Word: banjo
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People spend a lot of breath telling other people (if the subject comes up) that there is a boom in folk music. This is correct, one needs only to see the happy faces of coffee- house owners, guitar-and-banjo-makers, professional folksingers to verify the fact. Some people, including myself, will tell you folk music suffers from renaissance--the trios and quartets (which shall be nameless) begin turning out corrupt, oompah versions of perfectly good folk songs; no lover of folk musics enjoys hearing the lush, superfatted, slick results. The task of separating what we like from the phony...
Singing in English. French. Hebrew, and Spanish, the group is a kind of Kingston Quintet, doing a spread of folk songs. American and foreign. All five play the guitar, and beyond that they diversify into a variety of instruments that includes five-string banjo, recorder, autoharp, maracas, a ten-string South American charango made from an armadillo shell, and a Nigerian talking drum. Their style is controlled and relaxed, with faultless rhythm, but minus Michael and United Artists, they could be any good college group...
...never strayed into the far-out realms of atonality or mechanical idiosyncrasies. His serious musical education started late, but he learned fast. As a boy on Manhattan's upper West Side, Schuman was totally uninterested in anything long-haired. He had a passing fling with jazz, played the banjo and the violin in a jazz band he formed in high school, and wrote, with Frank Loesser, such pop songs as In Love with the Memory of You. Baseball was his enduring passion: "Had I been a better catcher, I might never have been a musician." His only opera...
Although some fellow priests regard with disapproving coolness Father Dustin's jazz success, he does not mind. All the income from his banjo-concert fees and record royalties-goes to the order, for its missions in Thailand and Brazil. Furthermore, Detroit's musical priest thinks he has an excellent precedent: St. Alphonsus Ligouri, founder of the Redemptorist Order (in 1732) was a cool man on the harpsichord...
Described by one critic as ''a sort of do-it-yourself urban folk music." trad rests mainly on the standard instruments-clarinet, trumpet, trombone-but now and again tosses in a banjo for such provincial classics as Waiting for the Robert E. Lee. Chris Barber's Jazzband founded the movement with a bestselling version of Sidney Bechet's Petite Flew, and now the trad bands are so popular that they play everywhere-not only for jazz clubs and festivals, but also at debutante parties, society dances, on trans-Channel steamers, even waist-deep in swimming pools...