Creative Connections
By Wendy Butler
Ashland, Ore.-based singer-songwriter duo Jeff Pevar and Inger Nova Jorgensen are the special guest performers for Which Way The Wind Festival’s concluding event tonight (Saturday, Oct. 15) Songs Of The Wind, which will begin at 7 p.m. and will be held at the festival’s venue Synapsis, 1675 Union St., Eureka.
Pevar is a guitarist, composer, producer, performer and multi-instrumentalist, who has worked on stage and/or in the studio with world-renowned artists including Ray Charles, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Bette Midler and Joe Cocker, among many others.
Pevar served alongside Russ Cole as a juror for this festival’s Songwriter Contest.
Jorgensen, also an accomplished sculptor and painter, formerly lived in Humboldt County. She said she’s looking forward to returning for this performance.
The two have been writing and performing music together for 17 years, and that was before they were married. Marriage is a partnership, of course, but for them so is writing music.
“Certain songwriters write numerous songs a week,” Pevar said. “I feel lucky if I can get a number of songs a year, so Inger has been really pushing us to work on our own music and really helps me solidify and focus my songwriting because we write together.
“A lot of times Inger is coming up with the lyric-center focus and then we’ll like look at the language together and maybe tweak it a little bit, but Inger is very much the poet in this songwriting duet,” Pevar said.
A recent song with working title “I’m A River” is a good example of how the two partner in a song’s composition.
Jorgensen said the words came to her while she was in her art studio.
“I was feeling a lot of angst around the times we’re in basically; it was during the pandemic,” Jorgensen said.
An excerpt: “There’s a babe crying out for a mother, a man standing on the corner carrying a sign, a woman in the hospital fighting for her life, I’m here feeling sorry for mine ...”
Jorgensen noted a connection we all have with each other even in the most dire of circumstances, and that is what she sought to express in these lyrics.
“There’s this sort of sense of loss that a lot of us have and a lot of grief, I believe, and so it’s kind of just a metaphor to that,” she said.
Pevar said the creative process whether in music or visual art cones back to the individual doing the creating.
“When I’m playing, it’s an extension of my heart,” he said. “When I play that note, even though that note is on every guitar that’s ever been made, when I’m playing it, it’s my note.” And that is comparable to Jorgensen in her art studio working with clay. “It belongs to her.”
The nonprofit Which Way The Wind seeks to engage the community in discussions about current world crises, including nuclear proliferation, global warming and environmental degradation. Since this organization’s inception in 2018, the arts have played a principal role.
Pevar and Jorgensen both feel the arts are a powerful communicator.
“Our jobs as artists are to bring beauty and life of some kind, hopefully things that are more light than dark into the world,” Jorgensen said. “When we bring art pieces or music pieces forward, it affects people emotionally and might affect them in a way that allows them to open their hearts to certain things that they wouldn’t normally be open to or they wouldn’t feel until they saw that piece of art or heard that piece of music, and so I think it all just ties into the healing of the planet.”
Pevar agreed with and added to Jorgensen’s statement about art’s importance.
Art and music, Pevar said, can be “magnets” to bring people together to be aware of and discuss heavier issues.
“It’s about all the various people who have forethought and awareness of these issues which some people do not,” he said. “It is the gathering of all the minds that can bring about change, I believe.”
Tickets available by clicking here: Order Tickets Here Or get your tickets at the door.
