There Is No Eye: Music for Photographs from ViArt PHP Shopping Cart

There Is No Eye: Music for Photographs--Recordings of Musicians Photographed by John Cohen is a great mix CD of raw, ragged, and right American folk music. Though that's little surprise as, since the late 1950s, John Cohen has patched together an alchemical body of work as a filmmaker, photographer, self-taught ethnographer, music writer, art professor, and musician. The CD accompanies a book of Cohen's beautiful, black-and-white documentary photos. Cohen really knows his folk music; his 1968 interview with Harry Smith for the Sing Out! fanzine remains the Rosetta stone for the all-important Anthology of American Folk Music, and as one-third of the New Lost City Ramblers he helped bring the visceral pleasures of true traditional Americana to a larger audience during the folk revival. This collection is wide-ranging and largely unerring. From Beat jazz to gospel, Appalachian a cappella singing to a Peruvian string band--it's all here, with no slick O Brother arrangements or anything else to get in the way of the music as it would have been heard on front porches, small clubs, and backyards. About a third of the tracks are previously unreleased; Dylanologists will need this CD for a swell unreleased track by the young Bobby, a version of "Roll on John" from a 1961 WBAI radio broadcast. --Mike McGonigal ViArt PHP Shopping Cart