When the Valley Advocate‘s annual Grand Band Slam rolls around, interesting conversations happen in and out of the newsroom. The good news and bad are the same: the Valley is full to bursting with musicians of almost every stripe. For those of us who appreciate original music, that is exceptionally good. For those of us who must sort through all those bands in a nominating and voting contest, it creates intriguing issues.
Try though any music fan or critic might, it’s impossible to have complete and up-to-date insider knowledge of jazz players in Greenfield, punk bands in Ludlow and the newly-formed co-op taking noisy shape in a Shutesbury barn. That, I think, is the root of the inevitable imperfections of the Grand Band Slam process.
Take this year’s ballot, for instance. In the metal category, we have an unusual appearance: Shadows Fall, a band in the “made it big” file. Should they be in a Valley contest? How big is too big? How local is local? Does it matter to those who don’t know prog-rock from Swedish metal?
It’s the kind of thing that keeps an arts editor up at night. We want to represent the Valley’s vast scope of styles and players, and we want to do it fairly and completely. Lines get drawn by consensus, but even with rules in place, questions arise: What’s a “major label” versus a “national label”? Should having one or the other keep a band out of the contest? Is Shadows Fall a local band any less than are Whyte Kastles or Fat Worm of Error? Do you cease being local when you’ve toured Montevideo?
And then there’s the conundrum of bands who have won repeatedly, bands like the Gypsy Wranglers or Aquanett. Should they be banned from further wins even if they’re nominated? Or maybe more categories are in order.
It’s also true that the Grand Band Slam is the product of many years of tweaks and changes imposed by different publishers and corporate owners. Like few other projects at the paper, it is the result of collaboration between departments.
We’ve tried to thread the needle as best we can with this year’s crop of nominations. And, as you may have seen in last year’s Big Music Issue, we’ve thrown in some new wrinkles, things like Editor’s Picks—the bands we think ought to be on readers’ radar screens even if nobody nominated them. (It definitely makes for a more varied show at the end of the process, too.)
All our angst comes back to the same thing. We throw the contest for purely altruistic reasons, at least from this editor’s chair: we want to stir the pot, to bring our readers a thorough taste of the ever-changing musical free-for-all of the Valley. There’s some pride in there, too—the Valley is a unique place where musicians swirl into new combinations, offer something distinctive, then fall back for a while into the primordial ooze that spawned them. If we’ve got it, we might as well flaunt it, and we’ve definitely got it.
We want to tap into every nuance of the hardcore scene and plumb the depths of local noise, a task akin to watching protein folding (“like trying to watch knot tying in a microscopic bowl of spaghetti” said UMass’ Dr. Lila Gierasch in a recent article).
We mostly hear from our readers after the Band Slam issue has hit the streets. That’s a shame, because, well, go ahead—just imagine the perfect Grand Band Slam. What would it look like? Would it be full of brand new bands? Full of young bands and short on the gray hair? All polka? Already, we’re thinking about the current formulation, even wishing this year’s ballot looked a little different. If you’d like to let us know your thoughts now, before this year’s issue arrives, just drop me a line at jheflin@valleyadvocate.com or post your comment below.