I recently met Forrest Dunbar at a retirement party. We were celebrating the career achievements of Diane Kaplan, the former CEO of Rasmuson Foundation. The event brought together musicians like myself, politicians like Dunbar, businesspeople, teachers, artists, and many others. As we talked, Mr. Dunbar mentioned his effort to attract the film industry back to Alaska. He highlighted the opportunities that film offers musicians, so I asked for a phone conversation to share his perspective with readers of this blog. You may already know that Forrest Dunbar served on the Anchorage Assembly until ..read more

Earlier this year, as I listened to Anchorage Music Co-op’s Teen Open Mic at The Nave, I mused about the benefits of intergenerational households and community living spaces. The teenagers trying out new stage personas and tender-fresh songs had an attentive, supportive audience: friends, parents, and locals, including elders, from Cook Inlet Housing Authority next door. It was a diverse crowd. There were even a couple of toddlers, who weren’t paying much attention, although no one seemed to mind. Everyone was safe in that space to make mistakes. It is important to have such safe spaces for pe ..read more

Conor Oberst of ,Bright Eyes wrote: “If you love something, give it away.” Composer ,Stephen Lias is doing just that here in Alaska. He found a love of composing in the wilderness, and he’s giving it away to other composers through the aptly named program ,Composing in the Wilderness. Steve and I met recently to talk about what it means to compose in the wilderness. I asked him, What do you mean by wilderness? and Why write music there? For Steve, wilderness is what lies outside his comfort zone, inspires him, and stimulates change. In a word, wilderness represents adventure. Denali National ..read more

I’m a born procrastinator. So the last ten days before Folk Fest found me frantically strumming my guitar at all hours, building up my calluses to prepare for the main stage. I wasn’t alone. Much of Juneau lights up during Alaska Folk Festival season, humming with the energy of rehearsals in a hundred households. After two years without an in-person festival, that bottled energy felt quadruply intense. The Alaska Folk Festival is one of the highlights of life in Juneau. Music fills downtown for seven solid days, with over 120 acts booked on the main stage plus several workshops and dozens of c ..read more

Alaska is often understood in one of two ways – a resource extraction state, or a pristine national park. These clichés, only slightly deeper than the misconception that Alaska is a povince of Canada or a territory of Russia, do not tell the whole story. Yes, there are oil fields in the Arctic and fish in the ocean and rivers, but extracting profit from them is a delicate matter. And yes, there are vast tracts of land where the U.S. government prohibits most commercial activity, but those tracts are not uninhabited or untouched. This land we call Alaska has also provided the U.S. government wi ..read more

As Lisa Hawkins sits down with me at ,Frostline Studio an early afternoon in March, she sways ever so slightly as we arrange ourselves on bar stools around a studio table. The momentary imbalance is not fatigue after “last night’s musician’s excesses” – Lisa is still jet-lagged after traveling halfway around the world from Dubai, where her a capella trio ,Pipeline Vocal Project was featured at the USA Pavilion of the ,Expo 2020 Dubai. For four days, they sang for global audiences from the huge Expo stage to illustrate the convention's theme that “freedom enables creativity, innovation, and op ..read more

There is a wrinkle in the mountains to the east of Bogotá, Colombia called Quebrada Vieja. The name comes from the word quebrar, which means to break. The place didn’t seem broken to me, so I’ve called it a wrinkle–an irregular fold in a sheet of rock whose contours throb green with the veneer of life. The wrinkle is gradually deepened by a trickle of water that flows into Bogotá. The water is slowed in its course from cloud to city first by leaves that interrupt its fall from the heavens, then by detritus that changes its direction as it slides downhill, then by the roots, microorganisms, an ..read more

A friend of mine was recently brainstorming with me, trying to find funding for a project that would create opportunities for artists and educators in Alaska. I was only seeing one solution set when he asked a helpful question. He started off “How might we…” Those three words can be powerful. How asks for nuts and bolts, might invites creativity, and we implies teamwork and support. My friend could have said “Let’s step back…” or “I don’t think we should forget…” but instead he offered an invitation to open-ended, creative collaboration. The magic of his invitation didn’t lie in the words them ..read more

There are many kinds of musicians in Alaska, and I'm the road-seasoned kind. Most of my career has been spent on tour, playing small gigs or house concerts -- and then getting in the car, driving all day, and doing it again. Coffeehouses, village pubs, parks, and backyards are the performance spaces where I feel like myself. That's why the world of grants and grant applications initially felt distant to me. Every year I used to hear about the ,Rasmuson Individual Artist Awards, and every year I would think: That's meant for those OTHER musicians. Not for me, passing the hat for coffee and gas ..read more

To kick off a new year it seems fitting to look back and take stock of what we’ve done. This blog launched in 2021, as did the Music Alaska survey that will provide a clearer picture of who Alaskan musicians are, what we do, and why we matter. We heard from many of you in an end-of-the-year virtual get-together about the projects that have kept you busy, as well as the time you’ve taken to rest and recharge. One of the updates we heard during that get-together came from a fixture of the Alaska music community, Kurt Riemann. Kurt founded the Alaska Music Archive–a monumental effort to collect a ..read more