For some reason, weather prognosticators, free-ranging banquet speakers, and evangelical sawdust-trail shouters all like to claim that autumn is the season of death.  When the leaves fall, the sun shines shorter, and the cattle in the fields all look like they've got somewhere to go, people think about death - the end of the cycle of seasons - a time when nature descends into a crypt of silence.  Well, for those of us who prefer this season over all others, it makes us seem like a bunch of oddballs who keep roadkill in jars of formaldehyde in our cellar.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  By late summer already my cellar is already full.  Of preserves - but just pickles and salsas and chutneys and dilly beans, etc.  Indeed, Autumn is a time to celebrate the harvest - the newly-grown - which is what we do today on Routes & Branches & Beyond, when I play a set of music that is relatively new to this world.

I have jaunty front porch shuffles, buckboard banjos, skittering fiddles, celtic boundary breaches, Afro-Caribbean steelpan jazz, sweet and savoury old-time music from darkest SW Ontario, poly-rhythmic voices of the past, pure drop Kerry polkas, spirited (yet dignified) classical celtic tunes.  All from bands such as April Verch & Cody Walters, Natalie MacMaster & Donnell Leahy, Joy Lapps, Onion Honey, Musique á Bouches, Pólca 4, and The Bookends & the Stratford Symphony Orchestra.  Set down that jar of formaldehyde and join us.

Routes & Branches & Beyond show # 293 2023 09 28

Ivan Emke