REWIND: Previously, in The Daily Times Weekend edition ...

By Steve Wildsmith
of The Daily Times Staff

In The Daily Times Weekend edition, we’ve interviewed a lot of performers over the years. Many come through East Tennessee regularly, or not long after their most recent performances.

We can’t interview them all, every time, but we can share with you some excerpts of previous interviews with these artists. Here’s a selection of previous stories we’ve done on the performers who’ll be in town this week:

EOTO

Performing at 10 p.m. Monday at World Grotto, 16 Market Square, downtown Knoxville. Performing with: Michael Kang. Tickets are $15. Call 226-2962 for more information. Online: www.eotomusic.com.

The interview: With group member Jason Hann, from the Oct. 19, 2007, edition of Weekend:

Jason Hann and Michael Travis, the duo that plays percussion for The String Cheese Incident and makes up the side project EOTO, want you to come closer.

Don’t be afraid of the spotlight. Don’t be self-conscious about dancing. That’s why they make such frenetic, hypnotic electronic-driven music anyway — for you to get up and move, man.

So let it out. Close your eyes, and forget about whether anyone is watching you.
“It’s funny, because if you go see a band that has songs and lyrics, you can sing along and bounce along and be a part of it that way,” Hann told The Daily Times this week. “It’s something we notice whenever we play — however far the light extends from where it’s shining on stage, anywhere from 3 feet to 10 feet, there’s like this invisible wall that people stay behind. They don’t want to come into the light.

“And we totally get that. Not everyone likes to show off their moves; people are very self-conscious about that. And the way the room is laid out can make a pretty big difference. If it’s nice and dark in there, it feels like you can get away from all of that stuff, and it feels like you can dance with no one watching.

“But we do see that at every show, and we look for that invisible line,” he said, chuckling. “What we do works different from rock bands. The only thing to do to our music is dance.”

EOTO (pronounced “E-oh-toe”) is live music, and it bridges the divide between the jam-loving hippies of the String Cheese scene and the club kids who would rather get out on the dance floor. The music of EOTO is derived from the deejays and computer artists that spin music for a living; the difference is that Hann and Travis create and improvise their breakbeat, trip-hop, house and drum n’ bass music every time.

Every show is different. Every song is different. It’s an incredible technical and creative challenge, Hann said, which is refreshing from what the two do as members of SCI.

“I was definitely a jazz-head at times when I was growing up, and we approach this the way Miles Davis and John Coltrane approached music each night,” he said. “I think it was Miles who said you don’t want to play the same note twice — not just in one night, but ever. And it’s very liberating for us, having to make this stuff up for hours every night. It really puts you on your toes. You start recognizing the things you get into the habit of doing every night.

“With traditional songs, you’re required to play them the same way. Sure, you can color within them and get creative, but the expectation is to be true to the song. With something like this, we can go in any direction, and it makes you very aware of your habits, and pushing yourself every night to play something different is more challenging. And when you get through to the end of the night and you’re still making stuff up and it’s still sounding good, it’s very, very rewarding.

“That works, but what also works is not having to play the same songs over and over, night after night,” he added. “We’re lucky that in String Cheese we have such a big song repertoire that we don’t get into that habit anyway, but this is many leagues beyond that.”

Cherryholmes

Courtesy of Shorefire

The Cherryholmes family includes (from left) Skip, Cia Leigh, mom Sandy Lee, dad Jere, Molly Kate and B.J. The band performs Wednesday at the University of Tennessee.

Performing at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday in the Cox Auditorium of the Alumni Memorial Building on the University of Tennessee campus, Knoxville. Call: 974-5455. Admission is $25 for the general public. Online: www.cherryholmes.com.

The interview: With Jere Cherryholmes, from the Oct. 11, 2007, edition of The Daily Times:

The members of the Cherryholmes family could have let their grief consume them.
After the death of Shelly Cherryholmes, the eldest daughter of Jere (pronounced “Jerry”) and Sandy, the couple and their four remaining children could have succumbed to the inexorable pull of depression and heartache that consumes so many of those who lose loved ones.

Instead, the family channeled their grief into music, and through hard work and a little grace, they’ve turned a family tragedy into a celebration of life.

“It was a tragedy, but it was a great thing anyway,” Jere Cherryholmes told The Daily Times this week. “It was back in 1999, and we weren’t a band — we were just a family living out in Los Angeles. Music was around, and Sandy and I played in church, but none of the kids played anything. Then in March of that year, Shelly passed away.

“About a month after that, we decided to play hooky from church one Sunday and just get out of town and go somewhere where nobody knew us, and we didn’t know them. We ended up at a bluegrass festival, and we all had a good time. On the way back, I told Sandy that we ought to get some instruments and start a family band.”

At the festival, Cherryholmes observed, music was a way of social interaction. Aside from the performers on stage, the campground and parking lot were full of amateur pickers who enjoyed what they were doing and shared a friendly connection with complete strangers.

Back in L.A., Jere began gathering up all of the used and broken instruments he could find. True to his role as the family patriarch, he assigned each of his four children an instrument — daughter Cia started off on guitar and switched to banjo a year later; son B.J. was handed a fiddle; son Skip began playing mandolin but switched a year later to guitar; and daughter Molly was asked to play fiddle as well. With Jere on upright bass and Sandy on the mandolin (and, occasionally, the claw hammer banjo), the sextet began harmonizing and teaching themselves to play bluegrass.

“We started playing around the house, and a couple of months later we were at another festival playing in the campground like everybody else does,” Jere Cherryholmes said. “There was some magic there, and we ended up having people coming up and asking us to play for money. About four months after we started, we kind of had a job.”

It’s still sort of surreal, Cherryholmes added — eight years ago, only he and his wife knew how to play an instrument. In 2005, they were named Entertainer(s) of the Year by the International Bluegrass Music Association. They recently released “Cherryholmes II” on Skaggs Family Records, and they performed last fall in Maryville as part of the Foothills Fall Festival.

“It’s kind of funny — I’ve stepped outside of myself a lot of times, but I don’t know if we’ve ever really been aware of that magic that we seemed to have stumbled upon,” he said. “Definitely, there’s times I’ve been able to look and see how talented everybody is, but it seems like we’re caught in a time warp — we’re always striving to get better, and we’re always looking up to other people and striving to be what they are; and yet, in some ways, we even exceed what they are, but we’re not aware of it.”