Buffalo Heart

Elephant Revival was the featured band at the Buffalo Heart Project (B.H.P.) benefit at the Boulder Theater on Feb. 5th which raised thousands of dollars for emergency heating assistance for people living on the Pine Ridge and Rose Bud Reservations of the Lakota people during this particularly cold and trying winter of 2010.

The concert was in all ways a major, defining event for headliner Elephant Revival, which is on the cusp of a major breakout into the greater national musical scene. It also defined the bands unique social activism.

Elephant Revival is the leader in an emerging new, influential musical genre being called Transcendental Folk. All the musical artists who joined Elephant Revival for the benefit concert contribute in some way, to the defining of this new musical genre.

The Plenty Wolf Singers, a traditional Lakota Drumming Society, initiated the concert with prayer and invocation to the Great Spirit/Creator with sad yet triumphal traditional drumming and singing.

The music of the Plenty Wolf Singers is the song of our shared American landscape/American topography, a sad primal lamentation of dispossession and attempted genocide, where economically worthless badlands become Indian Reservations forming new frontiers of despair, hopelessness and oppression. Still the song of the Plenty Wolf is also a song of joy, triumph, and transcendence. A song of still abiding in this bleak, arduous American landscape still connected to a persisting, living counter-culture.

The intention of the evening pulsed forth & gained cadence as the drum, the living heartbeat of the American landscape, inaugurated and invoked the evenings magical unfolding.

The Plenty Wolf Singers were joined by a surprise special guest Silent Bear, a fellow resident and musician from the Rose Bud Reservation. Silent Bear received permission from Pete Seeger to alter the words to Seeger's famous Vietnam protest song, “Bring Them Home.” Silent Bear’s song adaptation entitled “Bring Him Home” - is reference and homage to Leonard Peltier who spends his 34th year wrongly imprisoned for a crime he did not do. The song became a shared, heartfelt prayer for justice to come to a place where there is no justice.

The Plenty Wolf Singers were a persisting presence during the concert providing a focus to the show as the bands were setting up, as well as ending the concert with ceremony and prayer.

Jim Page was another persisting presence during the show acting as master of ceremony and providing historic context and demonstrating why he is the most notable, worthy American songwriter plying his craft, today.

Page played his haunting, signature song, '(accompanied by Elephant Revival) ‘The Wind did Blow', about the wind that blew and froze the corpses of the men, women, children, and old people murdered by the U.S. 7th Cavalry at Wounded Knee, South Dakota on December 29, 1890.

As emcee, Page wove his own songs in between the other band's sets throughout the evening. Page included his own verse of Woody Guthrie's 'This Land is Your Land,’ and a current protest song penned about the war in Iraq, 'Collateral Damage'. His song ’Heroes &Survivors’ referenced the overpowering will of humanity to carry on through oppression and persecution. Page sang of ‘Anna Mae’ Aquash, a member of the American Indian Movement (A.I.M.) who was found murdered on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1976.

As the late great folk legend Utah Philips stated, “Jim Page is one of the great songwriters of our times. He is a master of the songwriting craft. Jim Page’s songs get right to the point. He looks at the world clearly and reports what he sees with compassion, humor and a biting sense of irony."

The Buffalo Heart Project Benefit was a night, which invited all participants to break-out their best protest songs, and 'The Boulder Acoustic Society' accepted the invitation. They took the posture of rabble-rousers and ended their set by bringing it into the audience. They sang the timeless protest song, "Lift Every Voice" and Steve Earle's "Oxycontin Blues."

Reed Foehl stood before the packed theater with nothing but his harmonica and acoustic guitar evoking a young Bob Dylan in the early days in Greenwich Village. And like young Dylan his songs were sad laments of isolation and alienation. He covered Dylan's "Visions of Johanna" beautifully.

Laura Goldhamer & The Silver Nail also sang songs of isolation and alienation, and the hope of transcending - rising above. The bands songs were illustrated by an on-stage slide show projected on a bed sheet.

Many sad songs were sung. Many angry songs of protest were sung. And yet, in the end, all anger and sadness was transcended by E.R.'s songs of hope and grace.

A magic moment occurred when headliner Elephant Revival took the stage, stood silently posed in the moment and then charged into the savage blood rhythm of their Celtic battle song, with the unlikely title 'Single Beds Were Made for One'.

The quintets fusion of Scottish/Celtic fiddle tunes, original folk pieces, traditional ballads, psychedelic country, & indie rock, and powerful reggae grooves has such a beautiful animal/creature vitality, that it made the dancers dance in new archaic ways.

Other Elephant Revival songs spoke to the delusion of apartness and separateness, while within the narrative of the song - the delusion is overcome. Other songs spoke to the power we all have to make the world anew.

As a whole Elephant Revival’s songs speak of the band member’s collective vastness and great generosity of spirit.

Elephant Revival hails from Nederland, Colorado - a place whose precious minerals have been mined out, yet Nederland is amazingly rich in its abundance of musical talent. Bands and talents such as Stephen Stills, Dan Fogelberg, Joe Walsh, Leftover Salmon, String Cheese Incident, and Yonder Mountain String Band have emerged from this part of the Coloradoan Front Range to take their place in the greater national musical scene. The unanimous, local folk wisdom is that Elephant Revival is next.

The kind of social activism that was showcased by The Buffalo Heart Project Benefit comes natural to Elephant Revival band members. Bonnie May Paine (vocals, washboard, djembe, musical saw) is tribal Cherokee from the capital of the Oklahoma Cherokee - Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Most all of the other band members have some connection to the Indian Territories of Oklahoma. From there springs forth their song of hope, comfort, and transcendence to the oppressed.

Many sad songs were sung at the Buffalo Heart Benefit. Yet, in the end all sadness was transcended through the convergence of musicians singing of an emerging new consciousness in these changing times. The music, all pervasive and elevating, represents an emerging new musical genre known as “Transcendental Folk.”