GUILFORD — For a musical group that turns family conflict into identity and branding, the members of the Dysfunctional Family Jazz Band demonstrate some exceptional functionality.
The band, which has released its second CD, Come Over, features longtime area musician Patty Carpenter singing duets with her daughter, Melissa Shetler, 38, now of Brooklyn.
Shetler's father, Scott Shetler, complements the women's smooth, warm harmonies, accompanying them with tenor and baritone saxophone, clarinet, mandolin, clarinet and penny whistle.
He is also Carpenter's ex-husband.
A little awkward? Not really, Melissa Shetler says.
“People love it that Mom and Dad love each other even though they split up,” she says brightly, noting that “sometimes people can love each other but not be able to live with each other.”
And the family connections keep going.
Travis Light, 20, frequently performs with the rest of his family. He is Carpenter's son with her current husband, documentary filmmaker Charles Light, who serves as the album's executive producer.
Scott Shetler's wife, Jill Gross, and his cousin, Brooke Lundy, provide harmonies. Alan McCarthy, Melissa Shetler's husband, a jazz historian by day, helps with booking and has designed the band's logo.
When the band plays family parties, people find the complicated, yet genial, family relationships comforting, Shetler says.
“We all have the goal of making music,” she adds. “That makes us tolerate quirks.”
Performing together can create some challenges, “sometimes in an eye-rolling way,” she says. “Friends will come to a show and come up to me in the intermission and ask, 'Are you mad at your dad?'”
Even performing professionally, when it's family, “it's all out there,” Shetler says - a quality her mother says “makes it very honest.”
Writing life into poetry and song
About 40 years ago, Patty Carpenter and Scott Shetler - like so many young people caught up in the back-to-the-earth movement - came to one of the communes in Guilford, the town where they first started making music.
She left for Oregon. She returned to Guilford. She moved to Greenfield. Now she's back in Guilford. Carpenter keeps returning to this place, both in real life and in the music that graces Come Over.
The songs chronicle love, the loss of a friend to suicide, Travis as the “babe on the hip,” Melissa and Alan's anniversary - the moments of a family's life.
Shetler says when the songs, mostly written over a period of several years, were assembled chronologically, “musically, they just happened to work.”
Woven into the album's musical tapestry is poetry by Verandah Porche, Carpenter's friend since the commune years in the early 1970s, whom she describes as Melissa Shetler's “second mother.”
As the album's liner notes say, the two friends “wrote their life into song” - a process that resulted in 12 tracks that marry the poetry and lyrics to music in a variety of genres, from jazz to reggae.
The title song describes the chaos and anarchy of life n the number of communes in Guilford - and the cold - as well as the spirit of pooling resources and sharing. (“Sister, I've got a jar of peaches/from the orchard, still sealed,” Porche reads. “Let's make a meal of it. Come over.”)
That same spirit went beyond the communes, says Shetler, who was born at Johnson Pasture.
It came from the native Vermonters too, particularly when the idealistic sheen of country living wore off and young commune-dwellers had to learn how to build fires in their woodstoves.
They came over, too, so to speak, and helped them, Shetler says.
The Vermonters “could have just watched them freeze, but they didn't,” she says with a laugh. “They really helped the hippies not starve.”
“They probably looked at you and said, 'That poor little girl - she's cold,'” Carpenter points out to her daughter.
Multidisciplinary music
The album, which turned out to be “a little more eclectic than the original concept,” Carpenter says, features a creative blur of musical genres - not to mention all that poetry - and thus is resistant to big-label marketing realities.
Consequently, Come Over is self-produced and self-marketed. “We're self-everything,” says Shetler.
When people say they don't know what to make of the album, “I get people to listen to it,” Carpenter says. “I tell them to close their eyes and listen to the music, and I try to win them over that way.”
Both mother and daughter now work full-time on their musical pursuits, which include various permutations of solo gigs and duets (varying in frequency from twice a month to three times a week), mostly in and around New York City.
Father/ex Scott Shetler, who has found a lucrative niche performing on Martha's Vineyard in the summer months, completes the Dysfunctional Family Jazz Band when he can.
When not performing, Carpenter has worked for years developing programs that bring music to senior citizens. Shetler has worked as an HIV educator and in theater.
Antinuclear benefit
The musical family members will return to Guilford on Sunday, Aug. 15, to commemorate the launch of Come Over with a “music jam dance party” and potluck picnic at the Organ Barn at Tree Frog Farm. The Sun Dogs will also perform.
The event is designed to raise funds for the Vermont Citizens Action Network (VCAN), which is working to prevent relicensing of the Entergy Nuclear Vermont Yankee station in Vernon.
Carpenter and her husband, Light, have long roots in the antinuclear movement since the days of Seabrook protests. “We knew we were going to do a launch party for the CD - so why not do it for a good cause?” she says.
VCAN employs a lobbyist, Bob Stannard, to represent the organization's interests to state legislators. The organization paid Stannard $71,532 in 2009, according to the charity's public 990 form, filed with the Internal Revenue Service.
The organization's treasurer, Harvey Schactman of Shelburne Falls, Mass., says Stannard's work is critical to prevent Entergy from pressuring the Legislature to take another vote in its next session to reconsider this winter's pivotal State Senate decision that prohibits the Vermont Public Service Board from issuing a Certificate of Public Good to the plant.
“You don't have to be antinuclear to want to shut this plant down,” Carpenter says.
Tickets are $20 ($15 in advance) and can be purchased online at www.dfjbmusic.com/cdrelease or by calling VCAN at (413) 625-8177.