Listening to the music of David Wax Museum is like being invited to a fiesta. The sound is folksy and rocklike, mixed with a tinge of zydeco and a colorful outer layer of traditional Mexican folk music.
The sound is, quite simply, “pure, irresistible joy,” as Bob Boilin of NPR hailed upon their hit gig at the 2010 Newport Folk Festival. Mexo-Americana may be the best description of the “sons” or songs that combine Latin rhythms that are often infused with call-and-response hooting and the rattling of a donkey jawbone.
“The teeth are loose in the donkey’s jaw and they make a rattling sound,” said David Wax, as matter-of-factly as explaining how fingers over guitar strings produce a strumming sound.
Wax and his quartet are currently on the Canadian leg of their summer tour that takes them to the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage later this month.
| Onstage |
| The David Wax Museum comes to the Millennium Theatre at the Kennedy Center on July 26. For more information, log onto |
| Kennedy-center.org |
Wax put the group together in the fall of 2007 and has a back story almost as interesting as the music he writes. While attending Deep Springs College, an unconventional institute of higher learning that doubles as a cattle ranch, he spent the summers of his freshman and sophomore years working in rural Mexico. Mexican folk music was an integral part of people’s lives in these small villages, and while Wax had never heard the music before, he maintained it struck a chord in him.
After transferring to Harvard, he received a degree in the history and literature of Latin America. A fellowship from Harvard took him back to Mexico where he studied and played its distinctive folk music.
“My songs are based on the traditional Mexican folk songs and many come from ones I have adapted into English,” he noted.
Upon returning to Boston he met musician Suz Slezak and while she had little exposure to Mexican folk music, she had a strong background in American folk music from growing up in Charlottesville. As bluegrass is an essential ingredient in folk music, Slezak worked well in Wax’s concept of the band. A friend suggested calling it the David Wax Museum, an obvious play on his name, but one that he says alludes to the idea of the band “as a collection of lots of old things turned into something new.”
So it has been since 2007, with the addition of Greg Glassman playing drums, an acoustic bass guitar called Leona and an electric guitar. One more musician Alec Spiegelman, plays baritone sax and trumpet. Wax, himself, plays acoustic guitar, and a Mexican guitar called a jarana, while Slezak sings and plays her fiddle.
“Our repertoire consists of songs from our recent record, ‘Everything Is Saved’ and I think it will take the audience with us across real depths of emotion,” Wax said. “We have a lot of upbeat songs, beautiful ballads and everything in between.
“We see the experience of playing music together as a joyful, beautiful part of being alive and we try to bring that spirit to every performance.”
