Saturday, April 27, 2019

Saturday Morning with Mike Regenstreif – CKCU – Saturday April 27, 2019


Saturday Morning is an eclectic roots-oriented program on CKCU in Ottawa heard live on Saturday mornings from 7 until 10 am (Eastern time) and then available for on-demand streaming. I am one of the four rotating hosts of Saturday Morning and base my programming on the Folk Roots/Folk Branches format I developed at CKUT in Montreal.

CKCU can be heard at 93.1 FM in Ottawa and http://www.ckcufm.com/ on the web.

This episode of Saturday Morning can be streamed on-demand at … https://cod.ckcufm.com/programs/128/42656.html

“We are traveling in the footsteps of those who’ve come before,” this program celebrates the enduring legacy of Pete Seeger (1919-2014). Some of the songs on the show were written or co-written by Pete, others are traditional or contemporary songs from his repertoire, and some were inspired by him. Friday, May 3, will be the centennial of Pete’s birth.

The Weavers- When the Saints Go Marching In
Best of the Vanguard Years (Vanguard)

John McCutcheon- To Everyone in All the World
Peter, Paul & Mary- If I Had a Hammer
Peter, Paul and Mary (Warner Bros.)
SONiA disappear fear & Gitte Diatsschuk- Where Have All the Flowers Gone
Live at Maximal (Disappear Records)
Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer- Well May the World Go/Letter from Pete’s Banjo
Get Up and Do Right (Community Music)

Grit Laskin- The Photographers
Unabashedly Folk: Songs and Tunes 1979-1985 (Borealis)
Rosalie Sorrels- Old Devil Time
Report from Grimes Creek (Green Linnet)
Ken Whiteley- Quite Early Morning
Ken Whiteley and the Beulah Band (Borealis)
Pete Seeger- Both Sides Now
Young vs. Old (Columbia)
Spook Handy- Pete Seeger’s Life
Dedicated to the Proposition: Pete, Woody & Me, Vol. II (Akashic)

David Wiffen- Times are Getting Hard
At the Bunkhouse Coffeehouse, Vancouver BC (Universal International)
Happy Traum- Empty Pocket Blues
I Walk the Road Again (Roaring Stream)
Bonnie Dobson- Dink’s Song
Penny Lang- Oh, Had I a Golden Thread
Carry On Children (She-Wolf)
Kate & Anna McGarrigle- Petites Boîtes (Little Boxes)
La vache qui pleure (Tribu)

Pete Seeger- My Dirty Stream (The Hudson River Song)
The Smithsonian Folkways Collection (Smithsonian Folkways)
Richie Havens- Of Time and Rivers Flowing
Where Have All the Flowers Gone: The Songs of Pete Seeger (Appleseed)
Arlo Guthrie- Sailing Down This Golden River
Outlasting the Blues (Rising Son)
Kim & Reggie Harris- High Over the Hudson
Unreleased recording used with permission

The Wailin' Jennys- Bring Me Little Water, Sylvie
The Wailin’ Jennys (The Wailin’ Jennys)
Long John Baldry- Rock Island Line
Remembering Leadbelly (Stony Plain)
Odetta- Midnight Special
Lookin’ for a Home: Thanks to Leadbelly (M.C.)
Pete Seeger- Huddie Ledbetter was Helluva Man
Pete (Living Music)

Ramblin' Jack Elliott & Jerry Jeff Walker- Hard Travelin’
Friends of Mine (HighTone)
Tim O'Brien- Pastures of Plenty
Tim O’Brien Band (Howdy Skies)
Judy Collins- So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh
Pete Seeger- This Land is Your Land
The Smithsonian Folkways Collection (Smithsonian Folkways)

Joe Jencks- Let Me Sing You a Song
Poets, Philosophers, Workers & Wanderers (Turtle Bear Music)
Kate Campbell- Passing Through
The K.O.A. Tapes (Vol.1) (Large River Music)
Pete Seeger- L’Internationale
Singalong, Sanders Theatre, 1980 (Smithsonian Folkways)
                  
Bruce Cockburn- Turn, Turn, Turn
Where Have All the Flowers Gone: The Songs of Pete Seeger (Appleseed)
Perla Batalla- Guantanamera
Discoteca Batalla (Mechuda Music)
Malaika- Malaika
Live (Malaika)
HARP: Holly Near, Arlo Guthrie, Ronnie Gilbert, Pete Seeger- Wimoweh (Mbube)
A Time to Sing (Appleseed)
Dave Fry- Lessons from Pete
Troubadour (Dave Fry)

Chaim Tannenbaum- Farther Along
Chaim Tannenbaum (StorySound)
The Klezmatics w/Joshua Nelson & Kathryn Farmer- Oh Mary Don’t You Weep
Brother Moses Smote the Water (Piranha)
Manx Marriner Mainline- This Little Light of Mine
Hell Bound for Heaven (Stony Plain)
Bruce Springsteen- Jacob’s Ladder
We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (Columbia)
Dawn Tyler Watson- Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child
En Duo (Justin Time)

Tom Paxton- The Honor of Your Company
Live For the Record (Sugar Hill)
Pete Seeger w/Arlo Guthrie & Shenendoah- Precious Friend You Will Be There
Precious Friend (Warner Bros.) 

Jim Kweskin- Living in the Country
Unjugged (Hornbeam)

I’ll be hosting Saturday Morning next on May 25.

Find me on Twitter. @MikeRegenstreif


--Mike Regenstreif

Thursday, April 11, 2019

SONiA disappear fear – By My Silence


SONiA disappear fear
By My Silence
Disappear Records

(A version of this review was published in the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin.)

Sisters Sonia Rutstein and Cindy Frank founded disappear fear as a folk-rock band whose material included a focus on social justice issues. Now working as a solo artist, Rutstein tours and records as SONiA disappear fear.

By My Silence, Sonia’s latest album, was inspired by the growing waves of anti-Semitism that she has observed and encountered in recent years.

Perhaps the most powerful of Sonia’s original songs on the album is “Wandering Jew,” a joyous, anthemic song in which she asserts her Jewish identity, recalls that her own ancestors were refugees and finds common cause with contemporary refugees. Another is “A Voice for Nudem Durak,” a song of solidarity, sung in both Kurdish and English, with a Sunni Muslim woman who was sentenced to 19.5 years in prison because she sang publicly in Kurdish in Turkey.

A couple of songs mark Jewish holidays. She wrote “Light in You” for a young neighbour disappointed that there were no Chanukah songs included in his school’s holiday concert while “Ahavnu (We Have Loved)” is her setting of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook’s words for a Yom Kippur prayer.

Sonia also includes compelling versions of “By My Silence,” a song by Nick Annis and Ellen Bukstel based on the famous Holocaust-era poem by Reverend Martin Niemoller, and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”

Also of note are her versions of Israeli folksongs “Elel Chamda Libi” and “Oseh Shalom,” sung in Hebrew, as is a stunningly beautiful version of “Hatikvah,” sung as a prayer-like meditation that reflects on the feelings of hope at the heart of the Israeli national anthem.

And in “Who I Am (say amen),” Sonia, a lesbian, seems to be in dialogues with her mother and with God about her sexuality. “Mom, is it OK if I am who I am,” she asks at the end of the first verse. She puts the question to God in the second verse along with a plea for God to say it’s OK. It is OK she concludes at the end of the song and says “Amen.”

Sonia and I chatted when we were both at the Folk Alliance International conference in Montreal in February. She told me that when she finished making this album on Friday, October 26, 2018, she then turned off her TV and all electronic devices for Shabbat. The next night, when she turned on the news, she learned of the massacre of 11 Jewish worshippers at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.

As the songs on By My Silence show, SONiA disappear fear is a convincing and truly fearless artist.

Find me on Twitter. twitter.com/@mikeregenstreif

And on Facebook. facebook.com/mikeregenstreif

Mike Regenstreif