By Daniel Buckley

It's been a while since we’ve seen a concert sponsored by the Tucson Friends of Traditional Music, but they’ve teamed up with the University Folk Music Club to bring us a truly great offering, a group called Metamora.  That name may not ring bells immediately, but folk music fans in the know will probably recognize it’s members: Malcolm Dalglish, Grey Larsen and Pete Sutherland.  If those names are still unfamiliar, this is a show you need to see.

If you had to compile a desert-island list of traditional recordings, Dalglish and Larsen’s Thunderhead (Flying Fish 266) and Pete Sutherland’s Poor Man’s Dream (Flying Fish 336) would have to be on it.  Both are outstanding examples of where traditional players have taken the music today, blending idiomatic performances of old-time melodies and songs with tasteful contemporary departures.

But together, these three are even better, supplying an eclectic, touching and…shucks…downright fun patchwork of musical magic.

OK, but who are these guys anyway?  Malcolm Dalgish is an Indiana native who studied theatre at Oberlin College and Music Education at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music.  He plays primarily the hammered dulcimer, a trapezoidal-shaped zither whose graduated strings are struck with small wooden mallets to produce a sparkling sound.  In addition he plays spoons, bones, face, and other miscellaneous percussion instruments.  Malcolm and Grey Larsen started working together in 1975.

Larsen is originally from New York City, but studied at the University of Cincinnati and the Oberlin Conservatory of Music where he got his degree in composition.  In college, he played in early music groups and a lot of the group’s lovelier classically-influenced arrangements come from that background.  Larsen plays flutes, tin whistles, fiddle, concertina and guitar.  He also plays a Norwegian folk fiddle called the hardanger fiddle.  It is slightly smaller than a regular fiddle, has a curved top and has eight strings (four on top which are played and four beneath them which sympathetically vibrate).  Its tone is glowing and luminous like that of the ancient psaltery.

The group’s newest member, Pete Sutherland, is primarily a fiddler (and how!) with a repertoire of fiddle tunes and styles that stretched from Quebec to the Carolinas.  He’s also a fine player on banjo, guitar, and piano (and he calls a mean dance tune, too).  Originally from Vermont, Pete toured with the Arm and Hammer String Band and Mac Benford’s Backwoods Band before joining Larsen and Dalglish in Metamora.

All three in addition are beautiful vocalists and their voices blend in three part harmonies of gorgeous tone and elegant arrangement.  Their music runs the gamut of riverboat songs, Irish and Scandinavian tunes, songs of social consciousness and originals.  They often throw in a hilarious operetta they wrote, billed as “Gilbert and Sullivan meet the Lake Champlain Monster” (now that’s broad-based appeal!)  One of their originals even uses the format of the a capella sacred harp or “sharp note” vocal tradition with all its contrapuntal and harmonic complexity.

Everything they play has one thing in common: quality.  They are musicians of precision, depth, vitality, passion and most importantly, humanity.  If I had to choose one tune that I thought best characterized that aspect it would be Dalglish’s song, “Little Potato,” to his then three-week old daughter.

‘Nuff said. The group plays next Wednesday, September 25^th at 8p.m. in the UA Modern Languages Auditorium.  Tickets are $6 for TFTM members and $7 for everyone else at the door or for $1 dollar less in advance at Discount Records, Piney Hollow, the Book Stop and Workshop Music.  Get on over and see them…or your friends will talk.