Dave Van Ronk

Guitarist, singer, songwriter, and native New Yorker Dave Van Ronk inspired, aided, and promoted the careers of numerous singer/songwriters who came up in the blues tradition. Most notable of the many musicians he helped over the years was Bob Dylan, whom Van Ronk got to know shortly after Dylan moved to New York in 1961 to pursue a life as a folk/blues singer. Van Ronk's recorded output was healthy, but he was never as prolific a songwriter as some of his friends from that era, like Dylan or Tom Paxton. Instead, Van Ronk's genius was derived from his flawless execution and rearranging of classic acoustic blues tunes.

Rekindling his love for classic jazz, Van Ronk puts together a string of American standards and, along with a seven-piece band of seasoned session players, makes the kind of music he grew up listening to. The tunes swing along with Van Ronk's mildly Louis Armstrong-flavored rasp, which holds up throughout.

Although Dave Van Ronk managed to make many albums over the course of a long career, he was primarily a solo concert artist, and this recording, made in a theater in Bremen, Germany, in 1993, captures a somewhat typical performance by the then-56-year-old performer. As annotator Harald Moenkedieck points out, Van Ronk had a tendency to tell stories on-stage, but he kept the commentary to a minimum here, perhaps in deference to a non-English-speaking audience, so there's more music and less talking than might be usual.

Dave Van Ronk, along with friends Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, was instrumental in leading the American Folk Music revival out from Greenwich Village in the 1960’s. His posthumous memoir, “The Mayor of MacDougal Street,” inspired the Coen Brother’s cult classic Inside Llewyn Davis starring Oscar Isaac. Live at Sir George Williams University, recorded live in Montreal at the height of the revival in 1967, is now remastered including a bonus remix of “Statesboro Blues.”

This album, originally released in 1976, may or may not be, as annotator (and former Dave Van Ronk guitar student) Elijah Wald claims, "Dave's greatest single album" (frankly, Van Ronk has made so many albums for so many fly-by-night labels that it is hard to endorse so sweeping a statement), but it is certainly a very good one. Van Ronk had made various efforts in recent years to accommodate pop and rock music on his albums, but this one was a return to his usual repertoire of folk-blues tunes and jazz and ragtime transcriptions for guitar, with one Joni Mitchell song ("That Song About the Midway") and an original, the title song, thrown in.

Unreleased performances by Dave Van Ronk, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Kate McGarrigle, Rick Danko, Anais Mitchell, Sleepy John Estes, Arlo Guthrie, Sarah Lee Guthrie, and more. Nestled in the quaint upstate town of Saratoga Springs, New York is Caffè Lena, the oldest continuously operating folk music coffeehouse in the US. Opened by Lena Spencer in 1960, this tiny room has played host to influential artists across diverse genres of music; traditional folk, blues, singer-songwriters, jazz and bluegrass. Luckily, many performances were caught on tape through the years, offering the listener a thrilling seat inside this hallowed venue. 'Live At Caffè Lena', a 3-CD box set, the result of years of investigative research, contains 47 tracks, all released for the very first time, alongside previously unpublished photographs. Images include selections from the archive of esteemed photographer Joe Alper, who captured many iconic, intimate portraits from the folk era of the 1960s.

It was distinctly ironic: at the very zenith of America's postwar space-age love affair with TV, 3-D, and rock & roll (and other disposable cultural ephemera), a grassroots movement set out to recapture the country's lost musical heritage. These curious minds not only found it in a wealth of seemingly forgotten protest songs, spiritual blues, and country laments, but also forged new songs in its image. That this crusade sprang from lower Manhattan's Washington Square and the doorstep of New York University made the paradox all the sweeter. Ted Myers, the producer of this triple-disc anthology, grew up just blocks from the epicenter of that folk-quake, and his generous sense of place and time permeates this rich collection. Generally misunderstood and historically pigeonholed, the era finally gets its due, chronicled here by 72 tracks that extend far beyond the roots-conscious work of Woody Guthrie, the Weavers, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and Pete Seeger on one hand, and the more popular material by the Kingston Trio, Limeliters, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan on the other. Culturally, the Folk movement was the alt-rock of its day–if eminently more conscious of history and politically committed. Musically, it encompassed an ethos that enthusiastically blurred the boundaries between blues, Appalachian ballads, jug music, pure country, honky-tonk, work songs, and even unbridled novelty; this set explores them all, often with a palpable sense of discovery. Historically, the movement championed preservation at the same time it gleefully tweaked old sensibilities in pursuit of new inspiration. Listen and you'll hear music that became touchstones for artists as diverse as the Byrds, Roberta Flack, Rod Stewart, and–wittingly or not–every passionate coffeehouse minstrel who's strode on stage with a guitar ever since. –Jerry McCulley