Folk Songs

To borrow a phrase from Monty Python, now for something entirely different: a man who makes his living singing the folk songs of South Jersey. The folk songs of South Jersey? The Ballad of Little Nicky? Three Fair Maidens of the Admiral Wilson Boulevard? Haul Away Lads, We're Bound for the Moorestown Mall? Jim Albertson doesn't find such wit amusing nor warranted. "South Jersey to me is the interior, the pines, the meadows and back bays. I love it," says Albertson.

Born in Brooklyn into a Ukrainian family, Fran Kleiner learned to love two things: speaking Yiddish and singing. There was always music in the family home, she said - lullabies and love songs, and the traditional folk melodies her mother loved to sing at family gatherings. The songs were as natural to Kleiner as breathing, and as she grew up, attended Boston College and went on to graduate school, she never forgot the pleasure they brought her. Now, at 73, retired from teaching and social work, Kleiner is making a second career of the beloved music of her childhood.

"Folk music is children's theater - moving and singing and laughing and creating and sharing all the songs. " Oscar Brand, the folk singer behind that quote, will take to the stage today at the Philadelphia Folk Festival in Schwenksville to create and share his folk songs with children. Featuring a sampling of sing-alongs and musical games, the performance by the internationally known recording artist also will include selections from his kid-vid entitled, Sing Along Party at Oscar's Place.

With a Macedonian bagpipe, a smaller Bulgarian bagpipe of goatskin, a triangular Russian string instrument called the balalaika, her guitar, violin and a piano nearby, Sue Anderson was ready to tackle any folk song, be it the Bulgarian fire-walking dance or a merry Croatian tune. Connie Martorano of Newtown Square, a musician and former flamenco dancer, had brought her mandolin, a guitar, and even her ebony castanets, just in case a Spanish song would come up. After a few minutes of tuning and shuffling of music sheets, Daryl Kezell's accordion led off the first Macedonian number at the international dance music jam, and more than a dozen musicians joined in on a range of instruments from the flute to the tupan - a Macedonian bass drum played by Jo Anne Rocke of Sellersville.

It's a form of music that reaches back 5,000 years. It was the subject in the 1920s of the first big "talkie," The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson. It is the art of the Jewish cantor, and a presentation of that art is planned for Saturday night at Congregation Beth Or in Spring House. "A Marriage of Cantors" will showcase the singing talents of a husband and wife team - tenor Paul Offenkrantz, who serves as cantor for Beth Or, and soprano Karen Braunstein. "The role of the cantor," Offenkrantz said in a recent interview, "is as the leader of prayer for the Jewish people, through the vehicle of music.

The Rev. Garry Culp (center) of the Pebble Hill Church in Doylestown Township takes part in a group singing of folk songs in Doylestown Borough. The ecumenical service on Sunday marked the 50th anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Remarkable for its colorful evocations of Chinese landscape paintings and for its lyrical use of folk songs, Yellow Earth, a stunning musical set in 1939 China, chronicles Chinese resistance to the Japanese invasion and occupation. An award-winning first feature by Chen Kaige, it tells the story of a cadre of communists who collect folk songs and teach them to peasants as a way of celebrating the Chinese cultural heritage. Filmed on location in the Shaanxi Province, a rugged landscape in China's northwest as majestically barren as America's Southwest, the movie symbolizes the vigor of the revolutionary ideas that blossomed in the parched soil on the banks of the Yellow River.

The bells that toll on Wednesday evenings at the Washington Memorial Chapel in the Valley Forge National Park will ring for the last time this summer at 8 p.m. Wednesday. A barbecue chicken dinner, which usually attracts 300 to 400 people, will precede the potpourri concert by the chapel's resident carillonneur, Frank DellaPenna, and his students. Tickets for the dinner, $7.50 for adults and $4 for children, are on sale at the Cabin Shop. For more information, call 783-0576. "After dinner, the bell tower will be open for anyone who wants to walk off their dinner by climbing the 112 steps up the tower," DellaPenna said.

Live shows for children will be offered by the Camden County Park Commission in two locations on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, beginning this week and running through August. All the shows in the series are free. The commission has been offering the summer children's theater series for about 13 years, according to John McNally, a recreation supervisor for the commission who is in charge of the series. When it began, the series was held in only one location - Haddon Heights Dell in Haddon Heights, McNally said.

The Schubert song cycles have gradually become the province of the recording rather than the concert hall. One reason is that there seem to be fewer recitals; another is that many singers find it more profitable, commercially and musically, to learn another operatic role than to polish a long song cycle. German baritone Olaf Baer is the latest to record such a cycle, Die schone Mullerin, with pianist Geoffrey Parsons (EMI CDC7-47947 2). The 20 songs that trace the story of romantic longing and final disappointment are a microcosm of Schubert's world of song.

New Recordings Ratings: **** Excellent, *** Good, ** Fair, * Poor Laura Marling Once I Was An Eagle (Ribbon Music ***1/2) Laura Marling already sounded like an old soul when she released her haunting debut, Alas, I Cannot Swim , in 2008, when she was 18. On her fourth album, the 23-year-old British songwriter (and former Marcus Mumford dater) sets herself even further apart from her peers with a pretty-much- peerless collection of folk songs.

The Clean From their antipodean home of Dunedin, New Zealand, in the 1980s, the Clean were the secret architects of '90s American indie rock. The catchy, droning, experimental guitar sounds crafted by brothers David and Hamish Kilgour with Robert Scott provided the blueprint for angular indie luminaries and professed fans such as Pavement and Yo La Tengo. The band's releases have been few and far between, thanks to side projects (like Scott's the Bats) and Hamish's move to New York; tours have been rarer still.

Tristram P. Coffin, 89, a folklorist who unearthed worlds of meaning in ordinary rituals, died of pneumonia Jan. 31 in Wakefield, R.I. Mr. Coffin, a retired member of the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote many books for a popular readership. They include The Book of Christmas Folklore (1973), Uncertain Glory: Folklore and the American Revolution (1971), and The Old Ball Game: Baseball in Folklore and Fiction (1971). If folklore, as Mr. Coffin cheerfully wrote in the introduction to Our Living Traditions (1968)

MONTERREY, Mexico - The mayor of a Mexican town who survived two drug cartel assassination attempts now has his own corrido , a genre of Mexican folk song that in recent years has been more devoted to glorifying the exploits of drug traffickers than public servants. But in a Mexico desperate for heroes, plain-talking Mayor Jaime Rodriguez Calderon seems made to order: The song dedicated to him is called "El Alcalde Bronco," or "The Unbroken Mayor. " "I'm not one of these politicians who hides what they think.

Willing to put his mouth where the money is, singer-songwriter Tim Gleeson will perform selections from his solo CD, No Sad Songs , at your place. "They're called house concerts . . . there's lots of stuff about them on Google," Gleeson says in his Moorestown home studio, a pleasant, orderly space full of guitars and recording equipment. "I've done a couple so far. " Such is the low-fi yet high-tech life of a working American roots musician, even an established local performer whose work appears on other artists' recordings - including a disc recently nominated for a Grammy.

Like Brahms, George Crumb prematurely announced himself done with composing - this was a decade or so ago. And, like Brahms, he ended retirement quickly when newly inspired by performers, in this case Orchestra 2001. The ensemble, led by James Freeman, became Crumb's personal outlet for an astonishing outpouring of music that draws on his West Virginia upbringing. Samples of that remarkable series of six American Songbooks were performed Friday at the Kimmel Center and Sunday at Swarthmore College in concerts marking Crumb's impending 80th birthday on Oct. 24. The program had the feeling of a festschrift, its first half including works by James Primosch, Jay Reise and Anna Weesner, colleagues when Crumb taught at the University of Pennsylvania.

Like so many genre labels, folk music is a malleable term. Does it denote roots music from regional sources, played by nonprofessional musicians? Or acoustic music with an overt political content? Or something that reclaims and archives traditional songs? Or has the term become, as Colin Meloy fears, so vague and amorphous that it's nearly meaningless? "Most people, when they hear the word folk music, just assume it's any sort of pop-derived music that features an acoustic guitar centrally," he says.

It was the end of the school year and the night before a Carnegie Hall gig with concert repertoire that thrives on heat. So the Curtis Symphony Orchestra was all but guaranteed to rearrange your hair Monday at the Kimmel Center, even without Paavo J?rvi. The ever-rising chief conductor of Orchestre de Paris and the other CSO (the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra) canceled in the weeks following his drunken-driving arrest and ensuing court proceedings. More-than-capable Michael Stern led the heavy 2 1/2-hour program that was most notable for Prokofiev's Sinfonia concertante (Op. 125)