Special Guests

Special Guests
Saturday, May 20, 2000

Ramblin' Jack Elliott

Folk music legend has it that RAMBLIN’ JACK ELLIOTT showed up at Woody Guthrie’s house 48 years ago and stayed for two years. Other stories about him abound, like the time he played for James Dean in a Hollywood parking lot, or the time Jack Kerouac read him the entire then-unpublished manuscript for On The Road, or the time he serenaded a group of young British schoolchildren on a railway platform and years later ran into one of the kids who told him the encounter had prompted him to buy his first guitar (the kid was Mick Jagger). A master storyteller, Elliott first “rambled” around the country with Guthrie in the early ’50s, then was an influence to Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village in the ’60s. After moving to California in 1965, Elliott reconnected with Dylan in the early ’70s and became a member of the Rolling Thunder Revue. Throughout his career, he has traveled the world, gathering inspiration for his stories and songs. In 1996, Elliott won a Grammy for his South Coast album (Red House Records), and was also chosen as the recipient of the Bill Graham Lifetime Achievement Award at San Francisco’s Bay Area Music Awards. For 1998’s Friends of Mine (Hightone), he was joined by a number of artists with whom he had toured over the years, including Guy Clark, Nanci Griffith, Arlo Guthrie, Emmylou Harris, Tom Waits, and Jerry Jeff Walker. His most recent recording, The Long Ride (Hightone), features covers of songs by the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, as well as several original tunes.

Kitka

The vocal ensemble KITKA was founded in 1979 as an outgrowth of the Westwind International Folk Ensemble. Originally an informal group of amateur singers who met to share their passion for Eastern European women’s vocal traditions, the group has become a professional ensemble known for its mastery of the demanding techniques of Balkan and Slavic vocal styling. The many languages in which they sing are largely unfamiliar to American ears: Albanian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Georgian, Ladino, Hungarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, Romanian, Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, with the occasional Latin, medieval Gallician, or ancient Greek. The group’s singers have performed and conducted field research in Bulgaria, Macedonia, former Yugoslavia, Russia, Hungary, Kazahkstan, and in ethnic communities throughout America. In 1991, they traveled to Bulgaria, where they were honored to perform at the National Festival of Bulgarian Folklore. Nikolai Kaufman, one of Bulgaria’s foremost composers, was so taken by their performance at the festival, that he dedicated a set of original compositions to the group. Kitka has collaborated on a wide variety of projects, including a reconstruction of the medieval pageant Carmina Burana, and the soundtrack for Adrian Lyne’s film Jacob’s Ladder. They can also be heard on the motion picture soundtracks to Braveheart, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, and several television documentaries. They have released four recordings on their own Diaphonica label: Kitka; Voices on the Eastern Wind; Sacred Voices, Sacred Sounds; and Nectar. A 20th anniversary retrospective album of live performances is scheduled for release this year, as well as a recording of the Medieval Cantigas d’Amigo with the early music quintet Ensemble Alcatraz. The singers who make up Kitka are: Shira Cion, Leslie Bonnett, Catherine Rose Crowther, Deborah Dietrich, Juliana Graffagna, Janet Kutulas, Ann Moorhead, and Lily Storm.