I have a aunt and uncle who host little jazz and folk parties in their house in Alameda. Entirely paper-mail and word-of-mouth driven.

I'll forward this link to 'em, but somehow I doubt they'd want to add a layer of complexity.

"An Internet search of the term "house concert" produces 15,900 hits."

I love how this is becoming a standard graph in newspaper trend stories - and that they assume their readers have enough knowledge of searching to judge whether this is a large number or not...

House concerts keep "skipping" back into the news every so often, but I'm glad to see that this appearance is getting wide weblog attention.

The thing about house concerts is that not only can you ATTEND one, you can PRESENT one pretty easily. That's what makes the phenomenon robust.

Here is another link: http://abcnews.go.com/wire/SciTech/reuters20030203_77.html

There is a guide to putting on your own concert at

http://houseconcerts.org

and more info at

http://folkmusic.org

Reminds me of the Czech Living Room Theatre, immortalized by Tom Stoppard in Cahoot's Macbeth: "Everybody, who wants to have Macbeth at home with two great and forbidden Czech actors, Pavel Landovsky and Vlasta Chramostova, can invite his friends and call us. Five people will come with one suitcase." http://www.buedg.daig-kastura.de/stoppard/stopp2.htm

Looks like I could still have a career as a rock star after all!

Where's the news? This was an NYT story 3 years ago.

Plus, the link opens up a story about skipping stones.

I'm confused.

Steve, who won't be skipping the Stones tomorrow night

I'm not a huge fan of folk music, but this is a brilliant idea. I'm sure it'll be outlawed soon, as a bunch of guitar playing granola eaters are clearly a gross violation of Homeland Security, but a great idea nonetheless. :)