A Good Air Loom

Just heard the title track of LIFE ON A STRING on CBC's Northern Lights out of Winnipeg. If you were listening just after eleven, and there was suddenly a solo banjo piece there, as delicate as anything you'd ever heard (and that goes for people who don't like the banjo, yes I'm talking to you, you heard it too and you liked it, you said "What's that? that can't be the banjo, I don't like the banjo so it can't be that, what IS that?"), music that moved swift as grasshoppers displaced when you're running through a field of long yellow grass, working their little grasshopper-hindquarters, and then stopping dead on a sun dime in the middle of the sky, just long enough to notice the sky's still blue and then starting again, displacing the grasshoppers again...

(Forgive my adjectival reach, I'm trying to report on the images that form when I hear this music, always a dubious activity)

BUT If you heard, suddenly, three minutes of summer (no, it was shorter than that, it's too short, mercilessly short) TWO minutes of summer - CANADIAN summer... if you heard the sound of a light storm approaching across the prairies though it's sunny overhead, or the sound of that valley in the middle of Saskatchewan that's all hills and green until you climb to the top of the highest hill and find that you're actually in the middle of the prairie, far as the eye can see, and again it's sunny, but the sun is never oppressive, it's so dry that you barely break a sweat...

If you heard something so quiet that you even had to pause in your READING to hear it all and hear it right, and then you had to get right up out of bed to come and write this post, well, what you heard was the best clawhammerer in Canada, maybe the best in the world, master of a sound that can only be called CANADIAN BANJO, swifter and lighter and - well - DIFFERENT than its southern neighbour, holding more secrets than its southern neighbour. And I mean no disrespect towards its southern neighbour. Nor to the fine Canadian Clawhammerers I've heard. But DANIEL KOULACK is the best.

He's out of Winnipeg too, just like Northern Lights. Perhaps one of their best-kept secrets, though he should be renowned. Part of the general weirdness with which the banjo is received. He plays without a nail on his frailing finger, because he plays so much the nail gets worn down. And he plays a Neufeld, with a resonator. At least that's one of the banjos he plays.



And I have more to report on the CANADIAN BANJO, you'll see.