November Group Concert
If you think it's tough finding Osama bin Laden, you ought to take a shot at discovering anything specific about the soundtrack album to the impending Civil War-era movie, Cold Mountain. The album bears looking into because it's being produced by T Bone Burnett, whose ear for listenable period music gave us the megaselling O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack. In addition, several acoustic-oriented country artists from O Brother and its spinoff projects have been involved in the new album, among them Ralph Stanley, Alison Krauss, Tim O'Brien, fiddler Stuart Duncan and guitarist Norman Blake. Calls to the Nashville and New York offices of Columbia Records, which will release the album in league with Burnett's DMZ label, have yielded nothing. According to Amazon.com, the soundtrack will be out Dec. 9, but the site offers no info on specific tracks or artists. Then there's the equally mysterious Cold Mountain stage event set for Nov. 17 at New York's Lincoln Center. Some -- and possibly all -- of the artists participating in the album have been asked to leave that date open, presumably to perform.
Having no luck with the usual sources, Hot Talk tracked down Tim Eriksen, a singer who specializes in shape-note singing (an ancient form of musical
notation) and who has been working with Burnett on a separate album. He says that all the artists cited above are on the soundtrack, as well as himself, Dirk Powell, Jack White (of White Stripes) and banjoist Riley Saugus. Elvis Costello and Sting, he adds, have written songs for the album. The Lincoln Center show, Eriksson thinks, will be filmed for either PBS or A&E. It will consist of musical performances by the soundtrack artists and readings by Cold Mountain's author, Charles Frazier, and the film's principal actors, Nicole Kidman and Jude Law. The O Brother phenomenon was greatly aided by the documentary Down From the Mountain, which was shot at Nashville's Ryan Auditorium well before the movie that inspired it was released. Perhaps there's similar thinking here.
(Submitted by Dave Farr)