By Larry Schwartz
BEN Sollee was in the back seat of a minivan outside Port Fairy after the coastal town’s annual folk festival when he noticed the boy.
“There was a dad driving his two sons in a wagon,” says the Kentucky musician, who pronounces his surname So-Lee. “They were passing us on the highway and I think the kid looked over and recognised me and got his dad’s attention.”
As the other vehicle slowed a little, the boy held up a CD Sollee had signed for them. “So I waved at them and said, ‘let me take a picture’. They held up the CD and I got a little picture of it…It was just a really cool experience.”
A classically trained cellist and singer-songwriter, whose music reflects folk, bluegrass, jazz, and R&B influences, Sollee will this month perform as a duo with percussionist Jordan Ellis on his second tour in as many years.
“I felt like people in Australia were more affectionate than they are here in the States,” he says.
Sollee, who is in his late 20s, says his fourth album, Half-Made Man, is “very personal” and describes it as “a transitioning … from many of the things that I thought I was going to be”.
He might, for instance, have played in a classical orchestra but says he “chose to be on this path because I love the people and the places that I got to see playing this type of folk music, rhythm ‘n’ blues music and so on”.
Sollee and his band cycle from town to town to a third of each year’s gigs. He once covered more than 530km miles to a festival in Tennessee with his cello strapped to his bicycle.
“Of course that changes the dynamic of how we are on the road,” he says. “…What is good about that is it puts you through communities you wouldn’t normally be travelling through. It keeps you from rolling up your windows in the bad neighbourhoods. It keeps you from playing too big a venue.
“…You are out riding for much longer and making less money. But my goal has never been to get filthy rich but rather to connect with communities more profoundly.”
He might have chosen a less cumbersome instrument for travel. “So it is maybe a little heavier than a guitar and it may be a lot heavier than a violin,” says Sollee, who carried his cello up to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, to sing a song called For a Few Honest Words in a bid to encourage voting at the recent US election. “But the range of sound you can get out of it for taking one instrument is huge”.
His grandfather was a fiddler. His guitarist father taught him bass lines. His mother sang and encouraged him to do so. They set aside musical ambitions to raise a family. He listened to Wilson Pickett, Ray Charles and others in their soul record collection and cites other artists as varied as Paul Simon, Louis Armstrong and Ani DiFranco.
Sollee has played cello since primary school and still enjoys classical music. “It’s part of who I am,” he says. “I unabashedly love Brahms. I love so much of Elgar’s music. …I have only loved it more as I have gotten away from it.”
But he’s happy with his chosen path. “The social scene around classical music is not nearly as cool as hanging out with fiddlers and folk musicians,” he says.
December 2012. Unpublished, after tour cancelled
Larry Schwartz Writer 