Bringing the World to the Twin Cities

Last year, with the release of Live at the Cedar: Visionaries, the first in a planned series of CDs, Malian singer-guitarist Ali Farka Touré, Sámi singer Mari Boine, American guitar legend Bill Frisell, singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco, and the famed local blues trio of Spider John Koerner, Dave Ray, and Tony Glover were among the artists sharing a disc. This diversity is what The Cedar is about—providing a home for culturally important music, whatever the genre. The man behind that vision is artistic director Bill Kubeczko.

“When I took this job, I really wanted to make my programming here as eclectic as my own taste,” says the fifty-two-year-old, sitting in his office, a small room at The Cedar that doubles as a storage closet. “One of the things I really strive for every month is a strong mix of things, so when someone comes in the door for the first time, they look at what’s happening this month and next month and go, ‘Wow. I might want to see that too.’”

That eclecticism has led to programming that’s often ahead of the cultural curve. The Cedar has hosted the Twin Cities debuts of artists such as Greg Brown, Martin Sexton, Cape Verde singer Cesaria Evora, and DiFranco—acts whose audiences now exceed The Cedar’s capacity. So far this year, shows have ranged from Finnish folk luminaries Värttinä to New York klezmer masters The Klezmatics, the Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar Festival, Jorma Kaukonen of Hot Tuna and The Jefferson Airplane, and gospel greats the Holmes Brothers.

“I have a lot of freedom to bring in music I feel is important in some places, whether it’s American, regional, Minnesotan, or some other part of the world,” says Kubeczko (pronounced cue-BEZ-coe). “If I think it’s really important, and I see the reaction of other people to this music in other places, then I feel we should be sharing that here.”

Kubeczko sent a copy of Visionaries to Ian Anderson, editor of England’s influential fRoots music magazine. “He called me immediately and said, ‘I can now die happy knowing that someone else has vindicated me by saying that you can put Koerner, Ray, and Glover [and] Ali Farka Touré on the same record. I can die happy knowing that someone else has my same vision of world music,’” Kubeczko says. “That was a real affirming statement because this guy runs an amazing magazine.”

Kubeczko’s passion for music is rooted in his childhood. Growing up in Chicago and Elgin, Illinois, he attended many Polish weddings, where the music and dancing lasted all night, and he worked three paper routes to feed his record-buying habit. With the rise of progressive FM radio in the late 1960s, he found himself absorbing a new array of sounds. “There was a fantastic station in Chicago called Triad Radio,” he says. “They would play a lot of things from Europe, a lot of prog rock at the time. They were the first ones to break things like King Crimson, The Moody Blues, and stuff like that. You could hear all of [Pink Floyd’s] Atom Heart Mother or Meddle weeks before it was released in the States.” Soon, the Grateful Dead, British folk-rockers Pentangle, and other influential bands were turning him on to the folk sounds that now regularly fill The Cedar.

Though generally referred to as “The Cedar,” the venue truly is, as the second half of its name suggests, a cultural center, committed to the people who make it special—staff, artists, volunteers, and audience members. “It’s a very organic community, and a lot of it is respect,” Kubeczko says. “We treat the artists with respect, but if they don’t treat our staff [and volunteers] with respect, they don’t come back—no matter how big of a draw they could be. We want to make a lot of people very comfortable when they get here.”

And people are comfortable. You see it in the interactions among staff, volunteers, and audience members. In the way returning artists greet staff like family. The Cedar cares for its artists in ways that sound simple, but are rare in the industry—a four-course Indian meal and a hot shower in the dressing room can mean the world to a road-weary musician.

This sense of respect and relationship-building has been central to Kubeczko’s career since he started in 1977 at Harry Hope’s, the famed Cary, Illinois, club where he served as soundman, house manager, and artist liaison. Muddy Waters was among the club’s regular performers. When nobody else would book him, Harry Hope’s had him four nights every six weeks. Later, when Waters became a hot commodity again, he remembered the club’s support. “When they wanted to do the live record, he said, ‘I’m not doing it at any of those places. I’m doing it at Harry Hope’s,’” Kubeczko says of what became the Grammy–winning Muddy “Mississippi” Waters–Live.

After leaving Harry Hope’s in 1979, Kubeczko worked at Chicago-based Flying Fish Records. Started by one of Rounder Records’ cofounders Bruce Kaplan, the maverick label was the first to take a gamble on the likes of Sweet Honey in the Rock and Utah Phillips.

Tired of the violence that was  plaguing Chicago, Kubeczko and his wife, Mag McDermott, moved to the Twin Cities in 1980. Soon after, Kubeczko got a call from local stalwart Willie Murphy, who asked him to work with Willie and the Bees, Murphy’s rising blues/R & B outfit. Kubeczko served as manager, booking agent, and soundman until the band split in 1983. Murphy called again, in 1986, to say he’d signed the local Celtic-rock band Boiled in Lead to his Atomic Theory label. He wanted Kubeczko to manage the band.

In 1987, Kubeczko took Boiled in Lead to the Winnipeg Folk Festival, where the lineup included Brave Combo, the Oysterband, 3 Mustaphas 3, and Billy Bragg—artists with whom Boiled in Lead would become fast friends and share stages. That was also the year the British consulate sent a bunch of music-business folks to Winnipeg, including Pete Lawrence, who recorded Michelle Shocked’s The Texas Campfire Tapes and started the now-legendary Cooking Vinyl label.

The gig in Winnipeg led to a European deal with Cooking Vinyl, and Boiled in Lead took off on both sides of the Atlantic. Kubeczko spent weeks at a time scheduling European tours from Cooking Vinyl’s London office.

All indications were that Boiled in Lead was going to be huge. “We were playing Reading Festival in front of 400,000 people, onstage between Billy Bragg and the Oysterband with June Tabor,” Kubeczko recalls. Then, after a string of festivals, one of the founding members decided the extensive touring wasn’t for him. Personnel and musical changes ensued, and Kubeczko rethought his plans. “I missed my family,” he says. “That made me think it was time to do the family thing and do [another] business.” In 1991, Kubeczko parted amicably with the band, but the experience made a lasting impact.

“Spending all that time in London, it was almost impossible not to be bitten by the bug to check out all these different African acts, or Madagascar acts, or [Indian] subcontinent acts,” he says. “It’s amazing—not only the level of awareness of music around London, but the rabid and enthusiastic following that happens at an underground level all the way up to a mainstream level.”

Toward the end of 1992, Kubeczko got a call from an old friend, Cedar board member Marty Keller. Three years after its founding in 1989, the organization was looking for its sixth executive director. Kubeczko applied and was hired as executive and artistic director.

He started under difficult circumstances. The theater’s stage had been replaced with a dance floor, which gave the venue a gymnasium feel. But Kubeczko made the best of it. “I thought, ‘I’m a soundman. When the lights go down, we just need to make the sound good.’ What little money we had, we put into building a bigger and better sound system. We soundproofed and fireproofed the ceiling. The room became, within a year or two, one of the best-sounding rooms in town.” And no seat is more than thirty feet from the stage, an artist’s dream.

Through bad luck and lack of business acumen, the first five executive directors had racked up, as Kubeczko recalls, more than $250,000 of debt (in contrast, The Cedar’s 1992 revenue totaled approximately $65,000), so he began running the place like a business and paying off the debt. He continues to run a tight fiscal ship and projects that three-quarters of The Cedar’s revenue will come through earned income this year—unprecedented for a nonprofit music venue.It’s not the challenges, however, that Kubeczko focuses on. He’s more apt to discuss the musical high points. Of particular note, he recalls DiFranco’s 1993 Cedar debut. “We brought in Ani for the first time to about forty-seven people who paid,” he says. “We gave away a bunch of tickets to make the room fuller. It was obvious the moment she hit the stage that ‘Wow, this is something special.’”       

“Another magic moment,” he says, “[was] when Martin Hayes, the Irish fiddle player, was touring with [local guitar wizard] Dean Magraw. John Williams, the concertina accordion player from Solas, was in town. The three of them had never played together before, and when John came onstage, the magic between Dean and John and Martin was incredible. The audience broke numerous chairs that night, jumping up on them and screaming and dancing.”

He also mentions great performances by artists who’ve since died, including Warren Zevon, who started his final tour at The Cedar when he was dying of cancer, and his close friend Frankie Kennedy of the legendary Irish band Altan. “Having Frankie come back and do one more tour before he died, that show was really an emotional one,” Kubeczko says. “What a sweet flute player. What a sweet, sweet man.”

Kubeczko admits that between state arts board cuts and the challenges of getting foreign artists into the country, running The Cedar is still a fiscal challenge. He rattles off a list of shows he’d love to book, if only the money was there—three nights with Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields, a DJ set by Mr. Scruff, and a sampling of England’s Big Chill Festival. But it’s more of an exercise in dreaming than self-pity. There’s a sense that the groundwork for moving forward is being laid.

The Cedar has recently added a development director and in February hired an executive director, allowing Kubeczko to focus on artistic direction. With these changes, he says, “we can really put our little space up alongside the Walker and the Ordway as a key presenter of this kind of music.”

There’s also a second Live at the Cedar CD due out later this year. Having already listened to 1,500 recordings for Visionaries, Kubeczko believes they have a jump on this next disc, which will feature collaborations. “We’ve put together some strange people over time,” he says, recalling when local improvisers Eight Head jammed with Altan and the time Bill Frisell collaborated with American fiddler Bruce Molsky, Senegalese kora player Solo Cissokho, and Swedish fiddler Ellika Frisell. (The two Frisells later found out they are distantly related.)

“It’s my way of sharing my work,” Kubeczko says. “Some people can write a book. I can make a compilation. And that’s a joyful thing to be able to share.” 

Bill Snyder writes about music for Mpls.St.Paul Magazine.