“I’m kind of like the water that drains down on the vines and then it filters through the sand of James, and whatever makes it through, that’s what’s going to become something you might hear at a concert or on one of our original music albums,” Joe Makoviecki (left) said of himself and James Black, of Jackson Pines.
The New Jersey Pine Barrens, also referred to as the Pinelands, isn’t just known for its wooded trails and miles of green. It’s also the birthplace of a band whose rhythm makes for a folksy, traditional feel: Jackson Pines.
You have core member Joe Makoviecki on vocals and guitar and fellow core member James Black on bass; Cranston Dean on drums and mandolin; Max Carmichael on banjo, flute and octave mandolin; and James Herdman on the fiddle and ukulele.
“Each instrument is like a voice and voices tell stories, even when they don’t have words,” Makoviecki said. “Each instrument’s voice is just … We’ll be playing really old songs, but we’re also playing brand new things we just wrote a month ago …
“The stories of folk music are part of where we grew up and part of our family’s traditions, and it always kind of weaves together.”
Makoviecki and Black go a long way back as former members of Thomas Wesley Stern, a group that was composed of three singer-songwriters, including Makoviecki, with Black on bass. The band members went their separate ways after six or seven years, but after that, they started writing new songs. Soon Jackson Pines was formed, and Makoviecki and Black released their debut album, “Purgatory Road,” produced by songwriter and poet Simone Felice.
Last year, the duo wrapped up its first extended tour since COVID.
“I’m kind of like the water that drains down on the vines,” Makoviecki noted, “and then it filters through the sand of James, and whatever makes it through, that’s what’s going to become something you might hear at a concert or on one of our original music albums.”
Jackson Pines will perform at the Perkins Center for the Arts in Moorestown on Friday at 8 p.m.
Jackson Pines will perform at the Perkins Center for the Arts in Moorestown on Friday at 8 p.m. The event is part of the Perkins’ house concert series, a co-sponsored project of the organization’s Folklife Center and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and its partner agency, the National Endowment for the Arts. Barry Hollander of Perkins will host the pre-concert talk, and there will also be a performance by 2023 arts council fellow and singer-songwriter Valerie Vaughn.
“The sound of Jackson Pines is the sound of me,” Makoviecki told PBS’ “Here’s the Story.” ” … Without James, I play a little differently. Without me, he plays a little differently. But when we play together, we meet in the middle, and there’s a rhythmic pulse that we get with just guitar and bass that is what our sound is built from.”
The band’s records, “Pine Barrens Volume One” and “Pine Barrens Volume Two” – both available exclusively on Bandcamp – are part of a series of EPs collecting folk songs from the Pine Barrens, music that originated or made a home in the Pines between 1750 and 2013. A few years ago, the band came across a long forgotten ReverbNation page through a friend that contained about 25 songs recorded for a Rutgers professor in the 1980s by one of the founders of Albert Music Hall, Merce Ridgway Jr., and The Pinehawkers.
That archive had examples of centuries-old Pine Barrens folk songs, as well as ones written by Ridgway Jr., and his father, Merce Ridgway Sr. In April of 2024, the band met again to record another eight songs from the Pine Barrens repertoires of the Ridgway and Britton families, as well as songs collected by musicologists Herbert Halpert and Dorothea Dix Lawrence.
For information on Jackson Pines’ Perkins show, visit www.perkinsarts.org. For information on the band or to check out its music on Bandcamp, visit www.jacksonpines.com.
