November 2009

Greetings from 30,000 feet over the Atlantic somewhere, on my way home for a bit of well-deserved R&R before hitting the road again. (As Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead said, "We tour, therefore we are.")

It's been a most interesting, and busy, summer and fall. After vowing not to do a recording project this year, I nevertheless somehow managed to get involved in no fewer than three! The first, in fact, is already available... Last year when our dear friend, master mandolinist and mandolin instructor Butch Baldassari was bravely fighting brain cancer, a bunch of his mandolin and guitar compadres contributed tracks for a benefit CD. I was honored to be one of the contributors, along with the likes of Sam Bush, Ricky Skaggs, David Grisman, Tim O'Brien, Tony McManus, Steve Kaufman, Beppe Gambetta, Carlo Aonzo, John Reischman and too many other greats to list here. Sadly, Butch passed away earlier this year, and the benefit CD became a memorial CD (although Butch did get to hear the final master, I'm told). And I gotta say, everybody involved really rose to the occasion on this one; the result is one of my favorite CDs to come down the pike in a good long while. It's The Road Home: A Tribute to Butch Baldassari, and you can get it right here - www.soundartrecordings.com - direct from Butch's record company SoundArt Recordings, now being ably run by his widow Sinclair. All proceeds go to Butch and Sinclair's son Blake's college fund. If you like mandolin and guitar, bluegrass, folk, Americana, or just quality acoustic music in general - such as the work of any of the above-named artists - YOU NEED THIS CD. And you'll be helping a worthwhile cause and honoring the memory of a great musician and friend.

Recording project #2: in September I traveled to England for the filming of a concert DVD with the one and only Tom Paxton at one of his favorite U.K. venues, Huntingdon Hall in Worcester. Tom's band for the occasion consisted of myself and the legendary English bassist Danny Thompson (as in Pentangle, Richard Thompson, Mark Knopfler, etc. etc.), so once again I found myself in pretty distinguished company! We're working on post-production now, and the plan is for the DVD to be available in time for Tom's U.K. tour next January (which I'll also be part of - my fourth in a row). The two-hour show combined Paxton classics like "The Last Thing on My Mind," "Rambling Boy," "Bottle of Wine" and "Whose Garden Was This" with a fair amount of new material - because Tom, at the ripe young age of 72, is still writing incredible songs and sounding as good as ever. We should all keep our creativity flowing so long and so well! Look for that one at www.tompaxton.com after the first of the new year.

After England it was off to America for a few weeks on the road both solo and with Scottish fiddler extraordinaire Jamie Laval, along the way adding guitar, cittern and mandolin parts to Jamie's new album-in-progress (voilà, recording project #3). And as soon as the clock strikes December it'll be time to jump on a plane and head back again, for Christmas Tour 2009! That's always my favorite time of year, and this year the tour will take me to Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia for solo concerts, duo concerts with my Celtic guitar brother Steve Baughman, shared evenings with the endlessly creative Al Petteway and Amy White, and the 24th (!) Annual Winter Solstice Concert reuniting Helicon (Chris Norman on wooden flutes and pipes, Ken Kolodner on hammered dulcimer and fiddle, and your fearless correspondent on guitar, cittern, mandolin and piano) for two shows at Goucher College's beautiful Kraushaar Auditorium. All the info is on the Schedule page, as always, so come on out and join us for some acoustic winter magic.

In closing, a quote from the late great "Gonzo journalist" Hunter Thompson that I'm adopting as my Inspirational Motto for Christmas Tour 2009:

"On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio." - Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear

YEAH man. See you out there - cheers, Robin

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