David Wax Museum Plays Two Shows for Wellfleet Harborfest

By: iO Staff, June 14, 2012

ERIK JACOBS/ANTHEM MULTIMEDIA - David Wax's journey from mid-Missouri to the back roads of Mexico inspires the Museum’s blend of traditional Mexican and American folk music. Homeschooled by her father on a small farm in rural Virginia, Suz Slezak was reared on traditional Irish, classical, old time and folk, lending her fiddling and harmony vocals to the band's distinctive sound.

David Wax Museum, the Boston Music Awards 2010 Americana Artist of the Year, performs at the Wellfleet Preservation Hall on Saturday, June 16 as Payomet Performing Arts Center’s special Harborfest Weekend concert. Due to the intimate nature of the space and demand for this show (DWM sold out the Congregational Church last year) there are two shows, at 5 PM and 8 PM.

Hailed by TIME.com as one of its "Ten Acts That Rocked SxSw," David Wax Museum fuses traditional Mexican folk with American roots and indie rock to create an utterly unique Mexo-Americana aesthetic. Combining Latin rhythms, call-and-response hollering and donkey jawbone rattling, the duo has electrified audiences across the country and are “kicking up a cloud of excitement with their high-energy border-crossing sensibility” (The New Yorker).

The quijada (donkey jawbone) for percussion and a jarana (a small, Mexican guitar) in addition to acoustic guitar and fiddle gives David Wax Museum its signature blend of Americana and Mexican folk.

For the new album Everything Is Saved, the band also brings onboard tapan (Greek percussion instrument), morin khuur (Mongolian horsehead fiddle), viola, accordion, chord organ, lap steel, clarinet, trombone, saxophone, and vibraphone, making for an eclectic whole rooted in traditional sounds.

David Wax studied Mexican history at Harvard and on a subsequent fellowship, while Suz Slezak grew up in bluegrass-rich Appalachia as a violinist before becoming a self-taught donkey jawbone player.

"I made my first trip to Mexico in 2001 to work with an NGO as part of the American Friends Service Committee. We were in an indigenous village in La Huasteca where I first heard this regional style of central Mexican music. I learned new songs and instruments," says Wax.

Lest David Wax Museum be pigeonholed, Wax also acknowledges the influence of Americana artists like Ryan Adams, Uncle Tupelo, The Avett Brothers (with whom the band has toured), and the Low Anthem. In fact, the latter band covers an early David Wax Museum ballad "Let Me Rest."