Larry & Joe + Joyful Noise at Big Ears, and remembering Jill Sobule
On Joyful Music and its Practitioners
In rounding the bases on my Big Ears experiences, two encounters were reminders that sometimes the power of music can be purely an expression of joy.
In the days before the festival, I sent an email to all the artist contacts saying I was open to meeting folks who were up to something were open to hanging out. I received a reply from Kayla Oelhafen who manages Larry & Joe, an acoustic duo of multi-instrumentalists Larry Bellorín and Joe Troop who blend Venezuelan Llaneran folk and Bluegrass music.
Joe Troop (banjo, violin, guitar) had already been exploring the potential of blending South American folk music with Appalachian and Bluegrass music for several years with his ensemble Che Apalache that had formed while he lived and taught music in Buenos Aires, Argentina. They were nominated in 2020 for a GRAMMY for Best Folk Album. But soon after they walked the red carpet for the ceremony, Covid forced his bandmates to return to Argentina and Mexico on the last planes out before the shutdown. Troop went to North Carolina to hunker down close to family. With live music on hiatus he found purpose volunteering to help migrants in the border town of Nogales, Arizona, including playing music to comfort them. Upon return to Durham, a friend tipped him off about a Venezuelan migrant who was a brilliant musician but was now working as a day laborer in construction.
Larry Bellorín had a successful career as a leading performer and teacher of traditional Llanera music in Venezuela. After starting around the age of 6, he was fully supporting himself with music by age 11, mastering the 4-stringed cuatro, llaneran harp and string bass along the way. The political landscape in Venezuela changed drastically in 2012 with the rise of Nicolás Maduro and the collapse of the economy. Larry closed his school and ultimately left for America in 2017, where he was granted refugee status, bringing his wife and daughter to join him in the U.S. shortly after. But Larry had largely abandoned music for manual labor, a career that brought injuries to his hands and left him resigned to the idea that his life of music was over.
With pandemic restrictions starting to ease, Joe set up a month-long weekly residency to showcase and collaborate with local talent, and cold-called Larry to invite him to play on the first night. According to those in the room, the first musical interchange was electric. Three standing ovations later on that first night, they knew there was a deep musical connection and aimed to start a new chapter in their careers as a duo.
I got a sense of their irrepressible happiness when they came to my Airbnb-turned-daylight studio on S. Gay St. Once the snap-button Western shirts were changed into and the harp set up, Larry took off like a perpetual motion machine with unending, dizzying cascades of arpeggios, fully in his own world of musical happiness that read clearly on his meaty face. Joe joined in, weaving around the harp with serpentine lines on the banjo. It felt like a transgression to have to pause them to reposition them for the light and angle.
In that meeting, and for part of their show that I caught, I felt a great happiness seeing their friendship and the give-and-take exchange of their music into one joyful act. The freedom to enjoy and share one’s gifts seems so fundamental. I hope that Larry is given safe harbor in America despite our own frightening political decline.
For the NYC readers, they’ll be at Joe’s Pub on July 16th, and a full list of summer appearances is here.
More Joyful Noises
Another portrait I was trying to coordinate was with Mike Savino, who makes varied and inventive music under the name Tall Tall Trees, often with a banjo fed into an array of effects and samplers. We missed each other for a sitting despite our sincere efforts but I had a half hour to swing by the back patio of Pretentious Beer Company to catch a motley gathering of improvisors assembled by Joyful Noise, an artist-forward, Indianapolis-based record label.
With an introduction from label manager Jake Saunders, it was billed as ‘chaos jam’ that included Savino and other notable labelmates Thor Harris, Greg Saunier of Deerhoof, Macie Stewart, Kramer (founder of Shimmy-Disc records) and Wendy Eisenberg, plus musical friends Shazad Ismaily and Hope Littwin. Even before the music started, signs of a good time included Thor Harris’ homemade instruments and use of a Little Tikes basketball hoop as a keyboard stand, and Ismaily insistently initiating a game of toss with the audience. (Each artist above is quite accomplished in their own right—I’ve linked each name to their sites as best I could and I’d encourage you to dig further and explore their music.)
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JILL SOBULE, 1959-2025
And lastly on the subject of joy, I wanted to note the passing of the accomplished and widely beloved singer-songwriter Jill Sobule, who shockingly died in a house fire on May 1st. She was traveling to her hometown of Denver to perform music from her acclaimed musical, “F*ck 7th Grade.”
I photographed and interviewed her in 2014 for a feature pegged to her album Dottie's Charms that was inspired by a charm bracelet bought off eBay by a friend. Several literary friends had provided the lyrics, with each song based on one of the charms. On her suggestion, we met at Cowgirl in the West Village along with Sobule’s mom and girlfriend. Many of her songs are humorous character studies. When we found this little pass-through window with kitschy cowboy curtains it felt like a perfect proscenium for her imagined protagonists.
I had followed Sobule on social media for the many years since that meeting and saw that she was always restlessly busy, trying new approaches and collaborations and willing to go anywhere with her little travel guitar. She was even willing to play a fundraising event I was considering around the time that I met her, which struck me as so open-hearted, egoless and generous. I was moved and surprised/not surprised to see the volume and breadth of tributes from musicians, fellow LGBTQ+ icons, collaborators and friends who mourned her senseless passing.
The images that follow are unpublished outtakes and I’ve included what Sobule said in the interview.
From the interview:
I was a weird kid. Instead of going home to play with friends I would just listen to music from my Close’N Play [record player]. It was either that or, I remember during fourth grade I would just want to watch Watergate coverage.
I had a brother six years older than me so I wasn’t just listening to teenybopper stuff. My brother had the cooler music but my parents had the Burt Bacharach, Tom Jones, the Association, the Fifth Dimension; these groups were un-cool but I secretly loved them. Whereas my friends might listen to the songs, I would spend hours looking at the liner notes and figuring out who did what and listen to the productions. I don’t think other kids would listen and think “Oh, that’s an interesting bass sound.” Whenever I was sick at home my dad would bring me a vinyl record. I remember getting David Bowie’s Station to Station when I had the flu.
You can never get over what you listen to for the very first time, that probably comes out in my music. The new record for instance, there is nostalgia in a charm bracelet. The lyrics on “My Chair” feel Mad Men, so my mind goes to “It’s Not Unusual” [Tom Jones], or Petula Clark. With Sam Lipsyte’s “I Hate Horses,” I’m thinking maybe a Marty Robbins kind of feel. I don’t want to emulate the music but I have these references some girls my age didn’t have.
I like being a storyteller. I’m bored with myself; I like to write about others. I have a lot of names in my songs: Karen, Margaret, Mary Kay. Even if it’s about me I want to put it through someone else. The music is the soundtrack to the story.
With Dottie’s Charms, this is the first time I didn’t write any of the lyrics. I didn’t do a lot of editing, but not everyone had a song form to begin with. Sometimes I would repeat a phrase to create a chorus. The song “Flight” [Vendela Vida] was really wordy. I didn’t want to cut things out so I mostly talked the words for the verse. The album was like a jigsaw puzzle, but what was amazing is how similar the writers’ vision of Dottie was. Her love life has not been great. They all gave her a tough time.
People get to a certain age and success that they stop being curious. I’m still curious because I haven’t really had that success. I’ve never done a record to catch whatever the latest sound is. It’s my love of music, eclectic-ness, and the music that I heard my entire life that seeps in. That’s what you’re hearing.
Next Up: 16 year-old Bluegrass phenom Wyatt Ellis
PREVIOUS COVERAGE on BIG EARS:
Ambrose Akinmusire: Bloomed at Big Ears (with Nate Chinen / The Gig)
Guitar Worlds of Rich Ruth & William Tyler
Instrumental Explorations with Tortoise x SML
Tindersticks