A Prairie Home Companion: January 8, 2005

Special Guests
Saturday, January 8, 2005

Leo Kottke

He was born on 9/11 in 1945 in Athens, Georgia, and raised in 12 different states. After high school he hitch-hiked around as a musician for a while and settled in the Twin Cities. He recorded Twelve String Blues in 1969 live at the The Scholar Coffee House, recorded Circle 'Round The Sun in 1970 and sent it to John Fahey, whose manager got him a contract with Capitol Records. He has 34 albums to his credit now, plus four singles. His latest release, Try and Stop Me, features a good deal of improvisation, unusual for Leo. "I deliberately lost count," he said, "So you don't know where the one (count) is until it's already gone past you. It's gonna infuriate people because of that. We really have the 12-bar blues format deeply ingrained in us, whether we even know what it is or not." Leo has just finished recording another cd with Phish bassist Mike Gordon, yet unnamed and due out next summer.

Cindy Cashdollar

Cindy Cashdollar grew up in Woodstock, NY and was captivated by Delta blues music at a young age; she began playing guitar when she was eleven. She now plays steel guitar and dobro and has won five Grammy Awards in the course of recording with leading country, roots, jazz, and folk artists. She spent eight years touring, playing, and recording with the Western swing band Asleep at the Wheel, and her talents can he heard on Bob Dylan's Grammy-winning Album of the Year Time Out of Mind, as well as on recordings by Manhattan Transfer, The Dixie Chicks, Reba McEntire, and Willie Nelson. Cashdollar has also made three instructional videos for steel guitar and dobro and conducts workshops across the nation. Her first solo CD, Slideshow, was released in 2003.

Mila Vocal Ensemble

They are a professional women's vocal ensemble committed to carrying on the vocal traditions of over thirty countries, in over a dozen distinct vocal styles. Grounded in the harmonic traditions of Eastern Europe, their repertoire also includes music from Central and Western Europe, Asia and the Americas. The seven singers hail from unique musical backgrounds and together they speak a dozen languages; they've studied with vocalists from Bulgaria, France, Hungary, Macedonia, Serbia, Spain and Ukraine. They have two rehearsals a week, four hours each, and are passionate about accurately capturing regional style and nuance. In a typical concert they will use fifteen different vocal techniques. They have two CDs available, a holiday concert titled From a Dark Night and a studio album, Sadila Moma, featuring songs from Bulgaria, Latvia, Russia, Scotland, Serbia, Ukraine and the U.S.

Louis Jenkins

Poet Louis Jenkins has had his work published in many literary magazines and anthologies. His poetry collections include An Almost Human Gesture, All Tangled Up With the Living, Nice Fish: New and Selected Prose Poems, Just Above Water, and The Winter Road, which was nominated for the 2001 Minnesota Book Award for poetry. Two of his prose poems were included in The Best American Poetry (1999). He lives in Duluth.