Fleeting MomentA Blend of Bluegrass Newgrass, Gospel and Traditional Music
Marcus Caudill - mandolin * Ashleigh Caudill - bass * Jessica Caudill - fiddle * Kara Caudill - guitar Contact:
Profile by Bill Donaldson, from Pow'r Pickin', October, 2001There is a wonderful phenomenon called the family band that appears in bluegrass and gospel probably more than in any other area of music. Colorado boasts an excellent example of the bluegrass/gospel family band residing in the Western Slope town of Montrose CO. That band is Fleeting Moment, comprising parents, Kara and Marcus Caudill, and their progeny, Ashleigh, and Jessica. Son Lucas also appears with the band, but is currently off to school in Denver CO and playing with the contemporary Christian band, Big Fish Story. Unfortunately, Lucas couldn't join us to interview for this article. Fleeting Moment could almost have been called the "accidental" bluegrass band. The Caudills insist they never set out to form a band and record CD's. It just sort of happened that way. The seeds of the music began several (discreetly unnumbered) years ago where Kara and Marcus grew up just outside of Baltimore. Kara says, "We fell in love playing music in high school. Mostly religious stuff - and then really inappropriate stuff when we were camping. You know, all that murder and mayhem stuff in bluegrass." Marcus grew up on bluegrass and old time music. "My uncle's a bluegrass player," Marcus says. "Of course I never really appreciated that until I was a late teenager. But there was always music around." Marcus explains how their church youth choir had only two members. "Kara was one of them and the minister's daughter was the other one." So to stir up more interest, they organized a folk group. Eventually this folk group evolved into Kara and Marcus and her brother, sister and two of his cousins. Everybody sang and picked a little guitar. "We were doing mostly country and then started doing a fair amount of bluegrass." "And then we've just played ever since in some form or fashion." But what really gave them the push into bluegrass was in 1972 when Marcus went to a festival at Watermelon Park in Berryville, VA. He paints the picture, "I'd go and sit out on the Shenandoah River, and the stage was facing the river, and just listen to bluegrass music for four or five days. And from the first time I did that I said I need to do this." Marcus plays mandolin and guitar with the band and is the driver of the motor home. The kids caution us he has also been known to pick on the banjo, whereupon they will warn him to "Put the banjo down and move away from it slowly." Kara sings, plays guitar, and acts as the business manager for the group. Ashleigh, age 17, plays acoustic and electric bass and sings. She also pitches in with flute and penny whistle on the Celtic tunes and plays guitar, mandolin, and piano. Rumor has it she is also learning to play banjo. Jessica points out, "Ashleigh plays everything. She actually plays sousaphone!" "Well, I half play sousaphone," Ashleigh protests. She explains how she played in pep band without really knowing the notes on the instrument, but managed to fake it by listening to the guy next to her. And then one day the other sousaphone player was having his wisdom teeth removed and Ashleigh was left on her own to sink or swim. Or, in this case, toot. "But Jessica plays a French horn!" Jessica, age 14, is already an accomplished fiddler and has been performing with the family since the age of seven. Both girls play in the school marching band and jazz band. Marcus' work as a consulting engineer interferes "horrendously" with the family's music. "We just have to be careful that when I'm traveling we have to make sure I'm back in time," Marcus explains. "I think it was last December, we were getting ready to do our Echoes From The Canyon CD release party and I was back in Philadelphia working as an expert witness in a lawsuit between two power producers." He was scheduled to testify on Wednesday, but wasn't called until Friday morning. "I got done at 11 o'clock, caught a plane at noon, got back to Montrose CO at 4 o'clock, got ready for the concert, and walked on stage and played. Right on cue." Kara adds, "Several times this summer we were playing at churches in the Denver CO area and he would fly into Denver CO on Saturday, play on Sunday and fly right out again." Kara worked last year as a part time elementary school music teacher, but this year is dedicating her time to managing the business of the band. "I enjoyed (teaching) but I felt like I couldn't put my energy into the music." And the kids are really into the music as well. Jessica says, "The best part about it is getting to play and travel and stuff. It's been a great experience. Jamming is way more fun than anything. Not all kids get to travel around the country all summer and play music." Jessica tells of their summer adventures. "This summer we were on tour. We had two days extra we could spend on our way to Virginia. We spent one day in DC and then said 'We are tired of this.' Our kind of monument is more like the beach." Assateague Island was their beach of choice, where, as Jessica explains, the wild ponies weren't all that wild. "We watched our neighbors camp get ransacked by a bunch of ponies. They went and ate their dinner off the table and the kid was crying because the pony was eating his Cheerios." Ashleigh adds, "And there was a goat that followed Jessica and me down the beach. It chased us. The ponies and the goat chased us down the beach. We're going to write up these stories for our web page." "And," Ashleigh says, "we saw the guitar player from REM walking down the street." Ashleigh tells of the old time jam at the country store in Todd, NC. "We heard about this old time jam and thought, 'Oh that'll be cool.' So on the way we're reading this thing that says songs prior to 1938 only. That's before Bill Monroe! And they're like, 'We'll do three more songs in D and then we'll move to A!' And I'm like NO! Because we've been playing for an hour in D." Jessica adds, "They ran us off. They told us we couldn't play bluegrass there. Only old time." "And we were sitting there in our CBMS t-shirts," Marcus says. Kara laughs, "They told us bluegrass is just old time music played too darn fast and too darn loud." Marcus tells how Lucas caught the bluegrass bug after Marcus had bought a couple of bluegrass tapes from a bargain bin in Idaho Falls. One was Bill Monroe, Orange Blossom Special, and the other was a collection of no-names. "Lucas got a hold of them and would listen to them going to sleep at night." And then one day, at the ripe old age of nine, Lucas announced he wanted to learn to play the fiddle. Marcus and Kara were skeptical, of course, but fortunately Lucas persisted and got his fiddle lessons. "He just kind of took off with it fairly quickly." So the family trio started playing in jams and local festivals, and then the girls wanted to join in. Before you knew it there was the Caudill Family Band. But when it came Ashleigh's turn, she had to be a bit of the rebel. "I thought, hmm, what do they NOT want me to play. I thought of the biggest, most expensive, wildest, most un-bluegrass instrument I could think of." She gets a demonic look on her face. "Piano!" Grandmother chipped in a bought Ashleigh the piano which she played for about three years. She wants to freshen up her chops now for the college entrance exam where she intends to major in music at North Texas. "Where they have a good jazz program," Ashleigh says. "You can relate everything from jazz. Rock, bluegrass, anything else. It all comes through jazz." "One of the first memories I have of playing together as a family band," Jessica tells, "was the time we had this 'cultural night' over at North Side. We thought we signed up to play a song, but they signed us up for a room for the whole evening. We had been learning to play the Battle Of New Orleans. We played that song a lot that night." Jessica is still focusing on surviving high school, but she, too, is getting as much music as possible in preparation for college. In 1999 the Caudill family decided to do some recording. "When we initially decided to do our first recording," Marcus says, "we just said at a minimum what we want to do is go in and record a good demo. We would just pick our best four or five songs and see how it goes. Then we spent a couple days and came out with six songs that came out fairly well." That was the impetus to go back and complete the first CD, the eponymous Fleeting Moment. The second CD was equally unexpected. At the release party for the first CD there just happened to be a representative for the National Park Service. He told the Caudills the Park Service was doing a commemorative project for the Black Canyon, the tunnel, and the National Park. He loved their music and he loved bluegrass, and asked them to write some songs about the Black Canyon for the Park Service to sell at the Visitor Center. "And we laughed," says Marcus, "because none of us had ever written a song." Kara adds, "It never occurred to me that we could sit down and write anything. I couldn't even sleep that whole night." The project was okayed by the Park Service and got under way. But according to Kara, "It was a stressful time. The funding was shaky. The Bluegrass Society helped out with a grant. It was an interesting experience. We had to help raise funds for the project." Naturally the Park Service had no concept of how long it takes to create a CD. They had a short time frame. And no up-front funding. Marcus says, "We passed the hat at concerts to raise funds for this and went to a bunch of different organizations, various banks in the community that give funds to not-for-profits, the Convention and Visitors Bureau, and CBMS." But they did indeed come up with some songs. Kara woke up late one night and composed the modally haunting title cut, Echoes From The Canyon, before daylight. Jessica says, "I had written a part of a poem about the Black Canyon on one of our moonlight hikes out to the canyon. It was just our family and a bunch of our friends. We'd go during the summer when the moon was full. We'd sit the and watch the moon rise over the rim of the canyon and it was so cool. And Ashleigh and me and our Pastor's daughter wrote a really stupid song about purple polka-dotted underwear, and that was our inspiration. I came home and wrote a poem about the moon and the canyon." That poem became Jessica's contribution to the CD, the rousing song So Far From Land. Ashleigh muses, "We've come a long way." "Once we had dresses that matched," says Kara. " We wore them once and everybody said never again." Ashleigh concurs. "They were hot and they were ugly." "But cheap," Jessica says. "And they were cute," Marcus argues, "but Lucas didn't look nearly as good in the dress as you girls did." TOP |
