The Blue Ribbon Tea Company: BRTC

Original and old time acoustic music from Spokane USA

Bill Kostelec, Kathy Kostelec , Shawn Kostelec

A note about us and our music

In our shows we play an old song sometimes called "Bed on Your Floor" with harmonies reminiscent of Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston, but if you peg us as an "old timey" band from that we'll turn around and play "At the Dairy Queen" an original that we do with electric guitars, bluesy and jazzy full of cigarette smoke and adolescent angst.  And then we might do a number with a combination of the electric bass guitar, shakers and voices, then turn around again and play a definitely non bluegrass version of "Old Joe Clark" with all the bawdy lyrics that bluegrassers won't admit to.  At least half of the songs we play are our originals, with Bill Kostelec the primary songwriter and Kathy not far behind. The songs are solid, memorable and the reason we formed the band in the first place.  The Blue Ribbon Tea Company is a songwriters band.

A song, like a poem, plays with language to say what it has to say in a strong way, but unlike poetry, it tries to connect in a more physical way, borne by the musical context, to grab the listener in the arteries of emotion and sensation.  A song has the possibility, the potentiality of working a great power upon those who hear it.  So many songs play at this with a superficiality of meaning and idea, a waste of all that power.  Not all of my songs deal with big ideas, but many of them do.  Life's so very short that using up creative energy to say "I love you yeah yeah..." seems a waste.  Not that I don't write songs of love...love is one of those big ideas. One of the points of my song "Damn You TV" is about the loss of love.  On the other hand, our social and political context is one of great crisis.  Bigger, perhaps than many people realize.  Everything changes, (another significant idea) but many changes are really degradations of nobler, better times and values.  I've lived long enough that I have honed with experience my own understanding of the world, mine... not everyone's.  As a songwriter, as a human being, citizen, fellow traveler, scarred flesh and mind, wisdom etched in pain... I often express my understanding in the songs.  Sometimes in a very political way.    "The Rathdrum Prairie Refueling Depot Disaster" is my take on the irresponsible nature of railroad executives, local politicians, and the high-priced public relations firm The Gallatin Group and the disaster unfolding over the aquifer which supplies drinking water for 400,000 people of the region around Spokane, Washington.   Follow this link to an AP story about it and the song.   http://www.utu.org/worksite/detail_news.cfm?ArticleID=209

I write and speak and sing out of my experience and can't help but do that.   I am a teacher and have daily contact with 20 somethings who have a very good grade point average.  They often can't connect with a lot of things that are of importance to me and I suspect that some of my songs will not connect with them very well either.  I guess that I am in a reflective mode of life as many of my new songs try to sort out  decades of living  that are beginning to put a little streak of grey in my beard.  On the other hand the issues that confront us all are not all that different than they were when I was in high school in the late 60's.  Some things don't change very much and my songs are not nostalgia music.   I take music and its power very seriously and I'm not going to waste a lot of words and melody lines on fluff.  Nor will I waste time on nostalgia for the activist hippie  era.  If I'm an activist now then it's because things need to be worked on now and not because I have fond memories of days gone by.  I do get political.  You will hear in these songs, nevertheless,  much more than political statements.  The human condition, its rapid rush of time and energy and change, its roads not taken and roads badly taken and all of the attendant disruptions, failures, collapses and revivals, all these things of personal and social nature come through here as well.   I hope some of  these songs will be meaningful for you.

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The Blue Ribbon Tea Company has been playing since late in 2003.  We have appeared at The MET in Spokane, played several times live on KPBX public radio, at folk festivals, at Gonzaga University and at a variety of fund-raisers in the Spokane area.   Our recordings have aired on The Nacho Celtic Hour with Carlos Alden,  and Sound Spacewith Norvel Trosst, both on KPBX Public Radio, and Dan Maher's Inland Folk of Northwest Public Radio. Dan Maher called Bill Kostelec, the lead singer and primary songwriter of the Tea Company, " a gentleman that writes with integrity!" Our  music also appears on KYRS Thin Air Radio in Spokane.  Carlos Alden of The Celtic Nots, called Kostelec, as a songwriter,   " a cross between Leonard Cohen and Phil Ochs". (and I am scared to think of what he meant by that!)

 The band.  released "Storyteller 2: And He Descended Into Hell" in April 0f 2007.  It features all originals by Bill Kostelec and is definitely a "mood" album.  A fifth  album,  partially completed at present (4-07) is called "Upon This Rock" and is an old time music album that includes a good dose of originals by Kathy and Bill that are steeped in old time sounds and themes.  These two albums together well represent the versatility and breadth of the music the Blue Ribbon Tea Company presents in our crowd pleasing shows.