We Yukoners have a great capacity for understatement.
When the thermometer hits -20°, we claim it’s nice out; only by –35° does the weather become cold.
Hunters in the Yukon will say, “I got a moose” as if the animal just followed the truck home and leapt into the freezer. In this way, Allan Benjamin’s’ Didee and Didoo is more than just fiddle tunes.
Recorded at Bob Hamilton’s Old Crow Studio, Fiddle Tunes is a quiet understatement in many ways.
The entire album is a celebration of a beloved style of music. Evoking an intimate homespun feeling, this music will warm up a room like fresh bread in the oven or a wood-fired stove on a cold autumn day.
Classic fiddle tunes, reels and jigs, standards played with love, accompanied by Nathan Tinkhan on rhythm guitar and Bob Hamilton on bass.
There is an inherent naturalism to this music that lends itself to any setting whether it’s listening on the home hi-fi or, as I prefer, while walking the trails with my little black dog.
The tone of the album is one of gentle energy, at times relaxing and at the same moment invigorating.
By virtue of being the music it is, it suggests a simpler time … a time when people got together to make what music they could with the instruments available at hand.
This stimulating energy creates a toe tapping celebration of friends getting together to have a good time making music instead of being idle consumers of it.
There are no overloaded sounds that risk breaking this spell. The guitar and bass played by Tinkham and Hamilton respectively hold the bottom down both rhythmically and sonically.
Guitar and bass create a solid platformance that allows the sound of Benjamin’s fiddle to both create the voice of the song and, through the magic of how the fiddler creates his instrument’s particular voice, drives the rhythm forward.
Two songs that bear a second (or third) listening to are the classics like Buffalo Gals and I’m Movin’ On. They have a special place in the pantheon of fiddle tunes.
Crazy Arms is an example of swing fiddling at its best. In the hands of Benjamin and friends, these songs come together with a real Yukon flavour.
I had an interesting thought when I was listening to the album: this music is perfectly suited to reading Benjamin’s’ Didee and Didoo cartoons and poems that grace the pages of this paper.
The combination of the two reminded me of some of the wonderful animation that has been produced by the National Film Board of Canada through the years. Perhaps some ambitious filmmaker will take this idea and run with it.
