33rd Annual Ann Arbor Folk Festival: The Ark.
January 29 & 30. (different programs). A major highlight of the local musical year, with established and rising stars representing a wide spectrum of vernacular musical idioms. Emcee both nights is Patty Larkin, an acclaimed Boston-based singer-songwriter who blends incisive, often very funny social commentary with heartfelt, tart-witted love songs about assorted people, places, and things. She sings in a breathy, evocative alto, and she’s also a superb guitarist. Tonight’s headliner is Tonight’s headliner is Roseanne Cash, a veteran country singer-songwriter whose music also draws imaginatively on pop, rock, blues, and folk traditions. The songs on her latest CD, The List, are selected from a list of 100 essential American songs her father, the late country icon Johnny Cash, gave her when she was a teen. Her own songs are known for their lyrical pungency and grace and their penetrating, often playful psychological and emotional acuity, and her singing blends a beguiling tunefulness with a sometimes fierce and sometimes sassy relaxed authority. Also appearing: Richie Havens is a veteran folk-rock singer-guitarist known for his wild and ingenious guitar playing, his hauntingly elegiac vocal style, and his trenchantly soulful reworkings of material by a wide range of top contemporary songwriters. Doc Watson, widely recognized as the best and most influential flat-pick guitarist in the country, is a mountain music legend. His huge repertoire is rooted in the Jimmie Rodgers/Carter Family tradition, but he also sings everything from down-home blues to pop standards. Watson stopped touring regularly several years ago, so this is a rare chance to see one of the major figures of old-time country music. Raul Malo, the former lead singer of the Mavericks, sings in an exuberant, impossibly clean vibrato, Malo has been described as a cross between early Elvis and classic Roy Orbison. As a solo performer, he sings in English and Spanish, and his eclectic repertoire ranges from rock and country to big-band jazz. Hot Club of Cowtown is an Austin-based trio with a sound that has been described as a blend of Bob Wills and Django Reinhardt. Its repertoire is an eclectic mix of 1920s jazz standards, western swing tunes, cowboy songs, fiddle tunes, originals. Enter the Haggis is a popular young Toronto quintet whose music is a rousing, raucous blend of Scottish and Canadian Celtic music with rock, bluegrass, Caribbean, and world music.
6:30 p.m., Hill Auditorium. Tickets $30-$150 per night and $50-$250 for both nights in advance at Herb David Guitar Studio, the Michigan Union Ticket Office, & all other Ticketmaster outlets; and at the door. To charge by phone, call 763-TKTS. [map]
