In early 1992, I reviewed the Horse Flies, a fabulous band from Ithaca, N.Y., for the Plain Dealer. That Peabody’s Down Under show is one of a handful I vividly and fondly recall from reviewing scores of shows for the PD and the Akron Beacon Journal in the '80s and '90s. Since then, the Horse Flies played a folk festival in Kent some five or six years ago. They didn’t play in Cleveland.
Now, the Horse Flies are finally making their return. They’re scheduled to perform at Beachland Tavern as part of a mini-tour also touching down at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York. and the Elk Creek Café + Aleworks in Millheim, Pennsylvania.
The Horse Flies are clearly back on their singular and moving case, performing music from the great 2008 album, Until the Ocean, the 1991 MCA release Gravity Dance, and Human Fly, an album Rounder released in 1987. All in all, the band has released seven albums since it formed in the early ‘80s. It’s begun to think about another one, which it will release on its own Pest Control label. Independence is critical.
“Put up a website, you get a vendor who’ll handle the stuff; the guy is right here in town, he comes out, he grabs handfuls” of CDs, supplies Amazon and CD Baby, “and they supply everything else, including iTunes. It’s a lot easier.” No more major labels for this band, vows Judy Hyman.
In a wide-ranging phone interview from her upstate New York home, Hyman, who is the daughter of jazz pianist Dick Hyman, depicted the Horse Flies as a fiercely self-sufficient band whose members are engaged in numerous musical side projects but find special satisfaction in this group.
The Horse Flies broke up in 1997 following original bassist John Hayward’s death from cancer, she says. But in 2002, an agent in Germany set up a tour; at the same time, the Telluride Blues Festival requested a reunion, so Hyman, Jeff Claus and Richie Stearns –the other mainstays – commandeered “a friend of ours to play the bass and sort of started back at it. We [also] made a bunch of new repertoire for that trip, a bunch of which is on the new album, and we stayed at it for a few years that way. Then... we found the bass player of our dreams, who happens to live right here in town.” That’s Jay Olsa, who also plays in Plastic Nebraska (an Ithaca, New York, band), along with recent Horse Flies enlistee Rick Hansen. (The upstate New York alt-rock/alt-folk scene seems quite vibrant: Olsa and Horse Flies' Claus also work in the band Boy With a Fish.)
