Dirt Road Diaries

A medley 2/3 Romanian, 1/2 Appalachian. Schwartz's Serba, Foyer Verde, and 'Goin Back to Israel"

Green Leaves, Green Leaves... In every country the rich get richer while the poor "light in dread a kilometer". (Lie a mile below the ground. i.e. in some kind of hell)

Time to time, I have come home to find my dog, Sasha wrapped around a tree. And not very happy about it. I had an extra Raspberry Pi (tiny, cheap, Linux computer) and an old webcam. I was able to cobble the thing into a working doggie-cam that takes a picture every minute and sends it up to a webpage, which I can check on my phone.

Picture coming

This is a small mill I built using GRBL on an Arduino, my old Foredom Flexible Shaft tool for the head

A Yiddish song based on the poetry of Itzik Manger. The late night adventures of a man with no place to go. "7 mice and one more are sleeping on the floor. Of course, 7 mice and one more, that is 8. So I put on my hat and walked out the door. To a bar with 2 drunks and a bottle. 2 drunks and a bottle, of course that makes 3. Should I be number 4?

My newest project. Back with my favourite Hungarian singer, Katlin Pazmandi my favourite Monticello violinist, Becky Perlman and Jim Luckner on sax and drums ( I haven't known him as long..) This could be your big chance! We are hiring. Get in touch (contact page). Beyond performance, we are all interested in exploring the musics of Eastern Europe and beyond.

"I don't kiss, and I don't tell and all you sinners can go to hell".

One of the canonical Charlie Poole Tunes. I'm playing mandolin and singing, with Gene Mueller on the banjo and echos. It is also one of our 2 tunes with an appearance of the bow-legged woman, but not on this recording : )

At his kitchen table, a small slab of dark wood surrounded with Yiddish tchotchkes and family photos, Harry Sweet was eating okra. Its a southern vegetable, making usual appearances in gumbos, or corn-meal-coatings — so it might seem a little out of place in Sweet’s kitchen in Pine Bush, NY, where his wife, daughter and I sat discussing Klezmer, cultural Jewish music that could not seem farther from the American South. But for this self-proclaimed contradiction of a fiddler, its only right.

Here is the full post

Many times when I lose focus practising classical violin I wake up finding that I am playing something original. This one works as a bluegrass or klezmer-ish tune. Here is the mando version with Yaniv on the backup parts. Just a field recording, first play thru.