Category Archives: Music

Jimmy Hutchinson’s Corachree and Gary Greene’s The Grand Imagineer

At one of my local folk clubs the other week, the compere said if he were asked to epitomise ‘traditional folk music’ he would have to choose one of the many singers like Jimmy Hutchinson. I think maybe he was … Continue reading

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Sad Daddy’s Way Up in the Hills

Sad Daddy is a wonderfully diverse and versatile band. The music they make is broadly acoustic country music, loosely falling into the now so broad as to be nearly meaningless category of Americana. But all four members are top-notch songwriters, … Continue reading

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Maya De Vitry’s Violet Light

Maya de Vitry‘s third solo album Violet Light is a superb collection of country-tinged folk music. Raised in Pennsylvania and now based in Tennessee, she’s been a part of the U.S. folk scene for 10 years now since starting out … Continue reading

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M. Ward’s Post-War

M. Ward is on a roll. With Post-War, he has released his fifth full-length CD (third for Merge), and against all odds he keeps getting better. He’s still recognizably the same singer-songwriter he was on his first, Duets for Guitars … Continue reading

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M. Ward’s Transistor Radio

Ever since his first album Duets For Guitar, No. 2 was released by Howe Gelb’s Ow Om label around the turn of the century (where it remains one of the label’s best sellers), Matt Ward has produced albums with a … Continue reading

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Various artists’ I Am The Resurrection: A Tribute to John Fahey

John Fahey was an immensely influential musician. He collected old blues records and helped revive interest in the Delta masters in the early 1960s. He started his own record label on which he recorded his own unique take on Delta … Continue reading

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M. Ward, September 30, 2006, Crystal Ballroom, Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.

One of the things that immediately attracted me to M. Ward was his muscular guitar playing. Sure, he was sometimes lumped in with the early ’00s crop of sensitive male singer-songwriters dubbed emo, for the way they often wore their … Continue reading

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An omnibus review of traditional Georgian and Russian Cossack music

Big Earl Sellar wrote this review. The former Soviet Union is one of the least explored areas in terms of traditional music, encompassing hundreds, if not thousands, of regional music genres. We have only begun to scratch the surface of … Continue reading

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Duo Temuzhin’s Altai-Khangain-Ayalguu; Ensemble Ardiin Ayalguu’s Solongo; Ensemble Temuzhin, Altai-Khangain-Ayalguu 2

Big Earl Sellar wrote this review. This is sort of a full circle review for yours truly. My first review (my “audition,” if you will) for Green Man was Tsagaan Sar’s White Moon, a disc of music from Mongolia. And … Continue reading

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An omnibus review of Central Asian traditional music

Many parts of Asia have only recently been opened to the West. Many of these lands have for much of the past several centuries been under the sway of huge empires – the Ottomans, Tsarist Russia, the Mongols, ancient and … Continue reading

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