How A Nice Jewish Boy from Pittsburgh Became A Spanish Folk Legend

A Musician Profile by Eric Sandberg

Michael Lee Wolfe grew up in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Point Breeze in the 70's, graduating from Taylor Allderdice high school [the school that gave the world Marty Allen and Wiz Khalifa, among other luminaries] in 1979. An avid music fan, Mike embraced what is now called classic rock, jazz and jam bands like the Allman Brothers and The Grateful dead. He took up guitar in his teens, playing with friends taking a year of lessons from Pittsburgh jazz legend Ken Karsh but...

"I wasn't a very good student so I mostly taught myself."

Mike's parents wanted him to become a lawyer but he felt there were enough of those already. After finishing his studies at the University of Michigan he spent the summer "Eurailing" where he eventually met up with a school friend living in Leon, Spain, a classical guitarist named Cy Williams.

While there, he was introduced to some people from Oviedo, the capitol of Asturias in northern Spain, who invited him to come up and party like it was 1984. Within minutes of stepping off the train in Oviedo Mike met Monica, the woman who would eventually deign to marry him. He wrote a song about it for one of his many musical projects Maraya Zydeco.

Maraya Zydeco: Flechazo [Love]

Despite only taking one semester of pass/fail Spanish 101 at Ann Arbor, a connection was made. It wasn't long before Michael Lee Wolfe started making other kinds of connections in Asturias — musical connections. In 1991 Wolfe founded Michael Lee Wolfe Productions and began a career as a successful concert promoter.

 "I brought over a bunch of American jazz, blues and gospel acts and ran a bunch of festivals," Mike wrote to me from his home in Spain. "I worked with a fair number of European artists: Celtic musicians from Ireland and Scotland, Fado [a traditional form of folk and popular music] singers from Portugal and even a terrific songwriter from France who writes in Yiddish and surrounds himself with incredible players.

I never had to worry about ticket sales. Like health care, the government picked up the tab for everything. I was really just an organizer and tour manager. This lasted until the economic crisis in 2013. I still promote some events here and there."

But Wolfe wasn't just promoting concerts and festivals, he was proving himself a capable musician who was able to adapt his skills and play with the folk and jazz musicians of Asturia.

"Being a musician with "a Jazz mentality" musical associations began to form naturally. Music is a wonderfully promiscuous endeavor.  If you stick at it, you get much better at it and it turns out I'm a natural producer type. So, if the idea is clear, it's not hard to get a new repertoire going." 

The preceding is an unquantifiable understatement. The wealth and breadth of music that Lee Wolfe [his professional name] has produced in support of and in collaboration with other artists and on his own is simply staggering. Over the past thirty-five odd years Wolfe has parlayed his love of music — playing, composing, producing and organizing, into becoming a historic figure in Asturian folk music.

Wolfe's first band in Spain, Xaréu, had made a couple of records for the small label FonoAstur, but after a falling out with the label over promotional support [a tale as old as time] the band became an indie act, with all the pitfalls that come with it. 

"Our first indie record was made with my old friend Carlos Pinto. He said he had a studio and a label but the studio was really crappy. He had one studio monitor with a busted cone and someone had to keep his finger on the multi-track recorder to keep the tape from spooling on the floor, which it inevitably did anyway. A lot of songs had to be spliced back together so it took a grueling six months of endurance and patience to complete our third album which was the first to be issued on CD."

After this experience Wolfe became determined to take control of the recording process for his work and utilized the experience he had acquired over the years, going back to making living room recordings with friends back in Pittsburgh, to become a producer. Through his concert promoting connections and his own musical efforts, Wolfe built a reputation as an efficient, reliable and knowledgeable project director with an elite musician's ear and skill.

Over the following twenty-five years Wolfe became a driving force in the music scene in northern Spain as a promoter, a producer and a musician. He has played with and produced albums for Asturiana Mining Company, Ubiña, Astura and Anabel Santiago, the premier neo-folk singer in Asturias. 

Asturiana Mining Company

In addition to adapting his skills to the folk music of his adopted homeland, Wolfe promoted his own brand of traditional roots music, blues and singer-songwriter styles as a solo artist and in a series of newer bands including Maraya Zydeco with accordionist Maria Alvarez, The Pink Rangers and the "Don't call us jazz" outfit De Miguel, Wolfe & Quintana featuring the gifted pianist Jacobo De Miguel and brilliant scat-singing percussionist Mapi Quintana.

The trio's one album Xota Pa Tres [Dance With Three or, if you go with the Portugese translation -- With Three Vaginas], co-produced by Wolfe, is an astonishing musical work that transcends labeling and description.

During his career Wolfe and his various compadres have played in Cuba, France, Switzerland, Scotland, Austria, Germany, Italy, Corsica, Algeria, Venezuela and Chile, as well as all over Spain.

"Since the economic crisis we still get out and travel a bit — play some festivals, but it's mostly a bar club life now for me."

Wolfe embraced and added to the culture of Asturian music but is also a bluesman and a jazzer at heart — music that figures prominently in his many projects. Rather than delve into a complex timeline of Mike's career in the limited space we allow ourselves here at Knock and Knowall, I want to share as much music with you as I can, sprinkled with comments from this amazing and humble musician.

"Tielve" [the name of a Parish of Asturia] is a traditional song from Patrimoniu by Asturiana Mining Company, produced by Michael Lee Wolfe and issued in 2000 by Lochshore Recordings, Glasgow, UK. Wolfe: "We are an Asturian folk band. We did the theme song "Trova del Mineru" [Mining Ballad] for the movie Pidele Cuetas al Rey." [a film about a miner who walks from Asturias to Madrid to petition the King for miner's rights].

Asturiana Mining Company performing live on Spanish Television

The hilarious "[I Put Your] Pussy on Facebook from The Last Day I Got Laid by The Pink Rangers, a splinter group from Asturiana Mining Company which performs American roots music. 

"La Islla de Brasil" and "Tabaco de Pipa" [Pipe Tobacco] Two remarkable live television performances of tracks from Xota Pa Tres by De Miguel, Wolfe & Quintana. Wolfe: "We got great feedback from the biggest jazz guys around Spain and yet my partners didn't want to see what we did as jazz, which pretty much stopped forward progress on this project."

Wolfe performing "Ay un Galán d'esta Villa" on Spanish television with Anabel Santiago "The female voice of Asturian folk" from the Wolfe produced album Desnuda.

"Louisiana," from Lee Wolfe's 2003 solo album Corners of the World, shows off his instrumental chops and versatility while the next video for "Reunion" presents Wolfe in fine singer/songwriter form.

In 2009, Wolfe released the compilation album Lee Wolfe: Xotes Asturianas 1984-2009 which featured highlights from his twenty-five years of shepherding, supporting, producing and playing Asturian folk music.

Now in his late fifties, with two grown children, and seven years into the era of government fiscal austerity, Wolfe has slowed things down a bit, but he continues to play music live regularly, most recently in partnership with Puri Penin as the roots music duo Hoot 'N Holler and still takes on the odd project with any number of the horde of people he has worked with over the decades. His unlikely musical journey is far from finished.
 
https://leewolfe.bandcamp.com/

Michael Lee Wolfe

A Select Visual Discography: