Atlas Travel
(by Don Rooke on Black Hen Music) 2003

Songs:

Nuevo Laredo
Palma de Mallorca
Alexandria
Donegal Bay
Villa Huidobro
Little Alpold, Hungary
Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe
Bourbannais
Most, Czech Republic
62n 103e Siberia
Blackpool
Filadelfia, Paraguay
Shimoda
Mahina, Iles du Vent

Offbeat Archives Rooke Takes a Sonic Trip With Atlas Travel By Alexander Varty Publish Date: 22-Apr-2004 Some performers live and breathe music. Melodies come whistling from their lips as freely as rain falls from Vancouver skies, and whenever they sit at the piano or pick up the guitar all the right chords just beg to be played. Others, though no less talented, seem to lack this gift. And while I can't say that Don Rooke falls into the latter camp, the strategy he took while creating his solo debut, Atlas Travel, seems to indicate that, at the very least, he's interested in finding ways of conceptualizing his art before bringing it fully into being. When the Toronto-based guitarist decided to take a break from his long-running band the Henrys--whose four CDs rank with the finest music this country has produced--he also reckoned he needed to distinguish his solo work from his ensemble output. So he decided to keep the tunes starker, if not simpler, and opted to work with smaller instrumental forces. More than half of the 14 tunes on Atlas Travel, for instance, lack bass and drums. But Rooke also felt that he needed to bring some unity to an album that might otherwise seem a collection of unrelated sketches, and so he started to associate each piece with a particular imaginary landscape. "I had the tunes, and then I gave them working titles, which were the names of countries," he explains, on the phone from his home. "And that did set the mood, but then I thought a country name was too general; it didn't really imply what I wanted it to imply. So then I resorted to the atlas to find locations with interesting names, so I would get the double benefit of having an interesting name and also an evocative location that would, ideally, suit the music that I'd written. Once I knew the names of the tunes, I'd add players and stuff that would reflect that; there was a conscious effort to make music that made sense in terms of the geography. But then again I haven't been to any of those places, so it is sort of a conceit." Atlas Travel's global scope is reflected in the instruments used in its making. The bandleader plays a variety of strings, but his main instrument is a Kona Hawaiian guitar, built in Los Angeles during the 1920s by brilliant luthier and alleged bigamist Hermann Weissenborn. Meanwhile, his guests employ everything from the familiar fiddle and mandolin to Armenia's clarinetlike duduk, Chinese and South Asian flutes, African kalimba, and the Scandinavian nyckelharpa. The sound might be colourful, but the disc as a whole tends toward the dark end of the emotional spectrum, although Rooke isn't entirely happy with that description. "Well, I didn't intend to impose melancholy on those parts of the world," he says. "I guess I wanted to evoke a mood--and then I'm sure some of those moods did turn out to be melancholy, but that wasn't the original intention, and it wasn't the philosophy behind it. I guess I see them more as just miniatures, studies for the Kona where I worked out melodies and tried to harmonize them." Melancholic or not, Atlas Travel made my top-10 records list for 2003, and I'm certainly planning to be in the crowd when Rooke makes his first solo appearance in Vancouver, at St. James Community Hall on Friday (April 23). Adding to the attraction is that he's not going to be alone on-stage for the entire night: as the first stop on a cross-Canada tour organized by local indie Black Hen Records, he's sharing the bill with accordion-toting agitator Geoff Berner and string king Steve Dawson. "I'm looking forward to playing with them, but I'm also looking forward to meeting them," Rooke says drolly. "But yeah, since we're all solo Black Hen artists, we're planning on each doing our own things and then teaming up in different permutations. But I don't know Geoff at all, although I've listened to his record. The one thing I heard from him was something like, 'Do whatever tunes of mine you want to do. Play on whatever ones you want to play on.' He doesn't want to be pinned down, so that'll be fun. But I suspect things will get a little more concrete when we get together." Naturally, this raises the question of how Rooke plans to prepare for making music and touring with someone he's never met, which gets a typically laconic response. "I don't know if there's any preparation to be done, except to be organized myself," he notes, adding that what he's heard about Berner's relatively confrontational on-stage style means the issue of keeping audiences entertained is unlikely to be raised. "That'll probably help us. He'll get the audience's attention more than Steve or I might." Which is true enough; both guitarists depend more on tasteful and imaginative music than showmanship. But the union of all three players promises nothing less than an evening full of delightful surprises. ----------------- Sublime. It might have been called Astral Travel, because that's where it takes you. This man is top 5, acoustic slide, on the planet. As a slide composer, he's in a class by himself. And though he's played in some illustrious concert halls, festivals, and TV shows globally, his gifts are not yet widely known. Not widely enough for this reviewer, at any rate. The concept of Atlas Travel is to take faraway unknown places on world maps, and imagine the music that might go on in such a place. Sounds like Don Rooke to me. The genius of the Hawaiian kona (a koa wood instrument from the 20s) and Weissenborn guitars (and lap steel) and the mastermind behind the Canadian wonder band The Henrys (see our review of their most recent release) pushes the sonic and harmonic envelopes in a very acoustic fashion, with a few new cohorts in the mix. If we introduce the players, it will give you an idea what this record is about. Johan Hedin is a Swedish virtuoso who plays the nyckelharpa, described in the liner notes as a keyed Swedish violin first made in the 14th century, having melody and drone strings and played with a short bow. Ron Allen plays two transverse flutes, the bawu from China and the bansuri from India. He also contributes on an Armenian reed instrument of olive wood called the duduk. Jørn Anderson plays an adapted drum kit, percussion, and bass kalimba (must get one of those). I believe that George Meanwell on cello (must get a name like that) and George Koller on acoustic and electric upright bass are new to the fold. Fellow Canadian luminaries Zubot and Dawson pop up on a few tracks, Jesse Zubot on mandolin and fiddle, and Steve Dawson on ukulele. More familiar Rooke partners are Rob Piltch on nylon string and electric and sustainiac guitars, Michael White on trumpet, and John Sheard on pump organ (the kind with the mouse-proof pedal, which is, thankfully, pictured in the booklet--can’t have the mice chewing on the bellows, can we) and piano, and Hugh Marsh on borrowed violin. So, casting the players gives you a certain idea what you’re in for here. But you must add to that list winged angelic creatures outside the studio windows. There is a humbling magic to these fourteen tracks that truly mystifies. • Frank Goodman, PURE MUSIC (Nashville) ---------------------------------- BEST of the BEST 2003 Alex Varty, Georgia Straight Mag, Vancouver, Dec 11/03 Sublimely beautiful melodies and crystalline arrangements feature heavily on Don Rooke's first solo CD, with pump organ, steel drums, and nyckelharpa backing the Henrys bandleader's elegant and unhurried acoustic steel guitars. Otherworldly, intimate, and familiar, all at the same time. ------------------------- **** Junior Bonner, Buscadero Don Rooke è il leader degli Henrys. Questa è la sua prima prova come solista, un viaggio immaginario nel mondo con canzoni che traggono ispirazione dai paesi visitati. Rooke si inventa un disco splendido, dai toni morbidi ed introspettivi che ha poco a che vedere con la sua band. Lascia completamente da parte la sperimentazione per addentrasi in un campo caro ad uno come Fahey : Lo stile è diverso, ma il viaggiatore ha le idee chiare e la sua musica è affascinante e coinvolgente. ------------------------ By Paolo Carù , Buscadero, Milan, Italy. Translation by Natale Arculeo A record of purity. Don Rooke, atypical guitar player, true artist, is the leader of Henrys, a band often described on this magazine. A mostly instrumental ensemble, sometimes using the voice of MMOH as an instrument, they gave us strange records, merging in a peculiar way the distant worlds of melody and improvisation, pure experimentation and dissonance. Don Rooke, the guitar player, suspended between Ry Cooder like research and Bill Frisell's desire to be always different, is the mind of the project. This time, after a few records with the band, Rooke decided to make a solo album. A world music record, but backwards. Recorded in Rooke's home studio in the basement, Atlas Travel is the travel diary of a true musician, of a very talented man at the quest of the pure essence of sound, as if, as a new John Fahey (there are some similarities with the great American guitar player), he decided to mould in his music sounds and colours from far away countries. But Rooke's work is more than that, because his imagination and creativity work at full steam to create something real from an imaginary situation. Don imagines the sounds of far away places, adapts them to his compositions and doesn't follow the path of other people: he is never been in the places he imagines, and he uses the instruments according to his own logic, for instance adapting a chinese flute to a song located in Paraguay. He follows his own path, as ever, but this time dispenses with improvisation and experiments a la Henrys and goes for melody, colour, athmosphere and the purity of his heart. Atlas Travel is an ethereal record, a distillation of sound, and the guitar of the leader is surrounded by a sparse instrumentation including violins, ukulele, pump organ, piano, guitars, drum, bass, trumpet, cello, nickelarpa (a sort of ancient Swedish violin). Understandably a record drawing its sounds from the pure fountain of Rooke's mind and a collection of folk inspired songs living through perfect performances and sounds. More than 50 minutes with titles like Nuevo Laredo, desertic and lonesome, Palma de Mallorca, deep and evocative, Alexandria, carried on by organ and drums, Donegal Bay, sad and touching, Villa Huidobro, with a latin theme; then we go to Hongary, Czec Republic, Guadalupe, Siberia, France, Paraguay, until we arrive to the windy island, Mahaina, pouring its sounds on the green surface of the sea. Listen to it in respectful silence, eyes shut, trying to imagine the landscapes created by Don Rooke with the magic of his sound. ------------------------ http://www.cdroots.com/rooke-fake.html ------------------------- Ton Maas, Ode Magazine, The Netherlands "The places Rooke conceives are remarkably rural and pastoral. The music is sparing and quiet. Those prepared to go adventuring from the comfort of their own armchair may take the musical journey of their lives. This is music that conjures up unsuspected vistas and resonates in the furthest corners of your own interior." -------------------------- Brent Hagerman, Exclaim Don Rooke took a journey into an atlas inside his mind, conjured up faraway places he openly admits he knows very little about and constructed a worldly album from the confines of his basement. The main songwriter for the Henrys, Rooke has jammed out an instrumental cartography projecting his musical prowess at various points on the compass ("Donegal Bay," "Alexandria," "Filadelfia, Paraguay") but hasn't bothered to shade any of the territories visited with traditional world music colours. Instead he has ceded each state and made it his own in this stringed acoustic feast. Rooke not only assembled a kaleidoscopic cast of musicians and instruments (ukulele by Steve Dawson; nyckelharpa by Johan Hedin; violins by Hugh Marsh and Jesse Zubot; Dudek, bawu and bansuri by Rob Piltch; and John Sheard on pump organ) he has instructed us on their unique characteristics in the liner notes. Fans of Zubot and Dawson, Nordic folk music and armchair travel will delight in Atlas Travel for its love of acoustic textures, melodies and far off places. Perhaps if you buy enough copies you'll even score some air miles. --------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------- Dec. 4, 2003. 01:00 AM Don Rooke shuffles up the musical atlas Album mixes, matches various world sounds A departure from The Henrys' usual aproach GREG QUILL ~ ENTERTAINMENT COLUMNIST "I liked the idea of someone imagining the world from his basement," says eccentric Toronto guitarist Don Rooke of the 14 exotic and evocative instrumental pieces that make up Atlas Travel, his first solo album. In content and form, the folk-based "songs" suggest uncharted landscapes and off-the-map nooks and crannies in Ireland, Spain, Egypt, Hungary, France, the Czech Republic, Siberia, England, Latin America, Mexico, and remote Pacific islands, places familiar only to the curious composer, the lonely basement traveller. Working with his kona - a distinctive and rare hollow-bodied, hollow-necked slide guitar made from Hawaiian koa wood in the 1920s, a distant relative of the Dobro and National resonator slide guitars that are ubiquitous in country and roots music - and with the instrument's peculiar ability to sustain and blend overtones and harmonics into eerie, modally complex chord structures, Rooke has crafted an astonishingly rich, textured impression of places he has yet to see, yet which he has assimilated into a musical atlas of his own design. "I know nothing of these places," continues Rooke, who fronts the rarely seen popular cult band The Henrys, writes most of the ensemble's material, and is considered by the world's music press to be a truly innovative master of his chosen instrument. "The premise of Atlas Travel is a pure conceit, but the effect is appealing to me. It's like a dream, an aftertaste, not a literal musical journey at all. The additional instruments are mixed up geographically - a Chinese flute, for instance, is featured in a piece set in Paraguay - and nothing is culturally distinct or necessarily appropriate to the location. I'm not attempting world music here." What Rooke is doing on Atlas Travel - with the help on this recording of mandolin player and violinist Jess Zubot, Steve Dawson on ukulele, Hugh Marsh on violin, John Sheard on pump organ and piano, guitarist Rob Piltch, drummer Jorn Andersen, bassist George Koller, Michael White on trumpet and modcan (a modular synthesizer), cellist George Meanwell, Johan Hedin on nyckelharpa (an ancient Swedish keyed violin with melody and drone strings), and Ron Allen on primitive flutes from China, India and Armenia - is continuing his journey toward the realization of a culturally indistinct but inclusive fusion of universal folk forms, sounds and musical structures. "It's the same trip as The Henrys are on, but these pieces weren't conceived with structured changes; they were meant to be improvised solo pieces that could grow organically from fragments of melodies ... that's why it has my name on it. It's not The Henrys, but it's definitely Henrys-ish." Three of The Henrys - Marsh, White and Andersen - will join Piltch, Allen and bassist Maury Lafoy and Rooke Sunday night at The Music Gallery in concert to launch Atlas Travel. The CD was recorded - with microphones only, and no direct inputs - in Rooke's basement studio in Toronto and is released on Dawson's Vancouver-based Black Hen Music label. "It's not the kind of music you can play in a bar," Rooke says. "It needs space, lots of air, a place where the all the acoustic tones, resonant notes, harmonics and drones will carry, because that's what the music is built on. "It's not easy music to play, but the right space brings out something in it that wouldn't be otherwise revealed." Rooke turned away from conventional guitar after stints with The Cuban Fence Climbers and Mary Margaret O'Hara's band in the 1980s and '90s, and after he discovered the unimagined possibilities of luthier Hermann Weissenborn's peculiar instrument. "I've never had any formal training in music, but with the kona I was able to find my own voice," he says. "I concentrated on developing that and, in the process, The Henrys came into being." With four CDs - the latest, Joyous Porous, was released a year ago and has won unanimous international critical approval - to their credit, and several key festival performances in Europe, Australia and the U.S., The Henrys remain an enigma, even in their hometown, appearing only under optimal concert circumstances, or when a new recording is released. "I guess you could call it a strategy," says Rooke, whose spare time is mostly consumed by the needs of his sons, aged 3 and 9. "I'd like to work more often, to be able to support myself. "But you can't compromise this music. It doesn't work any other way." ----------------------------------------------------- ROOKE MOVES GUITARIST'S BRAVE NEW WORLD MUSIC by Matt Galloway DON ROOKE at the Music Gallery (197 John), Sunday (December 7), $16-$18. 416-204-1080. There's a kind of armchair exoticism to Don Rooke's sublime new CD. Atlas Travel is the first solo set by the slide guitarist of Toronto abstract twang ensemble the Henrys. It could loosely be called a world music record, but in typical Rooke fashion, he's come at it from an unusual angle. Rather than focusing on authenticity and simply playing music from around the world, Rooke sat in his basement studio, thumbed through an atlas and imagined what the music in places with names like Villa Huidobro, Filadelfia, Paraguay and Shimoda would sound like. "This was initially conceived as a kind of fake world music record, where someone would actually be looking at a map and imagining the sound," Rooke confirms. "I like the image of someone sitting in their basement looking at the world. I initially had used country names, but that sounded too vague to me, so I ended up actually getting out a map and hunting down places that sounded interesting to me. "They're pretty loose interpretations. Villa Huidobro is a town in Argentina, and there's a bit of a tango feel to that piece. Shimoda to me sounds kind of Japanese, but more in the space and simplicity of it, not really the music. And there's a tune set in Guadeloupe that has steel drums on it. Other times, the music has no relevance to the geography. Ron Allen plays Chinese flute on a tune set in Paraguay, for instance." At the risk of encouraging the letter-writing wrath of Paraguayans upset that their national sound has been wrung inside out, let me say that Atlas Travel is anything but authentic. The clanking steel drums on Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe and Alexandria's wheezing pump organ occupy a geographic space all their own. "There's obviously so much great, authentic world music out there," Rooke laughs. "This isn't that at all. I saved myself a few centuries' worth of research by faking it. I was going for textures, not authenticity." Admittedly, global inspiration aside, Atlas Travel's sound doesn't differ wildly from the Henrys' own woozy music. In part, that's down to instruments, particularly the distinctive tone of Rooke's Kona slide guitar. If anything, the instrumental disc is more elliptical, filled with pauses, echoes and long periods of silence. "I wanted to give these tunes such a spare treatment that it wouldn't really be fair to call it a Henrys record. There would be a lot of standing around. There are a lot of duos and trios, so I think it made sense to think of it as a focus on my instrument and a chance to try it out in different contexts." It also gave Rooke the opportunity to reach out beyond the Henrys' open-ended lineup and work with players he's known for years as well as people he's never even met. "Johan Hedin is a Swedish nyckelharpa player whose music I heard over the phone," Rooke explains. "It sounded like a violin with no vibrato, and I was just blown away. I arranged through a friend to have him play on some tunes, never having met him. I still haven't. I guess that reinforces the idea of travelling the world from your basement even more." -------------- Finally, the damning with very faint-praise award goes to one David Ingram w. Alberta's Penguin Eggs magazine. The following has been paraphrased: "....There are some promising ideas here....A dozen musicians play well enough....hither and thither.....an inoffensive, backgroundy experience.... hardly evocative or stimulating...a bit noodley..." We like the employment of that arcane nugget 'hither and thither.' Oh yeah, and Dave mentions something about an "airport lounge." You go boyfriend! -------------- Woops! This just in - Ingram has company!! Ouch! fRoots Mag frm the UK, our old (read previous) friend, writes this: "Slide guitarist Rooke's work with Canada's The Henrys is exemplary, but here too much attention has been paid to the beautiful sounds of the many hit, blown and plucked acoustic instruments, and not enough to the content of the tunes. Wispy, wafty studio doodles float in one ear and straight out the other, even after repeated listenings." (Would it be picayune of us to wonder if there were anything between the writer's ears to slow down the flow of music? Hey!! We didn't say that, honest, we didn't!!) -----------------------