KEN WALDMAN WITH ANDREA COOPER
Burnt Down House: More Alaskan Fiddling Poet Music
Nomadic Press 2001

Ken is from Anchorage and he plays fiddle and writes poetry. Andrea is from Vancouver and plays banjo, pennywhistle and flute. The format is like an ongoing poetry-music theatre (with track breaks) with traditional music and Ken's recitations.

The poems are mostly prose in stanza form; I'm not sure why people chop up prose like this, when they could just write more understandable prose, but a lot of those people, like Ken, have MFAs, so I am just left to my own perplexity. There are no gory bush plane disasters on this album, just poems about Alaska and music and it is the music pieces that shine. I like this one about a house fire ("Burnt Down House"):

...I like to think how the two guitars, mandolin, banjo, bass, and fiddle might have jumped out of their skins a moment to make the craziest most raucous caterwauling noise, enough riotous jabberwock to fuel a dozen generations of old-time string bands, before slipping back into maple to smoke hot and right, the instruments' last bright Denali festival of sound.

Joining Ken and Andrea on and off is a whole big seven piece old time band, though most of what I hear is fiddle and banjo. They play traditional American tunes, a little bit of Celtic, for instance "Johnny Cope." Ken's fiddle is always squeaky, it's always that wonderful home music that valiantly defies Grammy Awards and helps define a wonderful counter-culture, a universe of rhubarb jam and junked Volvos and zero weather. They play "Year Of Jubilo" and "Soldiers Joy" and Ken writes about violin makers, contra dances, and fiddle contests and it is all well put together.

write: gennett at gorge dot net

The Columbia Gypsy