How these Arizona Renaissance Festival musicians found their way to performing on the circuit

SAM DINGMAN: The Arizona Renaissance Festival is in full swing. The annual celebration of medieval art and culture features food and craft markets, sporting events like jousting and sword swallowing, and music.

Guitarist Jeremy Graeff and recorder-player Mark Williams are two of those musicians — they’re back at the festival for their third year. Their music blends ancient and modern influences, and I found myself fascinated by the question of how an artist finds their way to performing on the Renaissance circuit.

So The Show invited Graeff and Williams to the studio with their instruments to tell their backstories.

Graeff, it turns out, didn’t even start playing guitar until his 30s. But he was a lifelong music fan. For years, in fact, he figured that’s all he would be.

JEREMY GRAEFF: By the time I was 25, I'd been to 300 shows.

DINGMAN: Oh, my God. Who were you going to see?

GRAEFF: Mostly a lot of punk bands and a lot of alternative bands. Really big fan of industrial music. So those are, like, the main genres. But, I mean, I went to see everything. I'm pretty musically omnivorous.

DINGMAN: So how did we get to the point where you, in your 30s, picked up a guitar and now are a professional musician?

GRAEFF: So the short version is, my brother and I were playing Rock Band.

DINGMAN: The video game?

GRAEFF: Yeah, and I was playing the “guitar,” quote unquote.

DINGMAN: Let me just say for listeners who may not remember this, Rock Band was this video game where it came with fake plastic instruments with very simple controls, buttons and switches. And you would quote unquote “play” the instruments along with recordings of well-known songs in the game.

GRAEFF: So we were playing whatever Slayer song was in that pack.

DINGMAN: Oh, yes, yes, yes. Was it "Raining Blood?"

GRAEFF: I think so.

DINGMAN: OK, yeah.

[SONG PLAYS]

GRAEFF: And I got so aggravated because of the button combinations. And I finally said something to the effect of like, you know, I bet I could probably learn to play this. For real.

DINGMAN: Right.

GRAEFF: About a month later, my brother bought me an acoustic guitar. And I was kind of like in like a very working class mentality kind of way. I'm like, well, my brother spent a lot of money on this thing. I really better put in an effort. And I have I have had friends that are professional musicians for a lot of my life. So of course, they stepped right in and said like, "oh, we'll do these things."

And I'm like, Oh, OK, I can do that. And for a year, I did nothing but play scales and listened to a metronome and changed chords.

DINGMAN: Wow, so you really started with the rudiments?

GRAEFF: Yeah, and then very quickly after doing that for about a year, I started just playing and singing along to songs that I liked that I knew were only like three chords, like a Hank Williams song, a couple Johnny Cash songs, a couple punk rock songs.

It felt really good. It was kind of like, oh, this is a puzzle like I kind of get. And like I don't at that time it didn't matter to me if I ever played in front of anybody.

DINGMAN: Yeah. Mark, what about you? You're in this group you play uh the recorder and the flute, righy?

MARK WILLIAMS: Correct, yes.

DINGMAN: Are those instruments that you've had a relationship with from a young age?

WILLIAMS: From college age.

DINGMAN: OK.

WILLIAMS: When I first wanted to start music I wanted to play flute, and they handed me a trombone.

DINGMAN: Did they not know what a flute was?

WILLIAMS: They decided my armature, my mouth shape, was not ideal for flutes, so it was better for trombone. So I played trombone for many, many years.

And then in college, I played recorder and some Celtic Cèilidhs and played harp because I was at the University of Texas where they had a huge harp program and you could just take it as an elective. So I started harp there as well.

DINGMAN: OK. So tell me what drew you to, when I hear you say you were interested in Celtic music, Cèilidhs, even harp to some extent, that at least makes me think of Renaissance-type music. It feels tonally in the same ballpark.

What drew you to these older musical forms?

WILLIAMS: I think originally it's just the acoustic nature of being able to create something that's been around for so long, that's been a part of humanity for so long, and just that connection that you feel.

Then the more I researched older music, then that added layers to it where it's like, well, this song is from the 12th century, so this has been around for so long.

DINGMAN: Right.

WILLIAMS: That it adds a layer of emotion to the lyrics and everything.

DINGMAN: That's really interesting. I love that idea that it feels connected to humanity by dint of the fact that it's been around for so long.

WILLIAMS: Right. In medieval music, a lot of what we know is fragmented. And so we're trying to recreate it. So there's certain creative aspects of just trying to guess what it sounds like. Even though we know what the melody of the lyrics might be, we don't know how they performed it. So we're exploring musically a different period of time.

DINGMAN: And participating in the survival of the form?

WILLIAMS: Correct. There was a time when I was playing in a bar in the border of Texas and Mexico, the Starlight Lounge, and it played one of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, which is a collection of 13th century songs.

And the table in front of us happened to be from Portugal. They came up afterwards, like, we still sing that song. This 800-year-old song is still in our culture today.

DINGMAN: I just got a little chill as you told that story. Wow. That's amazing. Jeremy, what about for you?

GRAEFF: My entry into early music is actually the goth band Dead Can Dance.

DINGMAN: OK.

GRAEFF: Who, like, their sound was very much influenced by a lot of early music, and if you look at their catalog, there are actually certain songs that are quite old. So, one in particular, "Saltarello."

So "Saltarello" is a kind of dance with, like, a jump. And it's a very bright, very happy sounding song and very beautiful.

When I first heard it as a teenager, I didn't realize that it was as old as what it was. But, you know, as I got older and I was starting to attend ren faires, I heard one of the historical bands playing that and it started like, I started making connections.

DINGMAN: So if I'm hearing you right, it's like there's this thing you already loved and you didn't necessarily know why you were resonating with it and then you love this other thing, ren faires, and realize like, oh, there's even more reason to love this thing I love?

GRAEFF: Yeah, and what I've found like since I've like started performing a lot of this music, it actually shares a lot of scales and a lot of melodic ideas with a lot of the post-punk music that I love.

So like a lot of the chord choices that like Robert Smith from The Cure will use are really similar to a lot of the moves that get made in medieval and Renaissance music, which I think is really beautiful.

DINGMAN: Last question for you both before I have you play some music. Is there a way that you feel a ren faire audience responds to the music that you play that is unique in terms of all the different contexts that you perform in?

GRAEFF: A ren faire is a venue unlike any other. It's broad daylight, so you see everything. So you see these incredibly lavish costumes. You can often hear other acts, like a couple stages over. You can smell all of the food that's happening. The people in the audience might be responding in ways that are astonishing and surprising, like the looks that they're giving you. And you can't tune that out.

WILLIAMS: This is so much more intimate.

GRAEFF: Yeah.

WILLIAMS: Right there.

GRAEFF: It is the most distraction-laden and intimate place you can possibly perform at.

DINGMAN: Well, I'd love to have you guys play one of your songs for us. Sure. Do you know which one you're gonna do?

GRAEFF: We're gonna play "Ivy Slow Low," which is a really old medieval lullaby that we will not be playing like a lullaby.