Will the 9:30 Club’s new quasi-record label prove successful? Did every media shop in town cover lone client Justin Jones’s invitation-only CD release party last night? Well, there’s your answer. You might recall club co-owner and Jones sugardaddy Seth Hurwitz telling City Paper this last month:

The goal of this has never been making money on the label. It’s about getting Justin’s music out there for people to hear. It’s about turning him into a live act.

Jones was tardy to his own party, according to one tweeting attendee, alias Karon. “Dear no name having your ep release at 930 – you were supposed to go on 37 minutes ago. Way to early in career to be a prima donna,” she furiously typed on a tiny computer that fits in her pocket. But Jones eventually won Karon over: “He may have started late but he put on a hell of a good show… I think @katyray & @mccanner would like.”

Will the rest of the world like? Time will tell.

MOVING ON:

The H Street Festival is tomorrow! Weather report says sunny and 83—perfect day to listen to live music, tour the Atlas Performing Arts Center, attend an art opening at Studio H, and stock up on Uncle Brutha’s hot sauce!

Here’s some other arts stuff going on this weekend! And here’s a shitload more for the rest of the fall!

If gorgeous street festivals aren’t your thing, you could always jump back a few letters to E Street go see that painfully fake Joaquin Phoenix-Casey Affleck mockumentary at Landmark. Or you could hold out for that painfully real Davis Guggenheim documentary about public schools, Waiting for Superman, which premiered here yesterday (question: are the Flaming Lips getting royalties on the title?). The director tacitly chided D.C. voters for effectively expelling Superwoman from the city government.

This one goes out to DCPS. Have a good weekend!

Photo courtesy of essgee51.

Last month, the 9:30 Club announced that it had formed a record label—9:30 Records, natch!—and that it had signed Justin Jones, the local altish-country singer/songwriter who also tends bar at the venue. The first release? Jones' Little Fox EP, which he'll be selling at a free show tonight at the club. It'll double as a fete for the fledgling label, which, as I wrote recently, isn't exactly a label as we understand the term. That's OK! But it tells you something about the industry.

But what about the music?

Well, that's also OK. I'm admittedly not the intended audience of Jones' earnest, sorta-ragged roots pop—I like alt-country that's damaged and/or arty—but one of Little Fox's songs has managed to burrow itself into my brain. That'd be "Need a Little More Time," in which he address a father who abandoned him, a mother he doesn't blame for his shortcomings,  a sister he's pulling for, and a brother he's counting on:

LISTEN: Justin Jones – "Need a Little More Time"

Doors open at 7 p.m. and the show is free. You can RSVP at Jones' website.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Justin Jones, left, and Seth Hurwitz

Ask Seth Hurwitz about how wise it is to start a record label, and his answer is surprising: “This has zero to do with making money,” says Hurwitz, the successful 9:30 Club co-owner, chairman of concert promoter I.M.P., legal adversary of the concert behemoth Live Nation, and now head of the nascent 9:30 Records, home to the Virginia alt-country singer-songwriter Justin Jones. “The goal of this has never been making money on the label,” Hurwitz says. “It’s about getting Justin’s music out there for people to hear. It’s about turning him into a live act.”

In that, Hurwitz may not be a typical label owner. And although he’s been Jones’ manager for several years, he’s really more his patron. “I don’t expect to make a dime on this,” Hurwitz says. “I’m not going to take a [manager’s] cut if he’s losing money. We’ll hopefully get to that someday.”

And 9:30 Records, which announced its existence last week, isn’t a typical label, or perhaps even one at all. It owns Jones’ music, and is fronting the capital to release his The Little Fox EP this month, and likely a full-length album next year. But many of the other typical label duties—sales, some of the marketing, radio promotion, new media—will fall on Thirty Tigers, a Nashville-based “aggregator” company that sells much of the infrastructure of record labels without their creative input, and other companies with which it works. The club's booking manager and the president of 9:30 Records, Lisa White, writes that she'll mostly coordinate logistics.

Thirty Tigers won’t manufacture or distribute the actual CDs—for the former, it put Hurwitz and his staff in touch with a handful of CD-manufacturing companies who competitively bid. And while Thirty Tigers is undoubtedly one alternative to the major-label model, it also relies on it: Thirty Tigers and companies like MRI and Rocket Science put their music in physical and online stores using RED, Sony’s independent music distributor.

Thirty Tigers boasts about 30 active labels under its umbrella—most of which have only one artist, who mostly fall somewhere along the spectrum of alt-country, Americana, and roots music. The most successful act is probably the Avett Brothers, the strained-voice alt-folk outfit from North Carolina that released several albums through the Thirty Tigers-affiliated Ramseur Records and are now signed to the Columbia Records imprint American Recordings. Ramseur has a roster of nine bands and is ostensibly a full-service label and management company—it’s hardly scandalous, but you wouldn’t notice that Ramseur outsources some of what it does. “[Thirty Tigers] is the kind of company that tends to fly under the radar,” says Glenn Peoples, senior editorial analyst at Billboard. “People in the industry might know about these, but they’re kind of invisible to consumers.”

Following a decade in which record sales plummeted, major labels shrank, and the sheer number of acts selling recorded music seems to have ballooned, aggregators may be the future. At the very least, says Thirty Tigers President David Macias, they’re well-positioned in the current landscape: The company is far leaner than a major—it has nine employees—and is likely as adept at selling and promoting music as a successful indie label.

Here’s how it works. Hurwitz and Macias wouldn’t share specifics of the deal, but Macias says arrangements usually involve the label paying Thirty Tigers about 20 percent of its gross—the cost of a typical distribution deal—plus an additional 10 percent or less for the other services. “You’re keeping 70-75 percent of revenue,” Macias says. “If you’re selling 20,000, you’re grossing 160,000 probably, so all of a sudden, after they pay us and they pay [for other expenses], then all of a sudden they’ve got money and they keep ownership over their assets...It gives them infrastructure that I think allows them to earn a living at 10 or 20 thousand units.” Macias says a band can break even selling around 7,500 albums.

Jones won’t have to worry about many other expenses yet. His manager works gratis, and he currently self-books, although Hurwitz says they’re looking for a booking agent.

Undoubtedly, having the 9:30 stamp on his music is beneficial to Jones, who is well-known in the area’s alt-country scene and is also a bartender at the club. Do you know any other bartender-musicians who were the subject of a half-dozen news articles last week trumpeting their forthcoming record? Jones got the press via 9:30’s announcement about its record label.

The success of Thirty Tigers and its one-act labels suggests a musical landscape in which consumers’ attentions are more fickle, labels’ curatorship matters less, and whatever manages to quickly catch enough ears wins.

Thirty Tigers has been around for nine years, and Peoples says other similar companies existed earlier. Macias says business is good, and that the company is adding acts at a fast clip: He says about a quarter of Thirty Tigers’ 2010 releases are from artists that are new to the company. In some cases, a band’s music will convince Thirty Tigers to work with an act; other times it’s the involvement of a third party, like Hurwitz, although Macias says he’s a fan of Jones’ music. But even if Jones tanks, Macias says, Thirty Tigers would still put out more music from 9:30 Records. (Hurwitz told TBD.com last week that he had no immediate plans to sign more acts.)

There’s an almost democratic potential in aggregators: They make what’s effectively self-releasing more efficient. But in some cases they could dilute, for better or for worse, the layer of filtration provided by labels. Hurwitz says he brought Jones’ music to a number of labels and grew frustrated. “‘No’ to me means try harder,” he says. “The more I got turned down—‘we like it, we don’t love it’—that drives you crazy.” I asked him if that means Jones’ music—a ragged, melodic roots pop—doesn’t have much mileage. “I think after 30 years, I know talent,” he says. “I don’t like bullshit—as a promoter I put on plenty of bullshit, but that doesn’t mean I like it. But when I recognize a genuine talent, I always believe that’s going to go somewhere.”

Jones says all he can do is hope for the best. “There’s no real model that works,” he says. “If there was, everyone would do it. I’ve been talking to Seth about starting a label for a couple years. Now I feel like no matter what, at least you’re in control of what happens. To me that is a better model.”

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

A Rockville High School bagpiper, whose group is performing at the festival.

Last year, Phillips Saylor discovered that the Washington Folk Festival is not the venue for “orthopolytonal banjo singing.”

Saylor, the inventor of that technique and the frontman of the D.C.-based band Stripmall Ballads, had been asked to share the stage with three other musicians as part of a songwriters’ workshop at last year’s festival at Glen Echo Park in Glen Echo, Md. He brought his amplifier—a four-watt, 1950s tube amp, which he uses with a homemade guitar with custom pickups—but didn’t tell organizers beforehand that he planned to use an electric instrument at the songwriters’ workshop, where performers customarily only play acoustically.

“I was looked at like I was E.T.,” Saylor, 31, says. “The stage manager told me I couldn’t use [the amp].” An argument ensued. The other performers at the workshop played their guitars into microphones, which were plugged into amplifiers, says Saylor, and he did not see the difference. And electric instruments are sometimes allowed at the festival. “I figured they hired me because they like what I do and they like the way I sound,” he says. “And I showed up to do what I do and sound the way I sound, and they got mad at me.”

Saylor did plug in but decided to forego any sonic experimentation. Still, the Folklore Society of Greater Washington, which organizes the festival, did not ask him back to perform this year.

What happened to Saylor was hardly a scandal, but it illustrates a local divide: That while for decades the Folklore Society has celebrated traditional forms like contra- and English country dancing, various folk music genres, and storytelling, its summer festival has made little room for the District’s burgeoning indie-folk scene. Here’s one possible reason: The festival will celebrate its 30th anniversary noon to 7 p.m. Saturday and Sunday at Glen Echo, and its leadership—and, by some accounts, its audience—is aging.

“If you look at the heads of people, and all the gray hairs, you’ll notice a demographic change,” says Charlie Baum, 56, who has been on the festival’s committee for just shy of a decade. “There’s a cohort that got involved in folk music when they were in college in the ’60s, the ’70s, and they’ve become grandparents instead of college students.”

There are a lot of families,” says Brad Park, 37, who played the festival last spring with Greasy String, a local old-time string band. “But in terms of 18- to 30-year-olds, unless they have kids, there aren’t a lot of [them] there.”

All this raises a question: Should the Washington Folk Festival open its arms to new extensions of folk music? And in order to replenish its ranks with younger blood, will it have to?

While some festival committee members deny that the fest’s audience is graying, all acknowledge that the committee itself skews boomer. Some, including festival co-director Mia Gardiner, have been on the programming committee since the first festival, in 1980. “It is hard to find ‘new blood’ for the committees,” Gardiner says in an e-mail. Last year, the committee took on Maureen Andary, 27, and Jonny Grave, 22, both musicians in D.C., who have made an effort to generate buzz about the Washington Folk Festival among their friends in the District.

But the festival, which is free and does not pay performers, remains unknown to many young adults in the city who make and listen to music descended from American folk forms.

Among them is Justin Jones, 29, the Virginia alt-country singer-songwriter who is one of the Washington area’s more prominent ambassadors of Americana. “I’m a local artist, I’ve been here for eight years, and I’ve never heard of this thing,” he said when contacted by Washington City Paper. Jones then texted three local musician friends—Josh Reed, John Bustine, and Lissy Rosemont—none of whom had heard of the festival, either.

A fourth young musician, Laura Tsaggaris, had heard of the Washington Folk Festival—in fact, she has played it for the past three years.  Tsaggaris runs a songwriters’ showcase at F Street NE’s Ebenezers Coffeehouse that functions very similarly to the workshop where Saylor and his amp were stymied last year. But she says there is very little overlap between the denizens of downtown songwriters’ circles and house shows and the attendees of the Washington Folk Festival—or any of the Folklore Society’s events.

As far as the Glen Echo event goes, Tsaggaris says that young city folk might be lured to Maryland by familiar, local names. “To get people interested in [traditional folk], you first of all have to get them there,” she says. “How do you get them there? You get the hot acts that are playing at the Black Cat and have them play unplugged. You have them present their songs in a way that touches the tangents of folk.”

But then there is the question of to what extent the fest actually wants to become a destination for 20-somethings. “There could be some concerns if you really pull in a lot of college kids, possible issues with drinking, issues with security, issues with behavior,” says Park. Drinking is not allowed without a permit at Glen Echo, a former amusement park that is now a multipurpose arts center co-run by the National Park Service.

Gardiner, the festival’s co-founder, says despite the decision to add Andary and Grave to the programming committee for “their fresh perspective and ideas,” she is confident that there are enough young people involved in the festival already—recently graduated sound techs, children of Folklore Society acolytes, certain performers—to pass on the tradition to the next generation. Any young city dwellers who hop a ride to Glen Echo because of Andary and Grave’s outreach, she says, would be “a bonus.”

There is also the question of whether the programming committee cares to give ground to musical forms they do not consider “folk,” notwithstanding whatever shorthand the press has chosen to use. “The pop media doesn’t really understand folk,” says Mary Cliff, current president of the Folklore Society and producer of the show Traditions on American University’s WAMU radio station. “Folk does not equal acoustic,” Cliff says. “It’s the substance of the material.”

Still, Cliff admits that folk is a “moving target.” She points out that bluegrass was not accepted as folk music when Bill Monroe invented it by mixing Irish folk music with American blues in the early 1940s. Bluegrass bands can be found all over the bill for this year’s Washington Folk Festival.

To its credit, the programming committee has expanded its bill in recent years to include different and new styles of folk music. There is a lot of world music on the bill. And this year, for the first time ever, the festival will feature a hip-hop artist: Chris “Christylez” Bacon. And yet local folk-inspired bands such as the psych-folk These United States and the folk-rock Junior League Band remain off the programming committee’s radar.

Members of the programming committee contacted by City Paper cited various criteria they use when evaluating the folkieness of a band: whether the music is participatory, whether it is the type played at life-cycle events such as weddings and funerals, and whether it tells stories that are deeply connected to cultural mores, among others.

But the process by which the Washington Folk Festival vets performers for folkieness—one member of the programming committee plays a few songs for the rest and they decide either to invite the act or not—seems to be largely based on intuition. “You avoid discussing it at length, because it’s almost impossible to define,” says Baum, one of the committee members. “You sort of know it when you hear it.”

“Who knows,” says Gardiner. “When I figure out what indie folk is, I might suggest we find a group to represent it.”

Justin Jones

City Paper: What was your impression of SXSW?
Justin Jones: SXSW was exactly what I expected. Traffic, hassles, drunk idiots, tripping idiots, Tex-Mex, BBQ, Jameson, ordering a pale ale and getting a bud, and a few moments that felt amazing playing music. What I didn't expect was having to spend $1,300 on a new brake system for the van.

CP: How does the new EP, The Little Fox, compare to your last recording, California?
JJ: Definitely more on the raw side. California was recorded with session guys—really great session players. To me it sounds like me singing with a group of 45-year-old guys that have been playing music their whole lives.

CP: Is The Little Fox a collection of songs or does it have a theme?
JJ: It’s an album dedicated to not having any love songs on it. As someone who has written a ton of love songs I was determined not to write any. The theme I think is very much about dying and mortality.

CP: Is that a natural progression, as you get older?
JJ: It must be. And then I had children. I started thinking that it's not going to happen for me in terms of a music career. There’s also a tune about the absurdity of the drug war.

CP: Do you find that when you start accepting that it may not happen for you career-wise as a musician—that it creates a freer atmosphere with less pressure?
JJ: I had always said, when I’m 27, I’ll go back to college and I’ll start a real life. That happened and I didn’t do that. I’ve known for quite a while that it wasn’t going to work out the way I wanted it to. Now, what's interesting is that I’ve become so disinterested in the business side that’s its working out exactly the way I want it to. I’m the only one deciding how it's going to work out and while that makes it harder to succeed in a financial sense…your goals get smaller. I just want to record music that I like, and hopefully people will like it. However long it takes to actually make a career out of it, I’m willing to wait.

CP: So it seems like the acceptance of that reality has been a positive?
JJ: I moved up here [from Kill Devil Hills, NC] thinking If I played the 9:30 Club I’ve made it. And you realize, that’s not it. [laughs]. Yes, it’s a great club but you realize a lot of things have to happen. You need to be playing at the 9:30 Clubs everywhere.

There’s no reality in this business. You can work ten years and not make any progress, but that’s because there are no guarantees in any types of art form. If you were a novelist, you might write 30 novels and never get them published.

CP: So how do you keep your chin up against that type of adversity?
JJ: I'm a chin down type of guy [laughs].

CP: There's been a recent spotlight on the vitality of the D.C. music scene.  How has the city and its cultural scene nurtured your progress?
JJ: It definitely had an influence. I moved up here and got deep into drugs and lived out of my car for two years. That would not have happened had I not moved here. But I certainly gained a lifetime’s experience in five years. It has nurtured a lot of output, that kind experience fills you with so many feelings, and then having come out of it and getting married and having kids and seeing the positive side….

It's funny, because I really didn’t write depressing music at that time and my music is sadder now. It had an influence because that kind of mental trauma will influence you. Now I have this whole "I made it out on the other side" thing.

CP: Are you thinking, since you’ve gone through some serious struggles, that the challenge of getting your work to a wider audience is minimal in comparison?
JJ: Yeah, but I try not to get to wrapped up in self pity. I actually made it out. Most people don’t. To me the worst days these days are pretty cool.

CP: How has bartending at the 9:30 Club affected the way you approach music?
JJ: When you see a great band, it can simultaneously bum you out and inspire you. Delta Spirit. That band is so awesome and they blow you away live…and I have to realize that what they do is not what I do.

CP: One gets the sense that many of your songs are autobiographical. Do you find yourself creating characters and imbibing them with the emotions and stories you want to convey?
JJ: Yes. Totally.

CP: What do you listen to that would surprise a Justin Jones fan?
JJ: Ray Charles. I listen to Ray Charles all the time. And Jackson Browne. I was a Public Enemy and Wu-Tang fan growing up.

CP: It's often tough to make the sonic connection between your speaking voice and your singing voice. Do you make a conscious effort to use a distinct singing voice?
JJ: A lot of people say that to me. That’s just how I sing. Before I actually heard myself recorded, I thought I sounded like Marvin Gaye [laughs].

CP: Who would you characterize as your influences?
JJ: I listened to a lot Steve Earle and Ryan Adams in my twenties, Wilco….I like all the bands you think I should like [laughs].

The Friday, March 26th Iota show features Jones with opening acts Don Dexter and Peter Bradley Adams for $12.

When Levon Helm and The Band hosted a five-hour send-off concert in 1976, it was a musical event of mythic proportions. The Band and its guests—among them Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell—were torchbearers of the American folk revival. And though it might be overly dramatic to say the movement “ended” with The Last Waltz, it was just a few years later that folk, blues, and gospel-soul began yielding pop to the second British invasion, arena rock, grunge, and hip-hop.

It would be likewise overdramatic to equate Sunday’s Route 29 Revue at Merriweather to The Last Waltz—certainly in terms of importance. But those attendees who’ve made a religious custom of watching the eponymous Scorcese film could not deny the aesthetic similarities. Old Crow Medicine Show, Iron and Wine, the Felice Brothers, and Grace Potter and the Nocturnals are very much torchbearers of the second folk revival, the one that began in the mid-’90s and has broadened in the new millenium thanks to the Web revolution and the consequent fragmentation of pop. Presiding over Sunday’s festival was Helm, the godfather.

Local boy (well, Virginian) Justin Jones opened with a set that was more modern country-pop than throwback country-folk, but that gave way to the barn-burning bonhomie of the Felice Brothers, an outfit of Yankee good ol’ boys from upstate New York. The Felice Brothers honed their chops in juke joints and subway stations and recorded their first two albums in a chicken coop, so they seemed out a bit out of place on the Merriweather stage. But it was clear right away that we were to play by their rules. Everybody was out of their seats by the second song, clapping and singing along to “Whiskey in My Whiskey,” “Run Chicken Run,” and Townes Van Zandt’s “Two Hands”—struggling all the while to match the energy of the band, whose members would run in circles, crash into each other, and take turns dancing on top of the kick drum (occasionally whaling on the cymbals with a washboard).

Grace Potter and the Nocturnals assumed a more formal stage presence—with the mic stands adorned with rose bouquets and Potter herself fit for the prom in a pale-gold gown—but their set was no less boisterous. Grace and the Nocs, who intersect with American roots music at the corner of Raitt and Joplin (oft-cited analogs, but undeniable ones), played a mostly uptempo set culminating in the title track(s) from the band’s first major-label (re-)release—a high-energy organ jam bookended by an a cappella intro/outro that would be called gospel if its lyrics didn’t eschew God and the Bible in favor of Water. Call it green gospel. Did I mention the band’s from Vermont?

Poor Sam Beam (aka Iron and Wine) came on next to play what was effectively an intermission between two halves of a hootenanny. Dressed neatly in khakis a white button-down—which, combined with his trademark beard, made him look like Happy Gilmore’s caddy—Beam seemed a little embarrassed to follow Potter’s dam-bursting water anthem with his gossamer lullabies. The result was a lot of grace notes and a chest-voice croon that gave whispery cradlesongs like “Upward Over the Mountain” and “The Trapeze Swinger” a more soulful presence in lieu of a backing band. (Where are the Calexico boys when you need them?)

Levon and his entourage—among them his daughter, Amy, and fellow Dylan collaborator Larry Campbell (who produced Helm’s new album, Electric Dirt)—came on next to remind the audience where all that second-wave folk stuff had come from. In the night’s only real disappointment, Levon declined to sing, per orders from his doctor. But, as City Paper Web editor and fellow concertgoer Ted Scheinman aptly put it, “Thank God for Larry Campbell.” Campbell led the band (which also featured Levon’s Midnight-Ramble horn section and E Street Band/Conan O’Brien multi-instrumentalist Jimmy Vivino) in a set that included four Band classics—“Long Black Veil,” “The Shape I’m In,” “It Makes No Difference,” and “Chest Fever”—the last featuring Campbell in a spine-chilling guitar imitation of Garth Hudson’s diabolical organ intro. With Levon’s vocal chords out of commission, they stayed away from songs such as “The Weight” and “Ophelia,” a wise and respectful choice (to sing “The Weight” without Levon would have been sacrilege, even with his blessing).

Levon kept time on drums and played a bit of mandolin, but his primary function at the Revue was to preside over the celebration of a tradition he and his contemporaries helped shape. In the middle of his set, the 69-year-old icon took a breather while his daughter, Campbell, and Campbell’s wife Teresa Williams sang a three-part harmony to the Grateful Dead ballad “Attics of my Life.” It was, perhaps, the unlikely highlight of the set; reverly turned to reverence as the trio sang, “I have spent my life seeking all that’s still unsung / Bent my ear to hear the tune, and closed my eyes to see / When there was no strings to play, you played to me.” In the shadows offstage, Levon was sitting with his eyes closed, rolling his head in slow circles, smiling.

Old Crow Medicine Show closed the six-hour circus with a typically charismatic hoedown, frontmen Ketch Secor and Willie Watson filling the song breaks by yammering back and forth in a schtick that harks back to the snakeoil salesmen from whom they drew their name. The Felice Brothers, who had been touring with Old Crow all summer, slipped on and off stage intermittently throughout the set, which reached a pitch with heel-stompers “Shack #9” and “Minglewood Blues.”

The restless ticketholders had left the back half of the pavilion empty by the time the concert was approaching its eighth hour, and those who remained pushed in toward the stage. Before the musicians closed with “Wagon Wheel”—very much the missing link of post-WWII folk, co-written by Old Crow and Bob Dylan—the day of solidarity culminated as Ian Felice joined Secor at the mic for the slow-paced ballad “We’re All In This Together.” One sensed they were not just singing to their bandmates.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user PZAO.