Weekend with Alan Jabbour & Ken Perlman

November 1 - 2, 2008     Ann Arbor, Michigan

AACTMAD, now in it's 30^th year, is excited to bring Alan Jabbour and Ken Perlman to Ann Arbor for four instrumental workshops on Saturday, a Saturday evening contra dance, and a Sunday afternoon concert. Please join us for this very special treat with these two masters!

Alan Jabbour was born in 1942 in Jacksonville, Florida. A violinist by early training, he put himself through college at the University of Miami playing classical music. While a graduate student at Duke University in the 1960s, he began documenting oldtime fiddlers in the Upper South. Documentation turned to apprenticeship, and he relearned the fiddle in the style of the Upper South from musicians like Henry Reed of Glen Lyn, Virginia, and Tommy Jarrell of Toast, North Carolina. He taught a repertory of oldtime fiddle tunes to his band, the Hollow Rock String Band, which was an important link in the instrumental music revival in the 1960s.

After receiving his Ph.D. in 1968, he taught English, folklore, and ethnomusicology at UCLA in 1968-69. He then moved to Washington, D.C., for over thirty years of service with Federal cultural agencies. He was head of the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress 1969-74, director of the folk arts program at the National Endowment for the Arts 1974-76, and director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress 1976-99. Since his retirement, he has turned enthusiastically to a life of writing, consulting, lecturing, and playing the fiddle.

Ken Perlman: Superb instrumentalist, acclaimed teacher of instrumental skills, gifted performer, award-winning folklorist, Ken Perlman is surely a welcome addition to any festival or concert-series lineup. Ken is both a pioneer of the 5-string banjo style known as "melodic clawhammer," and a master of fingerstyle guitar. He is considered one of the top clawhammer players in the world, known in particular for his skillful adaptations of Celtic tunes to the style. On guitar, Ken's sparkling finger-picked renditions of traditional Celtic and Southern fiddle tunes are simply not to be missed.

He draws his material from traditional sources -- the music of Scotland, Ireland, Cape Breton, Prince Edward Island and the American South. His approach to the music, however, is highly innovative. He has developed many new instrumental techniques, and much of his repertoire has never before been played on 5-string banjo or guitar.

Around the folk scene, Ken is often referred to as a musician's musician -- a player whose style is so accomplished and unique that other musicians go out of their way just to hear him.

Ken is an acclaimed teacher of folk-music instrumental skills. He has written some of the most widely respected banjo and guitar instruction books of modern times, and he has been on staff at prestigious teaching festivals around the world. He has also served as director, or co-director for seveal banjo -instructional camps, including Maryland Banjo Academy, American Banjo Camp, Suwannee Valley Old Time Banjo Camp, the Bath Banjo Festival, and Banjo Camp North.

Also an active folklorist, Ken has spent over a decade collecting tunes and oral histories from traditional fiddle players on Prince Edward Island in eastern Canada. Two outgrowths of his research are a tune book called The Fiddle Music of Prince Edward Island and a two-CD anthology of field recordings called The Prince Edward Island Style of Fiddling (Rounder Recordings). In 1997 and '98, each of these works received awards from the Prince Edward Island Heritage Foundation for helping to "preserve, interpret, and disseminate our province's fiddling heritage."

Schedule & Details:

All events take place at the Pittsfield Grange Hall, 3337 Ann Arbor-Saline Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48103 (¼ mile south of I-94 exit 175). Click here for map and driving directions.

Contact us!

Feel free to contact Joan with any questions:

734-769-1052