Album Notes

One winter - 2003/04 - while Yiming was studying for her masters in violin at Yale, I decided to corrupt her with 350 fiddle tunes from Ken Perlman's wonderful book of field studies, "The Fiddle Music of Prince Edward Island".

The final recordings were not included on Zendo Tavern's first CD, (go to www.Zendotavern.com). Because so many from our audiences at gigs found the tunes up-beat & happy, they asked where they could get them on CD - we decided to put them out as an experiment in form & development of a CD project.

The result is a chronology [ in reverse ]of arranging & recording eleven fiddle tunes as singles and in the more traditional medley form of the Scottish fiddle players used at dances and informal home get togethers, Ceilidh, where two and three tunes were played one after the other.

As we mixed and mastered the original fiddle & guitar tracks Yiming & I had recorded, we would say "you know some mandolin would be good here". So I asked Phil Rosenthal to put in his magic & he tossed in the odd banjo part. On a second trip to PiK radio in Bydgoszcz, Poland for mixing, Marek Borowiej, the head of the recording studio said, "I think this needs the embrace of a contra bass." So Phil's wife and musical partne, Beth Sommers gave us that embrace.

Pay for eleven tunes on six tracks & get the twelve variations free: tracks 1-6 are the final variations with full instrumentation; tracks 7-11 are the variations with mandolin & banjo, no bass; and tracks 13-18 are the original fiddle & guitar recordings.

MORE DETAILED & CORRECTED NOTES & BIOGRAPHY STILL TO COME