Annie Moses Band - Cape Cod Symphony

This is a promotional picture of the Annie Moses band -- a good one because it shows the physicality of their performance.  Annie is the one whose blond hair is swinging in the middle of the picture (she's beautiful but of course you can't see that), and Alex with  a fiddle near her is high stepping which he did frequently. The others are interacting or doing their thing.  This is not my kind of music ... except it was yesterday afternoon. They played a pops concert with the Cape Cod Symphony and I was there thanks to the lousy weather and kindness of a friend. She called and said her husband had to stay home waiting for a plumber because their heat had been out long enough in the night to burst a water pipe. Did I want to go? Why not? The symphony performs in a nearby high school auditorium; if it had been nice weather I would have walked the 6 or 8 blocks but it was in the teens although my car was not blocked by the snow and the sidewalks were (sort of) plowed as they have to be because of kids who walk to school.

When someone says of a person or group "they rock" it's slang I don't use and don't necessarily understand. But this band rocks! They are fine musicians and they put on a happy, smile filled show.  They started with a new arrangement of "Rhapsody in Blue" - it rocked! I've heard it so often I find it boring -- but not that version. They did many well know folk and traditional songs in their own arrangements. They traded out musical instruments, from fiddle to mandolin, from piano to harp.  All the women sang and so did Alex, the oldest brother -- the one who broke into step dances every so often as he fiddled.

There were songs Papa, the arranger and often pianist wrote and a couple others wrote.  Sentimentality is often at the edge of country music and there was a little too much of that in the second half of the  concert.  Often the symphony orchestra backed up the band, Jung Ho Pak, the conductor is a physical sort of conductor anyway. At time he was jumping up and down as enthusiastically as Alex. The sense of enjoyment was obvious and I had a wonderful time.

I was even happy when I went out into the parking lot where aisles of parking spaces were divided from one another by 10 foot tall walls of snow and I could not remember exactly where my car was. I didn't like wandering about in the very cold evening and then remembered my car key has a panic button. Yes! Soon, about 20 feet away, my car honked for me and flashed its lights. A wonderful tiny bit of electronic innovation!  So a cold, snowy, housebound afternoon turned to much delight indeed.
As I write this morning it's snowing again!  Enough already.