Top 10 Roots

by Mary Armstrong

Bradley Walker loves country music, real country music, the take-it-or-leave-it kind that's not designed with crossover in mind. His deep, sweet voice belongs in the honky-tonk; his taste for accompaniment runs to acoustic instruments and bluegrass singers who have worked the country circuit. The collection is good listening for country lovers tired of lukewarm pop.

Yes, the cantina sound is intended to get the whole room singing along, be it simple and sentimental or rabble-rousing. Downs changes her vocal sound completely to fit each song — from low, rich and powerfully sad to high, thin and sassy. Her arrangements are thoroughly Mexican, but clearly made by musicians who, like Downs, have trained outside the tradition and have returned for the love of it, bringing their polished skills and new ideas with them.

The liner notes explain it thusly: "Instrumental explorations of Chassidic music." Statman (clarinet), Larry Eagle (percussion) and Jim Whitney (bass) take old melodies and make them 21st-century new music. "Merciful One, Answer Us" is an aural journey in which percussion is as important to setting the tone as Statman's masterful clarinet improvisations. Very spare arrangements are part of the tradition, but a player who can ornament the spaces with Statman's delicacy and imagination must also be counted as an innovator.

That's Frontera as in the region in Spain where flamenco was born. Great-nephews of legendary guitarist Diego del Gastor, Paco de Amparo and Pepe Torres gathered with Raul Rodriguez and other players of the pure stuff to create this collection of their uncle's music. They shun nuevo flamenco's tarting-up of tradition; their biggest innovation is adding Rodriguez' steel-string Cuban tres to the usual nylon-string gathering. Hands and feet, cleanly played guitars and wailing voice stir listeners, as they have for centuries.

In the late 1800s, when New York was overwhelmingly Irish, Ed Harrigan wrote clever lyrics that documented immigrants' daily lives. Mick Moloney worked with the sheet music to breathe life into these humorous vignettes. Top-notch traditional players join Moloney to render the old songs with energy and grace.

McSherry's Irish pipes and whistle are perfectly matched to O'Connor's fiddling, the two often gracefully twinning a complex melody so closely they sound as if they are playing a single strange and wonderful instrument. The young Irishmen have composed new material in the tradition, gathering far Celtic nations like Galicia and Asturias and wandering into neighboring Castille for inspiration as well. Guitar, bouzouki and bodhrán fill in the bulk of the spaces. It's modern and energetic, but definitely not plugged-in.

Billy Joe Shaver's "Live Forever" lends a phrase to title the CD and sheds its original lugubrious treatment for an uptempo bluegrass setting that suits the hopefulness of the lyrics admirably. Marty Raybon plays Porter to Bradley's Dolly on the old weeper "Holding on to Nothing" — honky-tonk lives!

Perhaps it is his legacy, being the actor son of actors Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, that makes Guy Davis one of the few modern bluesmen to master a number of styles. With a nod to the jug bands, he's made hokum and old-time banjo an effortless part of his repertoire, along with the more mainstream fingerpicked acoustic blues, all juicy and fiery and big fun.

The bluegrassers with a taste for playing jazz called their stuff new acoustic music, and for years rarely featured vocals. Now head-turning cellist Rushad Eggleston has to share the limelight with the subdued jazz delivery of singer Aoife O'Donovan as they remake American roots music.

Montreal's Penny Lang is huge in Canada and nearly unknown in the States. A survivor of the Great Folk Scare of the '60s, she puts a new spin on some of the new songs from that time, as only someone who has been singing them for 40 years can.

(m_armstrong@citypaper.net)