The Yellow Room Gang got its start in, well, a yellow room.
The room was the Ann Arbor, Mich. living room of folksinger David Tamulevich and the gang was a bunch of
his singer-songwriter friends.
The concept was to form a kind of musical self-help group, says one of those Michael Hough, who performs
with Tamulevich as the duo Mustard’s Retreat.
“We can all write songs,” Hough wrote in a recent e-mail.”What we were hoping was to have our new
material analyzed by eight very different minds and to have the emotions of it judged by eight very
unique and generous heart, and to get criticism we could put to use to make better songs.”
From those living room sessions grew the Yellow Room Gang, an ensemble that brings together varying
combinations of the performers, all of whom maintain independent careers.
At the Black Swamp Arts Festival, the gang will feature Hough, Jan Krist, Jim Bizer and Matt Watroba.
Those changes a be as simple as suggestion about a specific chord. Other times they may be about the
words. A verse, Hough said, may be clear of read, but not when performed when the listener has to grasp
the meaning and feeling on the fly.
Hough said that the Black Swamp Festival is a reflection of broad based but still “under the radar”
cultural scene that so many artists and musicians inhabit. “It really is part of something bigger, Hough
said.
And with its diversity of music it “reflects and honors the diversity in our culture.”
Hough has performed in Bowling Green as part of the Yellow Room Gang and Mustard’s Retreat several times.
He and the other singers have always been warmly received. “We feel like we are among friends when we
come to play.”
That friendly ambiance fits well with the gang’s mode of performance. They play in round robin fashion.
Starting with an up-tempo tune featuring all of them, and then each in turn suggests a tune that others
may or may not join in on.
“We don’t have rules about this,” Hough explained. “All of us have good instincts, and we trust each
other implicitly.”
On the big stage, the ensemble may favor more songs using more members, on the smaller acoustic or family
stages, “we may play music that is intimate.”