Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Eric Thompson & Alan Senauke-Two guitars




Here's one of my favorite flatpicking guitar album. It was recorded in the mid-eighties by Eric Thompson and Alan Senauke, two fine Bay area musicians from the bluegrass-old-timey scene. The interplay between the two guitars in this record is excellent and they made a fine selections of rare tunes, fiddle tunes of course, but also irish, finnish and greek tunes. Here's my rip from the lp:http://www.mediafire.com/?lhzwzyzm3zz

Friday, October 17, 2008

Sister Rosetta Tharpe


The weather 's turning cold this morning and listening to Sister Rosetta Tharpe singing and playing her guitar warmed me a bit... Here's 22 tracks of great gospel singing and great guitar playing by the Sister.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Rasa- Jody Stecher & Krishna Bhatt



Ok, now it's time for a real gem, a unique record that never been reissued on cd and is hard to find on vynil also... It's a collaboration between one of my favorite american musician and singer, Jody Stecher, and the indian sitarist Krishna Bhatt. The fusion of indian and american music have already been tempted on record but it doesn't sound as natural and fun as on this album. Jody Stecher have been studying and playing a variety of roots music for years and always took the best, the essence of each traditions. On most of his records, he mostly displays his skills on songs and tunes in the american vein but he studied also the indian traditions deeply.
On Rasa, we have appalachian tunes, greek rembetiko, cajun song, russian-two step ,etc...played by two masters enjoying themselves with a bunch of friends.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Bruce Hutton


Here's a Folkways lp from 1978, called "Old-time music-It's all around" by multi-instrumentist and old-time revivalist, Bruce Hutton .http://www.huttonfolkways.com/ . Hutton, much like Mike Seeger (see my post of him below), devoted his  life to revisit american rural music, and  play it on a variety of folk instruments. He's a kind of perfomer/teacher who spread the good word about all this beautiful traditions. Check his perfomance at the Kennedy Center. http://www.kennedy-center.org/programs/millennium/artist_detail.cfm?artist_id=HUTTONBRUC

Here's a few tracks from this album with a pdf document containing the liner notes...

Friday, October 10, 2008

Michael Coleman









On my last post, i talked briefly of Shanachie Records, who started by issuing lots of irish music, contemporary and of the past. Here's a fine compilation of recordings by one of the greatest irish fiddler of all time, Michael Coleman http://www.colemanirishmusic.com/history.php 
Enjoy

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

You can tell the world about this





Today i'd like to post a rare record, from a label called Morning Star Records, which was operated by Richard Nevins, also founder of Shanachie Records. Nevins is also a record collector and operated the wonderful reissue compilations of vintage recordings on Yazoo. The Morning Star label was created in the 80's and released only a few records. I'm lucky to have found one on ebay wich is called "You can tell the world about this" , a wonderful compilation of ethnic recordings from the 20's and 30's. Ten years later Yazoo Records would release on cd five volumes of vintage ethnic recordings selected by Pat Conte called "The secret museum of mankind". A few of the tracks on the lp would reappear on the cds but the rest is another bunch of unique 78rpm records from around the world.