Fox and found Filming for the music of it BY SAM PFEIFLE
	in the brook where I belong By Nikolai Fox | showing at Maine Film Office Theater | Monday, July 18 | 6:30 pm | call 207.861.8138

Odds are, you know Nikolai Fox, at least by sight. The Press Herald just ran a picture of him, actually, in their local section. It had been a nice day, and so the roving Press Herald photographer was out looking for people enjoying it — and looking to fulfill their daily quota of five weather photos per daily paper. Fox, who’s been tearing up his fiddle on the streets of Portland for the last couple years, likely made an irresistible subject.

There’s just something innately likable about buskers (that’s what you call musicians on the street, dontcha know). Perhaps they tap into our capitalist upbringing, working, as they do, for every handful of change dropped into their cases. Maybe it’s that they project a passion for their music, as though they need to play for an audience so badly that they just can’t keep themselves indoors. It’s a primal form of music, harking back to minstrelhood and a time when the only music available was that music played in person by your friends and neighbors, or, if you were rich, your personal band for hire.

Today, it’s mostly the acoustically inclined who play out of doors — the Half Moon Jug Band probably being Portland’s most noticeable and rowdy street revelers — but I’ve seen an electric band like Conifer hit the sidewalk, guerilla style, on occasion, and there are some horn players who’ll give it a go. Musicians can earn a decent meal if they aren’t too loud and the summer tourist crowds are feeling generous.

For Fox, though, it’s not so much about pocketing cash. He’s been interested for some time now in music as community expression, that old adage of music for music’s sake that shows up in my email box every time I talk about a local band maybe getting a "deal."

"I’ve been spending time in Vermont," Fox recounts by way of explanation, "and one day my buddy steps on my fiddle, but he says there’s this guy who lives down the road who’s a luthier [a maker of stringed instruments]. He’s home all the time, he says, but the phone’s always off, so we have to go over there."

Thus was Fox introduced to Ahmet Nafiz Baycu, who was born in Ankara, Turkey, 55 years ago, but who has spent the last 30 years living in Vermont playing fiddle music — what you might call old-timey, or pre-bluegrass. He believes, says Fox, that "old-time American string band music cannot be played in the right spirit if the attitude of the musician is not cultivated by a self-sufficient existence."

So, Baycu lives in a yurt.

You can see for yourself in In the Brook Where I Belong, the five-minute short film that Fox has produced and which has just been chosen as a winner of the Maine Documentary Film Competition, to be shown as part of the Celebration of Maine Filmmakers’ Program at the Maine International Film Festival, on July 18. Fox says he’s new to the film game, but after he met Baycu, "he fixes my fiddle and we start playing some music. I had a digital camera, and it has a video feature on it, and so I took some shorts, and then I get home and start throwing some things together on the computer." Quickly, Fox knew he had something.

He started thinking about a full-scale documentary. That led to him borrowing some cash from his brother, the purchase of a camera and a trusty Macintosh computer, and a whole bunch more trips to Vermont (tough gig, right?). Fox says he’s got more than 17 hours of footage now, and that In the Brook is just a taste of what’s to come.

"What I’m going to do with it will depend on what it looks like when I’m done," says Fox. "There’s still a lot of footage to do." In the fall, Baycu and his band of players called the Bogstompers are playing at the Rutland State Fair, which should make for good film, and Fox wants to capture Baycu making cider with his "real old-timey mill," which is how Baycu makes a few bucks with which to get through the winter.

The final full-length film will be called Music for the Sky, Fox says, "and the idea is: art and life can be the same if you’re willing to compromise exposure, and that these friends of mine play their music where they do and when they do and they’re not worried about playing music in a way that is palatable to the general public — they get dressed up and go out and play on the street, but they’re not really interested in playing ‘gigs’ or ‘shows’ or anything like that."

Probably the most charming part of In the Brook comes when Baycu talks about how he got started with fiddle music in the first place. Sitting comfortably in a chair in his yurt, looking friendly in a black goatee and glasses, he says, "One day I woke up and said, ‘Today, I have to buy a fiddle.’ " And so he rode his three-speed bike down to the local flea market and bought one, fully equipped with rotting cat-gut strings.

Sometimes I think it goes without saying that many of us play music just because we can’t imagine not playing music. But once I watch Nikolai Fox saying it, and Ahmet Nafiz Baycu saying it, I realize how nice it can be to hear it said.

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at sam@phx.com