Finnders & Youngberg, Colorado’s premier Americana quintet, will add yet another honor to their impressive resume: they’ve been chosen as an official showcase act for the International Bluegrass Music Association’s World of Bluegrass conference in Nashville, Tenn., this fall. They are one of just 13 acts invited to perform during the bluegrass industry’s biggest and most important week.
Festival Mozaic has announced its 2012 summer season, which will take place July 12-22 in the most charismatic spaces across California's Central Coast including Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa, Chapel Hill in wine country, Hearst Castle overlooking the sparkling Pacific Ocean, and Mission San Miguel . The theme, "In The Footsteps of Giants," will showcase a lineage of masterworks which inspired – and were inspired by – phenomenal composers over the ages.
The San Francisco Mandolin Orchestra with singers Susan Gundunas and Twila Ehmcke will be performing one of the gems of the Baroque music era, Stabat Mater, written in 1736 by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi.
The Newport Festivals Foundation has announced the lineup for the 2012 Newport Folk Festival set to take place July 28-29 at Fort Adams State Park.
This album is sophisticated urban pop played with a combination of acoustic instruments usually found in bluegrass bands. Any further references to blugrass is hard to find on the album.
A neurological disorder called dystonia is estimated to have ended the careers of at least one member of every major American metropolitan orchestra. Dystonia has claimed the livelihoods of musicians across genres including the acclaimed pianist Leon Fleisher of the Peabody Conservatory of Music, former first oboist of the Chicago Symphony Alex Klein, acoustic guitarist Billy McLaughlin, classical guitarist Liona Boyd, keyboard player Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, and others.
Luckily, Alexandra Coutinho and Rio Con Brio decided to make this a stand alone album. The plan was to feature Alexandra Coutinho on some tracks of Rio Con Brio's Caprice.
Caprice is an album by a guitar and mandolin duo playing mostly choro standards. It could be a challenge to make this fly. Rio Con Brio have pulled it off.
Watertown is an honest low cost production. All tracks but one are signed songwriter Cheryl J. Watson. Fellow musicians helped her by contributing takes from their home studios.
The expression Goat Rodeo is a description for an event where a hundred things must go right in order for the event to work. That is the concept for this cross genre production.
Magazine
Plektro dude
He found way to combine Finnish traditional music and Brasilian choro. An unique flavour of choro was born.
By Reidar Falch
Jarmo Romppanen is a 42-year-old Finnish mandolin player and a professional folk musician. He works as a performing artist, composer, arranger, producer and music teacher.
Jarmo Romppanen
In 2007 he released his first solo album called Solmogen, "It includes some mandolin and mandola solos, some duos and my groups as well. My Finnish-Brazilian ensemble Nordic Choro released the debut album in the summer 2010. Mainly I´ve been recording, doing gigs and teaching music during the last decade."
"Lately I´ve been composing, arranging and practising some new stuff for my coming albums. Now I´m working on my second solo album, which I´m also going to play and record completely solo and live with my mandolin and my Finnish mandola," he says.
Finnish mandola? "The name is partly a joke. We all know, that it seems to be the law of the jungle, how the people name the different kind of mandolin instruments. My mandola is just builded in Finland, it has alto tuning plus low G, so it´s near to octave-mandolin. I do the accompaniment usually and sometimes second voices on my mandola, I don´t like to play melodies on it."
Jarmo is excited, "I think I´m just about to find my way to express myself in playing nordic folk music as solo, finally. My compositions for the second solo album are influenced by Swedish triplet polskas, Finnish-Carelian music, American old time music and mandolin duo-styles. I´m really excited to go in the studio, because you never know, what the result will be."
Jarmo Romppanen
There is more work done, "I´m also working on the albums of the groups Rosenfink and Kouon Frouva. The repertoire for Rosenfink consists mostly of Finnish-Swedish traditional music. Kouon Frouva performs so called love-folk with Finnish lyrics."
Jarmo is co-operating with Ääniä Records and is going to share the studio as a part of his working room, "The year 2011 is very special for me. I was admitted a scholarship by the Arts Council of Finland (the National Council for Music)."
"The scholarship gives me the economic freedom to concentrate composing and recording these albums I am planning to do. I know one year is a short time, and after it I´ll have to do more teaching of course to make my living," he says.
Jarmo started with a classical guitar at the age of 10, "but I changed it into an electric one and started to play hard rock as teen. When I became grown-up, I got interested in playing acoustic music again. So I found my instrument relatively late. But I really got hooked on the mandolin, applied to study the instrument seriously and I finally received my Master of Music degree from the Sibelius Academy Department of Folk Music in 2002."
There are many influencies, "Brazilian choro and Jacob do Bandolim, Hamilton de Holanda and many others in Brasil, the old Italian masters, David Grisman & Andy Statman and the other great ones in the States. But I´ve got my roots in Nordic tradition, especially in the fiddle-tradition, so I love to play some nice hamboes, fast polskas and Swedish triplet-polskas as well."
"I started to listen to choro in the beginning of the 1990´s, when the Acoustic Disc/David Grisman released these two great albums; Jacob do Bandolim: Original Classic Recordings Vol. I & II . I also studied choro mandolin-trills as a part of my studies later in the 90´s. But I got a chance to play choro more seriously, when we started with Nordic Choro in 2008," Jarmo says.
Jarmo ended up composing choros with his own approach, "My first thought was to find similarities between Finnish (Nordic) polkas and Brazilian choro tunes. Some choro waltzes also almost sound like they could have been composed and played in the Nordic countries."
"So, I took two traditional Finnish polkas, changed the rhythm into a choro syncopation and composed 1-2 parts more to the polka to get the whole songs. These two are half-traditional pieces and you can find them on Nordic Choro album. They are called Backas the Better and Blomqvists Jump," Jarmo explains.
Nordic Choro - Fabio de Oliveira, Anders Perander and Jarmo Romppanen - Photo by Eero Grundström
He continues, "After listening 10-15 years to Brazilian choro some new ideas just began to come in my head. I had to try the ideas on my mandolin, and suddenly I had a few nice temas and motives for my own choro tunes. After developing temas I got eight new choro composition, which I´m still glad about!"
"We´d love to be touring more, but we´re lacking a good manager so far. That´s the reason why all professional Finnish folk musicians have so many bands, to get enough gigs all together." Jarmo is no exception, he is also involved with Rosenfink, Kouon Frouva, Lieto and Plektronite.
Jarmo Romppanen
About Rosenfink he says, "We´re expecting to release the Rosenfink debut album in the end of this year. We´ve been working on Finnish-Swedish archive material, arranging it and trying to bring it up, so that all the people in Finland could notice how beautiful music we have in this Swedish-speaking area."
About Plektronite, "Yes, I´m missing the Plektro dudes. We all have small kids right now, and we´re living in different parts in Finland. We have enough tunes for our second album, so I´m hoping to get into a studio within two years with Plektronite also."
Jarmo thinks the Finnish mandolin scene is doing fine, "The instrument is quite rare in Finland nowadays, even though it was the most popular one back in the 1920-40s. People played mainly the popular songs, schlagers, between and during the World Wars. The mandolin was cheap to buy and easy to carry, it supposingly gave joy to people during the hard times."
The interest in the acoustic music is growing now, the older players want to go futher on their playing and we´re going to have some young and educated mandolinists as well in the future," Jarmo finishes.
Jarmo Romppanen - 10-string mandolin
Nordic Choro - The wave machine is starting
Nordic Choro - Happy birthday to me!
Radim Zenkl, the Czech-born, California-based magician of the mandolin has been on the road and onstage since he arrived in the USA more than twenty years ago. He recently swung through my hometown of Portland, Oregon and performed his eclectic solo show to a packed house of enthusiastic fans.
Rio Con Brio started out to make one CD. As they recorded tracks, they realized they had two albums on their hands. One is their third choro album, the other is the debut of fado singer Alexandra Coutinho.
If you were there, you’ll agree that the Baltimore host team put on an excellent convention for our quarter-century landmark. With so many people attending, the energy level was high. If you weren’t there, you want to know what you missed. Here are some highlights.
James "Yank" Rachell was the primary exponent of blues mandolin, although he also played guitar, violin, harp and sang expertly well.
To create a violin with the same characteristics as the 1704 instrument known as "Betts," Dr. Sirr worked with professional violin makers John Waddle and Steve Rossow of St. Paul, Minn. They used a CT scanner and a CNC router. Here are a few photos.
Recently, Cheryl Watson released a CD called Watertown. She unplugged her Fender Tele and turned to acoustic guitars. She traded a guitar for her first mandolin. Chloe, her cat, listen with the eyes closed when Cheryl plays the mandolin.
International mandolin super-group revives the name and repertoire of a 1930's Polish Jewish mandolin orchestra. And this September, they took the music back to its source. Full story and notes from the tour by one of the Ger mandolinists.
Alon Sariel is young, gifted and busy. He is one of those remarkable guys from the Beer Sheva Mandolin Orchestra in Israel. This Friday he appears in Cambridge, UK, to teach in the Cambridge Performance Masterclasses.
Conference. College. Genre bazaar. Horizon expander. Mandolinirvana. Musical family reunion. An ear-stretching, soul-filling, life-altering immersion experience. Surely, we must be talking about the Mandolin Symposium.
Nigel Forster is a luthier. He has a lot of thoughts about his trade. One book is not enough space for his thoughts. He willingly shares more thoughts.
Jim Richter is inviting all to his 1st annual Jim Richter rock-n-blues mandolin camp. He hopes it'll approach mandolin instruction from a perspective more immediately beneficial and useful than some workshops. He also has top ten advices for beginners.
"Enjoy." This quiet word, unheard by the expectant audience behind him, flew straight from the conductor's lips to the hearts of 35 mandolin, mandola, and mandocello players. Instantly, the chemistry in a Chelsea rehearsal room in the middle of New York City was altered - a subtle change, but the perfect one.
Raffaele Calace released his mandolin method in 1910. Mike Marshall and Caterina Lichtenberg have reissued his work in English, 100 years later.
He found way to combine Finnish traditional music and Brasilian choro. An unique flavour of choro was born.
Los Hermanos Cubero, The Cubero Brothers, live in Lliçà d'Amunt, a small town near Barcelona in Catalunya, Spain. Combining their folk music with bluegrass is a natural consequence of their influences.
French rock star Feloche has created his own cajun universe. It's rooted in his Urban Bajou.
"Oi, Druzil here," he presents himself, "The Dread Pirate Druzil is the resident mandolin, banjo, and tin whistle player in the world travelling band of raving drunken lunatics and purveyors of fine clusterfolk known as the Dreadnoughts."
Tim O'Brien is a traveller. He wants to get off the road and write and produce more.
Mandolin Cafe was launched November 18, 1995. The number one mandolin site is celebrating 15 years.
The education of the fashionable girl is not complete nowadays until she has secured a certain degree of proficiency in playing upon one or more of the popular string instruments.