Traditional Music

Members of the San Salvatore Society carry a statue of Jesus out of Holy Savior Roman Catholic Church for the traditional procession through Norristown's east side. Yesterday's procession marked the last day of the weekend's Holy Savior Feast. For the 91st year, participants flew Italian flags, played and listened to traditional music and feasted.

Fairmount Park took on a Native American air yesterday as the 20th annual Powwow of the United American Indians of the Delaware Valley began with traditional music, crafts and food. The powwow continues this afternoon at Memorial Grove, Belmont Avenue and Belmont Mansion Drive.

Yesterday, Philadelphia celebrated the memory of Gen. Thaddeus Kosciuszko, who fought in the War for Independence. Two hundred years ago, the city gave him a hero's welcome and that event was re-created over the weekend. And there were fun and games. (From top) Walenty Mazur performs traditional music yesterday at the Polish American Weekend at Penn's Landing; Mayor Rendell makes an appearance, dancing with Theresa Romanowski, and Anna Poniatowska, 17, of the PKM Dance group, waits to perform.

Their numbers may have declined, but the traditional music and dances of American Indians have not died, said Barbara Stevenson of the Powhatan-Renape Indian Nation. Stevenson, the Nation's planner and grants coordinator, announced a special performance of the American Indian Dance Theater, which will present traditional music and dance in a theatrical production Friday at the Rankokus Indian Reservation on Rancocas Road in Westampton. "The troupe is a good representation of American Indians throughout the country," said Stevenson.

When people come from a culture thousands of years old, they usually have developed many ways of making music. Los Kjarkas, a Bolivian folk group that performed last night at International House, can boast such a culture. Their music is rooted in the Quechua and Aymara Indian cultures, both of which predate the coming of the Spanish by millennia. They made music from the shell of an armadillo, from the skin of a calf, on bamboo pipes as big as a small child. They performed original compositions, based on traditional music forms, with the help of a foot-long seed pod, which provided rhythm.

If you can spare just a couple of hours to visit at the Philadelphia Folk Festival this weekend, be sure it's Sunday afternoon for the 4-6 p.m. show headlined by Los Lobos and featuring talented localite John Flynn. The personnel will be the same, but Los Lobos won't sound like the same bunch of Los Angelinos you've heard rocking sweet and hard at nightclubs and theaters, with just a little Latin lilt evoking their ethnic origins. "When we do a folk festival, we go full blast to our roots, relying more on the Mexican folk music of Veracruz, Michoacan and Guerrero," said David Hidalgo, the group's multi-instrumental virtuoso and singer.

The haunting, sonorous melody from Krystal Trinidad's flute spread like a murmured prayer over the audience at the Rankokus Indian Reservation yesterday. For a moment, there was silence among the 200 people, assembled around the reservation's ceremonial mound, as Trinidad and her musical partner, Orie Medicine Bull, retold the story of a Papago (Indian woman welcoming spring back to the southwestern United States many centuries ago. It is a song that has been passed nearly unchanged from old to young by generations of Papagos, said Trinidad.

"With Irish music, you won't become a star sensation overnight," laughs Seamus Egan. Maybe not as far as the public is concerned, but in traditional music circles on both sides of the Atlantic, Egan, a versatile 17-year-old musician from Lansdowne, has already earned a reputation as one of the finest young musicians of his generation. Last April he made his first record, "Seamus Egan. " And in Ireland, he and his flute have won - four times - the All-Ireland music festival, a competition he likens to "the Olympics of traditional music.

Bert Jansch, 67, a legendary folk guitarist, died in London on Wednesday after a long battle with lung cancer. Mr. Jansch was a founding member of the influential group Pentangle, which won wide acclaim in the late 1960s and the 1970s, and he also enjoyed a solo career that spanned five decades and more than 25 albums. Known for his gentle eloquence on the acoustic guitar, the Scottish-born Mr. Jansch was a central figure in the British folk-music revival in the 1960s and played to appreciative audiences throughout the world for many decades.

If the monthly Gospel Brunch at Johnny Brenda's is like a hipster church, then its minister is David April, a/k/a DJ DNA. April has hosted the brunch since Easter Sunday 2010; he's also hosted "Roots of Rhythm & Blues" and "The Gospel Train" for 20 years on Hatboro's WRDV-FM. To celebrate that anniversary, he'll preach musical truth Saturday with a live gospel show at the venue. The "Gospel, Soul & Rhythm-'n'-Blues Review" will feature performances by the York Street Hustle, a Philadelphia-based, nine-piece ensemble that plays '60s soul; Philadelphia's gospel-based God's Grace, which typically performs at local churches; and Carlton Lewis III, a member of the famed gospel group the Dixie Hummingbirds who has since embarked on a solo soul career.

Bert Jansch, 67, a legendary folk guitarist, died in London on Wednesday after a long battle with lung cancer. Mr. Jansch was a founding member of the influential group Pentangle, which won wide acclaim in the late 1960s and the 1970s, and he also enjoyed a solo career that spanned five decades and more than 25 albums. Known for his gentle eloquence on the acoustic guitar, the Scottish-born Mr. Jansch was a central figure in the British folk-music revival in the 1960s and played to appreciative audiences throughout the world for many decades.

A most intriguing voice, hefty blasts of (and from) the past, plus cool jazz, folk and world music have our attention in this week's new recorded music offerings. THROUGH THE HOOP: There's no staying neutral on Jesca Hoop and her second album "Hunting My Dress" (Vanguard, A-) . In the vein of a Bjork, PJ Harvey or Kate Bush, you'll find Hoop fascinating or off-putting and for much the same reasons - her soaring range, tongue-rolling pronunciation (sometimes appearing British, though she's not)

A little a cappella and a lot of gospel, haunting artifacts and heroic ancestors, joyful celebrations and somber commemorations are the hallmarks of Black History Month. Local observances will peak with a musical festival today at 30th Street Station and a series of exhibits and tributes next weekend at the Convention Center. And both are among the free celebrations offered in this region. At the Pathmark Black History Month Celebration today, radio and TV personality Diane Brown will emcee a program described as traditional music of the African American community on a stage in the train station's North Waiting Room.

The sixth child of a fiddle player from Donegal and an accordion player from Tyrone who met at a Ceili dance, John McGillian seemed destined to be an Irish musician. He grew up in a household filled with Irish song and began playing traditional Irish button-key accordion music at age 6. These days, McGillian spends almost every Sunday performing at The Plough and The Stars, an Irish pub in Philadelphia. "It's traditional Irish dance music. No words, all tunes," McGillian, 30, said.

Near a wood-carved illustration of the magical puppet who became a real-life boy, the musical duo of Kathy McMearty and John Lionarons played Celtic folk songs, country tunes and radio hits recently for the family crowd at Pinocchio's Bar & Restaurant. It was the second annual MediAmerica Roots Ramble, a festival featuring 14 musical events hosted by the Media Business Authority and other local businesses and benefitting the Domestic Abuse Project of Delaware County. McMearty, of Media, and Lionarons, of Lansdowne, were selected as entertainers for the event's first family-oriented show, said Paul Patchel, festival manager.

The Silk Road Project, sponsored through the clout of cellist Yo-Yo Ma and an international group of musicians known as the Silk Road Ensemble, burst onto the scene last year with a global agenda. Through a series of festivals, CDs and international concerts of newly commissioned works and traditional melodies, the project raised awareness of cross-cultural milestones in human history. Besides silk, gunpowder, crafts, mathematics and other innovations between 500 B.C. and the time of Marco Polo, musical instruments from Persia, India, China and Mongolia traveled this trade route as well.

Elaine Hoffman Watts' father taught her to play klezmer music as a little girl, but no one else would hire the female drummer to play the traditional Eastern European Jewish folk music. "It was a man's thing," she said. Not anymore. The revival of klezmer music has brought some long-overdue recognition, say her fellow musicians, to Hoffman Watts, 71, a third-generation klezmer player and the first female percussionist to graduate from the Curtis Institute of Music. These days, she often shares the stage with her trumpet-playing daughter, Susan Watts, as part of the Fabulous Shpielkehs, a Yiddish brass band.

It was reasonable to expect something reverent and traditional when, a few songs into its Wednesday performance at the Kimmel Center's Perelman Theater, pioneering New York Latin band Yerba Buena dedicated "Electric Boogaloo" to salsa legend Celia Cruz, who had died that afternoon. The piece started out typically enough - a Latin dance framed by Venezuela-born guitarist and bandleader Andres Levin's skeletal montuno chord sequence. Then the drums roared in, shoving tradition aside with an intense urban backbeat that had the slightest tinge of Ibiza club music.

The Archdiocesan Boy Choir of Philadelphia will present a holiday choral concert at 3 p.m. Sunday at St. Philomena Roman Catholic Church in Lansdowne. All are welcome to the choir's inaugural concert for this year's holiday season. The program will include traditional American holiday music as well as Spanish and French carols. Founded in 1969, the choir has more than 80 boys and is one of the few boys' choirs dedicated to performing sacred music according to a centuries-old tradition.