Michael Jerling: Musical Movies

Michael Jerling is remembering the first time he heard Bob Dylan and having a good laugh.
It is a deep, hearty belly laugh that sets his whole body in motion, as if he's releasing something that's been buried for the past quarter-century.

“I didn’t grow up in a house that played folk music,” Jerling recalls. “We watched the Kraft Music Hall and listened to top 40 music. The first time I heard folk music was through Peter, Paul & Mary, and the Kingston Trio, who became a mainstream sort of music,” he said.

“Like a lot of these things you start tracing things backwards. You’d hear “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and say ‘Who is this Bob Dylan guy?’
Then you’d play his record and think, ‘My God, that’s awful, he can’t sing like Peter, Paul & Mary,’ Jerling laughs again, then turns serious.
“You’d listen a little more and it would eventually dawn on you - wow - there’s something interesting going on here. That’s what leads you on.”

Jerling was playing some guitar and writing songs while going to school in the early ‘70s at the University of Wisconsin. In 1980, he moved east and settled in Saratoga Springs, where he became something of a regular at Caffe Lena.
“He’s a songwriter with a national career that happens to live here in Saratoga,” said Caffe Manager Sarah Craig. “Michael is one of the cafe’s inner circle of performers. He’s been in the thick of things since the ‘80s and we consider the cafe to be his home stage.”

Jerling is mindful of the progression of the singer/songwriter over the past 40 years or so, sketching a “line of continuum,” as he calls it, from Ani DiFranco to Woody Guthrie.
And, it is a seasoned voice of maturity that he provides on his latest CD, “Little Movies.”
Backed with a small army of some of the more capable musicians in the region that includes Tony Markellis, Bob Warren and Teresina Huxtable, it is an instrumental accompaniment
that is the soundtrack of America - all voice and wood and storybook travels.
Jerling’s voice is the sway that wavers between the opaque sweetness and heavy melancholia.
Embedded in his voice is a storyteller’s heart that rises to the surface as if it were the voice of a people singing from a mountain top.

I have walked your wilderness/ Climbed your Tower of Babel/ Why I lean to silence/
Only time will tell/ Only time will tell

“Normally, I’d have a theme that I’m noodling around with - a phrase, a line, a story, but on
this one, I did a lot of home recording,” Jerling said.
“I’d be working with a musical idea, using a keyboard or guitar, then I would flush them out lyrically afterwards.”
The CD’s 14 tracks are supplemented by an accompanying booklet filled with lyrics, old photographs and classic movie marquee architecture, fitting the theme of the album’s title, “Little Movies.”

In addition to issuing the full-length CD, Jerling’s song “Long Black Wall” was selected for inclusion on the Smithsonian Folkways Recording “Fast Folk: a community of singers & songwriters.” The nationally released double-disc also features performances by Suzanne Vega, Christine Lavin and dozens of prominent performers.

by Thomas Dimopoulos / published in The Saratogian