Fiddler Alan Jabbour's collecting and performing have had a powerful impact on the revival of oldtime instrumental music over the past half century. Growing up in Jacksonville, Florida, he played violin classical style. As a graduate student at Duke University in the 1960s, he began collecting oldtime fiddle tunes from elderly musicians in North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia. Documentation quickly turned to apprenticeship, and he began playing the tunes of his new mentors in their style. His repertory of oldtime tunes -- particularly the beautiful old tunes of Henry Reed of Glen Lyn, Virginia -- was adopted by his band in Durham, the Hollow Rock String Band. The band's repertory and style became a shaping influence on the burgeoning instrumental folk music revival of the 1960s and 1970s. The influence continues today, and Alan has helped it along by returning to an active schedule of performance and teaching since his retirement from the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress at the end of 1999. His performance style features complex bowing patterns and a high-energy but graceful elaboration of the oldtime repertory, and the tunes are always accompanied by lively story-telling that illuminates the sources and significance of the tunes.
Ken Perlman is a consummate banjo player who grew up in New York City and in the 1970s became an architect and exponent of what has come to be known as the melodic clawhammer banjo style. His early career focused on the Southern instrumental repertory, but his travels in the Northeast, Canada, and the British Isles led him to begin exploring and applying to five-string banjo and guitar the rich instrumental traditions of those regions. In particular, he has become the leading documentarian of the fiddle music of the Canadian Maritime province of Prince Edward Island, and he has brilliantly adapted that repertory to his melodic clawhammer style on the banjo. In the past decade, after Ken and Alan began performing together, Ken has again turned his attention to the Southern American fiddle repertory, and his 2005 CD of fiddle-and-banjo duets with Alan, SOUTHERN SUMMITS, is a new benchmark in oldtime fiddle and banjo performance. The duet style he has developed with Alan, though featuring the melodic clawhammer banjo style, is actually a complex style marked not only by note-for-note melodic performance but by a variety of accompaniment styles succeeding one another as the tune repeats itself in performance.
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Copyright 2018 The Folklore Society of Greater Washington
