The ReMemberers Will Maintain an Ancient Tradition in Denver

Before there were screens to keep us occupied, there was music. From minstrels in the Middle Ages to Bob Dylan, music has served as a way to while away the hours as we commune with others around shared stories given weight by sonics.

And there’s still music today, obviously. But in the new millennium, music has also become very commercialized, with big tours that cost millions to produce at the expense of environmental health (we’re looking at you, private-jet owners). The scramble to secure tickets for these tours has even landed Live Nation and Ticketmaster in federal lawsuits. Luckily, local scenes still thrive on the bare minimum, proving that people are always willing to show up as long as the talent and stories are there, regardless of fancy lighting or choreography.

The members of the ReMemberers, a band out of the Berkshires in Massachusetts, are all about maintaining the tradition of telling stories set to music. And that’s just what the trio will do at Swallow Hill Music on Sunday, October 5.

The concert is also somewhat of a full-circle moment: Mandolinist Alex Harvey, who attended East High, took classes there as a kid. “Some of my first music teachers were [at Swallow Hill]. I grew up in Colorado and left in the late ’90s,” he tells us, “and I’ve been coming back and forth ever since.”

Along the way, he became enamored of folk music, particularly by what he calls the “folk vernacular.”

“It means that it’s not just music, it’s a folkloric system that’s coming from a place or some kind of heritage,” he explains. “What gets me going — either as a player or programmer or listener — is when the music is transporting me to a place with history, a place with ancestry, a place where the landscape and the social scape is creating some kind of expression of what it means to be a human there.”

This is where poetry and music converge, he says, offering Leonard Cohen as an example, as well as Appalachian folk traditions. It’s through such tunes that we can resurrect moments and even people long past. “My personal engagement with music has always been to sort of shake hands with the dead,” Harvey says, “to be in a living conversation with people who are no longer there.”

He formed the ReMemberers with other like-minded musicians, Violet Southard and John de Kadt, who worked with Robert Bly, Krishna Das and Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead. “John comes from this incredible tradition,” Harvey says. “Robert Bly is an amazing poet from the middle of the twentieth century who instigated a huge revival of mythological storytelling and John played percussion with him and learned storytelling from him.”

Harvey had worked in film production for years before deciding he wanted to return to performing. “I was finding this desire to go back to the very simplest, most elemental form of sharing stories,” he says. “What is the earliest form of cinema, of projecting a story into the back of someone’s skull? And as we all know, it’s sitting around a fire with a great storyteller, bringing us to a space in between worlds. … I was ready to see what distilling a story really means.”

Southard, who sings in several different languages and is a sound healer, invited Harvey to bring his mandolin to a gathering with de Kadt about three years ago, and they all ended up playing music and sharing stories together. “It was one of those things where that one night, we all found this incredible rhythm with each other. And, I mean, it was sort of amazing,” he says. Just as amazing, he and Southard had the same idea for the group’s moniker, with the exact same spelling. “That was a total polygenesis,” Harvey says. “There was a lot of kismet with all of that.”

The show at Swallow Hill is part of a Colorado tour that will see the musicians reviving a Scandinavian folk tale whose roots lie in East India, covering the tale of The Lindworm. “We sit on the ground and we perform a feature-length story,” Harvey says. “People sit down and can’t imagine that we’re going to just tell a story with a variety of songs holding it together for ninety minutes. It works as a theater piece as well as a devotional, healing-music-type piece. It works as a straight-up musical experience.”

He hopes people can feel “impressed with themselves” that they’re immersed in a story “without the help of a screen or any major visuals,” he adds.

When de Kadt first told the tale of The Lindworm, “we were weeping by the end,” Harvey says. “There’s longing and impulsivity, there’s avoidance, neglect, shame, resilience, redemption, all the great stuff you want in a myth.”

“The story follows a secret, basically something that’s been hidden away. It’s a worm that was attempted to be discarded by the royal family, and then the worm grows into an out-of-control problem in the wilderness that then has to be dealt with,” he continues. “And then there’s this powerful, amazing shepherdess character who brings an earth-bound wisdom and day-to-day pragmatic wisdom into the crisis.”

No matter how long ago they were conceived, such tales still resonate today. “It’s just so recognizable along every political line, social line, along every demographic,” Harvey says.

“There’s the desire from these mythologists for us to actually engage on an incredibly deep level with these stories. But it’s sort of hard to do when you’re just reading it. But when you’re in this performance that’s kind of like this ‘mind cinema’ with sound and with rhythm and with change and humor and all these different great tools, it really allows us to go much deeper into what these myths are there to teach us. … These myths, they’re kind of like a dream, and anyone will tell you, from Jung on down, that every single dream is just an aspect of you.”

The ReMemberers, 6 p.m. Sunday, October 5, Swallow Hill Music, 71 East Yale Avenue. Tickets are $26.74-$31.89.