Check out the story I wrote on Danville native Tom Dennehy, fellow collaborator and musical wonder.
http://www.tricornpublications.com/issue8.pdf
Bassist Matt Homiak plays with Coal Region All-Stars
5/2/10 – 6/13/10 – Reflections on the Jibberjazz concert in Schuylkill County in 2010. For photos to this story, click here.
I usually look forward to the third weekend in April for Bloomsburg’s Renaissance Jamboree, but this year I had already purchased tickets for the jam-band festival “Some Kind of Jam 5” (SKOJ5).
SKOJ5 is one of several similar concert/festival events produced by Jibberjazz.com. After moving around to several other locations in past years, SKOJ5 landed in Schuylkill County Fair Grounds in Schuylkill Haven, PA.
My main reason for going was to see friend/bassist Matt Homiak perform in two of the bands on Saturday. Matt, whom I met while attending classes at PSU Hazleton, soon became a musical comrade in the early 90s and played bass on two tracks on my debt CD Mandala. Though we have been out of touch, he remains one of the kindred musical souls that has (whether he knows it or not) had a tremendous impact on my own musical path. Left-handed, and comfortable on all manner of 4, 5 or 6-string bass (fretted or fretless), Matt is definitely among the players in my mind if I could create a supergroup of people I know.
After Mandala, we lost touch for a number of years, Matt moved to Pittsburgh and I moved to Bloomsburg. I missed Matt’s previous appearance at a Jibberjazz event, and felt terrible about it for several years. So when I found out Matt was going to be at SKOJ5, I knew I had to be there to support him. A brief jam in Pittsburgh over this past winter showed we still had a lot in common, and Facebook has allowed us to keep in touch more often.
It’s worth noting that I do not related very easily to the jam band “scene”. There’s a few reasons for this. For one thing, my own music tends to be song-based. My songs have a verse, a chorus, a bridge, etc. Jam band music is much more improvisational and open ended. Many of the groups are entirely instrumental, and even the ones with singers often don’t feature songs in the typical rock, blues or folk sense.
