Issue #37
February 28, 2005
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Finger Lakes Ramble by David Katz Upstate New York has a rich folk music tradition, centered mainly in the Adirondacks and the Finger Lakes regions, with outposts around Saratoga, Albany, and Westchester, Putnam and Columbia counties.
Many of the Adirondack musicians sing songs of the region, both traditional and self-composed. The folk musicians of the Finger Lakes tend to be a more diverse crew, larded as they are with singers and pickers who started out at Cornell. John Roberts and Tony Barand fall into this category; two Brits who met at Cornell, they have, for the past several decades, entertained us with British folk and music hall songs, Kipling poems set to music, sea songs and medieval Christmas carols.
Walt Koken has also been around for decades, singing and playing around the country with a number of different folk groups and string bands. In his “Finger Lakes Ramble”, he gives us nineteen banjo tunes, most of which have nothing to do with New York State. (The exceptions are the title tune, Finger Lakes Ramble, an instrumental, and White Deer, another instrumental, which recalls a herd of albino deer that found sanctuary on a military base in the area.) Blues, jigs, rags, Appalachian dance tunes and ballads, all are played with virtuosity; he sings some of them, too, in an engaging but unpolished voice well suited to the music.
His banjo style is melodic and mellow, the kind of sound you get when the right hand is far from the bridge. He plays with velocity, but the pace never sounds forced and the tune is never obscured by the notes. It's the kind of easy, loping banjo sound that sounds effortless but takes years to master.
My favorites on this CD are June Apple, a perfect example of clawhammer-style banjo playing, Doctor Jazz, a number he remembers from his Muskrat Ramblers days, The Valentine, a rag that sounds just right on the banjo, Grey Eagle, a fiddle tune adapted for banjo (one of those tunes that, in the hands of the right musician, makes you think "nobody can play all those notes with just ten fingers"), and Ground Hog, a paean to the culinary excellence of the humble marmot. Ground Hog adds harmonica and the voice of Marty Lebenson to Walt Koken's banjo.
Eight of the nineteen numbers were composed by Walt Koken. Unlike many of today's singer-songwriters, Koken knows that a melody has to have more than three notes if it is to be interesting; all of his songs work, and one of them, The Valentine made it to my list of favorites.
Finger Lakes Ramble Walt Koken Mudthumper Music Box 791 Kennett Square PA 19311 wkoken@erols.com
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