Annie and Hedonists play -- and eat -- for fun By TOM KEYSER Staff Writer Published: 12:00 a.m., Thursday, November 25, 2010 (photo by Stephen Ide) |
"To my ear, it was some of the best music we were doing on this stage," she says. "It was fabulous. Part of the magic was that they did it just for the love of it, not as a big career move, with no real ambition attached to what they were doing. They just played their favorite songs." She says it was "the best face of folk music, and exactly what I want the world to hear, so it'll know how much fun folk music fans have in these little clubs and at these little festivals that fly under the radar of the commercial music industry. So I took every chance I could to put them in front of audiences." Craig booked them into the cafe on First Night, the New Year's Eve celebration in Saratoga Springs, and for benefits and regular concerts. "Sure enough," she says, "as soon as people got a sample of them, they quickly began to sell out the house." And Friday, when Annie and the Hedonists return to Caffe Lena for a Thanksgiving weekend concert, they'll likely sell it out again. In their 20th year together, they're as popular as ever playing their smooth, swinging and melodic brand of traditional folk, jazz, blues, bluegrass, country, Quebec dance music, and, well, you-name-it. They're friends as well as band mates -- two couples who have raised families, traveled, hiked, camped, played music, partied and, of course, eaten together (food plays a big part in the story of Annie and the Hedonists). "We really like each other, and we like to play music together, and we have fun," says Steve Fry, who with his wife, Betsy, makes up half the group. It was Steve who made the first move that led to the band. In 1990, he and Betsy attended an a cappella sing-and-potluck dinner sponsored by the Pick'n and Sing'n Gather'n. At the food table, he met Jonny Rosen, who with his wife, Annie, had only months before moved to upstate New York. Steve invited Jonny and his wife over for dinner, and later that night when Steve told Betsy, she was horrified. "Oh, that's terrible," she recalls telling him. "That could be awful. You don't know anything about them." Well, they weren't awful at all, Betsy says, laughing. They ate and played music and, thinking they sounded pretty good together, decided to meet again. A few months later they started playing out. At one of their first gigs, a concert for a convention of personnel managers, they did something that spawned their name. They arrived thinking they were going to get dinner. They didn't. After playing on empty stomachs, they were invited to finish up what was left on the dessert table. There was the remnant of what had been a multi-tiered baked Alaska. But there were no utensils. So the famished foursome dug in with their fingers, like hedonists. "You could say that we are pleasure-seekers," Annie says. They didn't play all that often their first 10 years together. They had children to raise and day jobs to do. But by 2000, their kids were starting college, and they released their first of three CDs. They started playing more, and by 2006 or 2007, they were playing most every weekend and traveling hundreds of miles for a gig. Now, the Rosens are in their 50s, and the Frys in their 60s. All but one are retired. Jonny still works as director of the Occupational Health and Safety Department for the New York State Public Employees Federation. Annie used to work as a caregiver for Schenectady ARC in the day-treatment program. Betsy was a visiting nurse. And Steve worked for 34 years as an administrative law judge for the state. They don't play concerts together as often they used to. The allure of traveling and hauling equipment has been lost on Betsy and Steve. So sometimes Annie and Jonny play with other musicians, but at Caffe Lena, it will be the original quartet plus Peter Davis, the talented, multi-instrumentalist from Saratoga Springs. They consider Caffe Lena their home base. Steve started attending concerts there in the late 1960s or early 1970s. He was good friends with Lena Spencer, the founder, and when she died, he did the work to set up the cafe's tax-exempt status. "It's probably the most exciting place to play that I've ever played," Steve says. That's because it's intimate and crowded, and when the band starts clicking, the excitement spreads from person to person and pretty soon everyone feels as if they're part of something really exciting, he says. "And we like the Thai restaurant across the street," Jonny says. "And Hattie's next door," adds Annie, ever the hedonist.
In concert Annie and the Hedonists |