First off, I can tell you that Ariella St. Clair doesn’t do this for the money. That isn’t to say she wouldn’t prefer to make a really good living producing folk and world music concerts in Ashland.
“That” she says with a laugh, “has always been the goal.”
But in the 16 years she’s been doing this in Ashland, the 62-year-old promoter has needed to supplement her income with a day job, cleaning houses. On that subject, she likes to paraphrase folksinger Utah Phillips, whom she’s booked a number of times.
“He says, ‘To make a million dollars in folk music, you need two million dollars.” In other words, for a promoter to attract the big-ticket acts likely to turn a big profit requires an investment in hefty guarantees. Ariella’s non-profit St. Clair Productions doesn’t have that kind of cash; and even if she did, she couldn’t afford to take that kind of risk.
Hence, “My niche is the up and coming performer or the middle-level people,” she says. “I won’t be doing the Rolling Stones.” This season she is promoting 14 concerts.
“People who don’t know me assume I’m rich, but the fact is, I could be the poster child for people who do what they do for love,” she says with more laughter and a good-natured grumble.
One pay-off comes in the feedback she gets from her audiences. “Someone will stop me on the street and thank me for bringing in a particular act,” she says. “That’s what keeps me going.” She recalls an email from a woman who’d attended a concert by Native American flutist Scott August. “She wrote me that it transformed her life.”
Another pay-off ? “It’s really thrilling to be able to put on my folk music heroes,” she says, referring to performers like Odetta, Utah Phillips, Tom Paxton and Holly Near, and others she grew up listening to as a folkie fan on Long Island.
More than just a fan, though, the teenage Ariella was a wannabe in the 1960s. On weekends she’d take the train to Penn Station and the subway to Greenwich Village where she’d play her guitar, sing and jam at Washington Square Park, the heart of the folk scene. To give you a sense for the purity of her passion, she used to consider Joan Baez “too commercial,” and preferred the more esoteric types like Phil Oakes and Paxton.
In her mid-20s, after attending college in Kentucky, Ariella worked in Kansas City with an organization called “The Foolkiller, helping to produce weekly folk concerts and one-act plays. One perk, she says, was having the chance to play her music at open mikes before shows headlined by folks like Phillips, Mary McKaslan and Mike Seeger, Pete’s brother. “I ended up producing a lot of these people later in Ashland,” she says.
After a few similar gigs in the Midwest, and before she was to attend a massage school in Albuquerque, Ariella met a “traveling guru type who had his followers sell all their belongings.
“One regret is that I sold my really good guitar and threw away my song book. I told myself I’d always remember those songs, but I don’t remember any of them.”
On the road and living simply, Ariella bounced around, living in Maui for a time and then, after a 1984 Rainbow Gathering in California, settled in Santa Cruz.
“I never felt that I fit totally into the hippie world, and I never fit totally in the straight world,” she says. “I was always within the alternative world.” The acts she books these days reflect her eclectic tastes.
Following periods in Santa Cruz, the Bay Area and Mt. Shasta, Ariella moved to Ashland 16 years ago with the intention of producing concerts. Her first was Maria Muldaur, in 1995.
Though she’s backed by a board of directors and aided by a relatively regular volunteer crew who take tickets, sell raffles and man the refreshment table, this is primarily a solo act. Ariella is the details and logistics chief, the one who solicits grants, signs up business sponsors, books talent, negotiates guarantees, sets the prices, distributes fliers, places ads and lists program info on countless web sites. And, when it comes down to it—and it always does—Ariella is the one who sweats it out in the days, hours and minutes counting down to show time. (By the way, she’s on the lookout for someone to help solicit business sponsors on a commission basis.)
And, of course, the job is far from routine or stress-free. Take, for instance, the holiday “gift” she received from a performer’s agent recently. Kinobe, a master of the traditional music of Uganda had been booked for nearly half a year to perform on Jan. 14. In the run-up to Christmas, trying to line up a promotional interview with the local public radio station, Ariella placed a call—and sent an email—to Kinobe’s U.S. agent.
“She’d closed down her office for the holidays,” says Ariella. And, when she did finally get back, less than two weeks before the concert, she claimed Kinobe had “visa problems. He couldn’t get out of Africa until Jan. 20.”
It’s times like those, she says, that make her day job such an attractive counterbalance. “The exercise keeps me moving and when you’re cleaning a house, you simply do it, you leave and you’re done.” What helps too, she adds, is simply being away from her computer.
While Ariella is too modest to describe herself in this way, she provides an invaluable resource to our community. If not her, who else would produce a concert –in fact, two concerts in consecutive years—by a 100-year-old ukulele master? F
Four more concerts remain on this season’s schedule, with banjo “wizard” Tony Furtado set for Saturday, Feb. 25. For more information, please check out Ariella’s web site at www.stclairevents.com.
(Alan “Rosey” Rosenberg is a Realtor with Real Estate Depot in Ashland. You can reach him at 541-778-8949 or at alan@roseyroundtherogue.com
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