This quartet of outstanding improvisers reimagines the American folk music tradition with great originality and feeling.

This quartet of outstanding improvisers (Ben Goldberg, clarinet; John Schott, guitars; Trevor Dunn, bass; Kenny Wollesen, drums) reimagines the American folk music tradition with great originality and feeling. John Schott writes: 'The present CD is in some measure a commentary on American folk music, a catch-all label for the many musical traditions that spring from rural Southern cultures. Artists such as Dock Boggs, Clarence Ashley, Son House, and the Carter Family, combined with Sacred Harp singing and work songs, provided a template for what song might mean. We set ourselves the challenge of writing music that could take its place among these recordings, songs that could almost have been passed along through oral tradition. We wanted to preserve the messy, knotted and tangled pictures the music presented us, and not prettify it or put quotation marks around it. We didn't want to simplify or needlessly complicate.

'Our model for the personal transformation of folk song was Bob Dylan, whose song 'Visions Of Johanna' provides the title of our record. From the outset of his career Dylan had an uncanny feeling for the strange, off-balance world the old songs inhabit. He knew that the violence of the imagery, the Old Testament justice, and the naked expressions of desire present in the songs were all but underground in the conservative '50s milieu from which he emerged. In our way we had attempted a similar re-claiming of the almost malevolent genius of bebop on our first record. Folk traditions have of course been used by jazz musicians before, memorably by Jimmy Giuffre, Ornette Coleman, and Albert Ayler. Moreover, jazz is itself a sort of folk music, mixing individual genius with an implicit history that is continually reworked.'

Analogue recording mixed to 24 bits/88.2 KHz and HDCD encoded for CD release.

Track Listing

• Gone Away
• Hollersdale
• Angle
• Long Way
• Aberdeen
• Strung
• When
• Indication
• Itta Bena
• Forty Years

Additional Details

Label: Songlines

Genre: Jazz

Run Time: 60 mins

Release Date: 10/12/99

UPC: 774355152522