A Strange Day in June

Led by mandolin, guitar, banjo, flute, harmonica and sitar player John Kruth, New York-based The Folklorkestra are a mostly instrumental sextet that also showcase the talents of Premik Russell Tubbs on wind, brass and lap steel, Kathy Halvorson on horn and oboe, Kenny Margolis on assorted keyboards, bassist Ray Peterson and Rohin Khemani on eclectic percussion. Together, thanks to help from a Chamber Music America grant and the Howard Gilman Foundation, they create an extraordinary form of acoustic chamber music that draws on a dazzling array of folkloric musical traditions. Jazz (‘Cooking with Lightning’), zydeco (‘(Be Careful What You Say to) An Armed Lady’), tango (‘Mariska (with Ancestor Dancer)’), Latin (‘A Pair of Boleros( à la Ravel & Beck)’), klezmer (‘The Girl I Never Knew’), European Gypsy music (‘My Cousin the Spy’), ambient (‘Orange Sky’), calypso (‘Madame Gonzo’), oriental mysticism (‘Meet Me in the Meadow’) and baroque classicism (‘A Strange Day in June (with We Fight, We Bury the Dead, Then We Eat, Drink and Dance)’) are all grist to The Folklorkestra’s mill. Yet it’s never as simple or straightforward as that, for all these are ground together into something that manages to sound both familiar and new at the same time, in a hybrid patchwork that seems to fuse past, present and future and defy time. “Musical boundaries are not our strong suit,” bassist Ray Peterson notes – which is exactly what makes The Folklorkestra’s A Strange Day in June such an unexpected delight and almost impossible to describe.