WORKSHOPS:
Sunday, Jan 22
1:30-3pm — For ages 7 to 12, all instruments welcome. Melody instruments will work with Donna and rhythm instruments will work with Max.
3:30-5pm — For adults, all instruments welcome. Melody instruments will work with Donna and rhythm instruments will work with Max.
Location: Folk School of Chattanooga, 250 Forest Ave. (one block north of Frazier Ave. up from the Walnut St. Bridge)
Workshops cost $10 per participant, and all workshop participants will be invited to perform in the concert that evening with Donna and Max at Barking Legs.
A fiddle teacher at both Smith and Amherst Colleges and recipient of eight NEA Master/Apprenticeship Grants in the Traditional Arts, Donna Hébert understands fiddling like few teachers can. “Donna gets it all right,” says fiddling pioneer Darol Anger in his foreword to her Fiddling Demystified for Strings, a 70-page volume with 3 instructional CDs that he calls “a fiddling encyclopedia”. Donna’s workshops teach defining techniques in Celtic, Québecois and Southern Old-Time fiddling, sometimes using one tune for several styles. Students learn rhythms that help define a style first, adding melody, ornaments and harmony in layers over a core beat.
Guitarist Max Cohen teaches rhythm and lead guitar in Celtic DADGAD tuning. Taking tunes Donna teaches, Max shows how to use DADGAD tuning to its best advantage, pulling rhythms from and adding them back into the tune. Max has taught children and adults in festival workshops for many years. With Donna Hébert, Max has wrangled the rhythm section for five years with the Great Groove Band of young musicians at both Old Songs and Philadelphia Folk Festival. The groove band is an impromptu group of players from 4-18 that learns tunes and songs on Friday, arranges them on Saturday and opens the main stage on Sunday in performance.
CONCERT: Donna Hébert & Max Cohen
Sunday, Jan 22
7pm
$10
Barking Legs Theater
”They are really a treat – fabulous musicians with a wonderful way of playing together.” Jay Ungar, Dancing on the Air, WAMC, Albany NY
Highly lauded Western MA fiddler and teacher Donna Hébert is one of the founders of the contradance renaissance. In 1972, she joined Dudley Laufman’s Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra and founded Yankee Ingenuity’s Monday Night Concord MA dance in 1976. Now, with 40 years and thousands of dances under her bow, Donna’s fiddling offers a lifetime’s worth of delightful dancing tricks. Six years ago, she began playing with extraordinary lead and rhythm guitarist Max Cohen. With repertoire from Celtic and US traditions, their waltzes and slow numbers are exquisitely expressive and their dance tunes rock! The duo performs, records and teaches at festivals and camps in the U.S., Canada and Europe. Max also performs and tours with folksinger Priscilla Herdman.
