David Surette

The passing of New Hampshire guitar and mandolin player David Surette is a tremendous loss to the folk community in New England and beyond. He had the most elegant guitar style, and a way of fitting Celtic tunes to a six-string neck that made those tunes really live and breathe, as witness here on a couple of Breton dance tunes...



...and here on the O'Carolan tune Planxty Fanny Power, which has seen countless guitar arrangements in its time but none better than this one...



Our deepest condolences to his family and his friends.

Burns

Loafer's Glory

Once there was a guy named Bruce Phillips, who went by the name Utah, who wrote a lot of songs, told a lot of stories, and toured a lot of miles until heart trouble kept him off the road for good, so then he went and started a radio show. Loafer's Glory could serve as something of an antidote to the Great Vacuum currently sucking all the oxygen out of the public discourse in these parts, in particular as it offers a somewhat different account of working class America than the one currently on offer. As Utah himself always did, fine upstanding IWW member that he was. Utah's son Duncan has posted up all the episodes here.

virtual 45

Monday Posting from the Ministry of Noise

These are days that might bring out the cranky New Englander in anybody, so have some cranky Early American Folk-Punk Hymnody, and take a shot of strong water every time the phrase "shining city on a hill" spews from a Mouth of Sauron.

sundry items

Some of you may be interested in the talking heads livestreams from the Opera America conference. Bernard Foccroulle, GM of Aix, is up next at 10:45am ET today.

BBC Radio 3 is having a little Shakespeare festival, so they've posted up a new Winter's Tale, with Danny Sapani and Eve Best, and with music by Tim van Eyken (also playing Autolycus), whom the hipster folkies among you will know from before he did the music for War Horse. It's up for another ten days or so.

Next after that is Ian McDiarmid's King Lear, which should be around for a couple of weeks yet.

WNYC's Studio 360 has a segment on the new opera JFK (and also an interview with Tilda Swinton).

amicus curiae

This is really ancient history, but in the matter Spirit v Zeppelin:



versus



On the other hand, all those acoustic players Page lifted from were inventing a style out of whole cloth and history, so yes, everything is ultimately traceable to American Blues players and a bunch of Elizabethan lute dudes.

sundry items

If you've been to see The Lady in the Van, and you're in an Alan Bennett frame of mind, BBC 4 Extra is running the 1994 radio version of An Englishman Abroad, with Penelope Wilton as the actress Coral Browne and Michael Gambon as the spy Guy Burgess.

Sure, it's March, you could go see any of a gazillion fine but inevitable Irish bands, or you could check out one of the finest setar/shurangiz players extant, Iranian multi-instrumentalist Sahba Motallebi, who'll be playing this Friday at (le) poisson rouge. Show starts with our local heroes KoriSoron at 7:30pm ET, and for those beyond NYC it will be live streamed somewhere here.

A decade or so and many a touring mile from the first time we saw it at Vergennes town hall, a reworked and expanded Hadestown, Anaïs Mitchell's telling of the Orpheus myth, opens in late May, waaay downtown at New York Theatre Workshop. Here's what it looked like five years ago at the aforementioned lpr

Sunday morning broadside from the Ministry of Noise

John Renbourn 1944 -2015

John Renbourn owned a lot of real estate in my teenage record collection, whether as a soloist, as half of a duo with Stefan Grossman or Bert Jansch, or as a member of Pentangle or the John Renbourn Group or Ship of Fools. I liked a guitar player who could find his way from Robert Johnson to Robert Johnson.

undelivered

One of the UK's great songwriters, Steve Tilston, gets an interview in the NYT, if only to talk about someone else's work. Oh well. Some days we're really glad life isn't a movie where your favorite people are mutated into some dude played by Al Pacino.

The things Steve Tilston gets up to here and here.

Thursday pronouncement from the Ministry of Noise

We take a moment from our regularly scheduled programming to announce that David Surette's version of Planxty Fanny Power is the best arrangement of a Carolan tune ever. Still.

That is all.

Child 170

In honor of my new downstairs neighbor, whom I haven't yet met but who was just singing an iteration of this song -- the Dáithí Sproule version, probably filtered (slightly anachronistically) through Inside Lewin Davis, but hey, we'll take it.

Wednesday posting from the Ministry of Noise

more Halloween Week at the Noise Ministry

"...left me naught to dig his grave..."

Daddy left me reckless, Mama died and left me wild

Statesboro Blues from Chris Smither on Myspace.

home team

Congratulations to Anaïs Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer for winning Best Trad Song at last night's BBC Folk Awards!

Phil Chevron, 1957 - 2013