us access to facts and details we cannot conveniently store in our minds, but computers do not contain true Memory.  Memory is not merely a cognitive function of the brain, bat also of the heart and soul.  memory, collective or personal, is not the mere retrieval of fact, but of experience.  This conception of Memory has long been manifest in music and poetry, particularly in the oral tradition.  In most cultures music is a kind of memory that connects individuals and generations through a knowing and understanding of enormous emotional and spiritual power.  Like Camillo's Memory Theatre, traditional music is not meant to return to the past, but to serve us in the Present and Future with wisdom gained from the Past. It is a Theatre in which we may explore the mysteries of who we are, where we have been, and where we might be going. 

- James Leva, Rockbridge County, Virginia