Alex Martin - Folk Songs, Jazz Journeys (2021)

For a society so diverse, we in the United States have a curiously constrained, and constraining, notion of folk music. My goal for my next album, Folk Songs, Jazz Journeys, is to explore beyond the limits of those conceptions, and to bring you along on the trip. As you will hear, my notion of what constitutes “folk music” is expansive, crossing many borders, so we’ll travel far.

As a jazz guitarist and composer born in Brittany, the Celtic region of western France, and raised mostly in Piedmont North Carolina, I have always been drawn to both tradition and innovation in music. The more I listen to and the deeper I immerse myself in my home traditions and others, especially those of Brazil and West Africa, the more I realize that tradition and innovation are far from opposites: traditional music, at its best, is relentlessly innovative, and jazz, a genre often thought of as pure innovation, continually renews itself by drawing on its core African and Caribbean traditions and, increasingly, those of other cultures as well.

In my musical projects and performances these days I am working not just with the familiar jazz trio of guitar, bass, and drums but also with singer-songwriters and musicians from West African and Indian classical traditions who bring instruments like balafon and tabla to my original compositions and arrangements of folk melodies. The three tracks I have already recorded for Folk Songs, Jazz Journeys—the Appalachian ballad “Wayfaring Stranger”; my setting of “Viceversa,” a poem by the Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti; and “Postal de Bata,” which I wrote after a trip to Equatorial Guinea—are first steps in these explorations and feature vocalist and songwriter Maya Rogers, bassist Tyler Sherman, drummer Keith Butler Jr., and multi-instrumentalist Uasuf Gueye on balafon (West African marimba).

Other compositions and arrangements will cover a similarly wide range and draw on the talents of some of the Washington, DC, area’s finest musicians approaching jazz from diverse perspectives. For example, my arrangement of “Asa branca,” one of the most famous songs from the folk tradition of rural northeastern Brazil, will feature friends from DC’s Brazilian jazz and popular music scene (some of whom I recorded with on my first CD, Nostalgia da Terra Incógnita [2007]), as will my composition “Triângulo,” inspired by the same tradition of northeast Brazilian forró. My arrangement of “Le temps des cerises,” a nineteenth-century French song long associated with resistance to oppression, is an homage to my French grandmother, who learned it as a young woman in Nazi-occupied Paris. My composition “The Kudzu, the Dust, and You” is a blues ballad that recalls the dirt-road landscapes of my North Carolina childhood. I also plan to include an arrangement of a Breton Celtic melody on this recording.

I already have been blessed by many creative and supportive hands as we begin to bring this project to life. By adding yours, you will enable a unique set of musical confluences to reach a broader public, through the physical CD, streaming sites, and the increased performance opportunities that a new recording can make possible. The energy in the studio recording the first three tracks was unlike any I’d felt in my musical career. Songwriter jazz? Jazz balafon? Something new here wants to be born. Please join me in bringing it into the world.