Cindy Kallet and Grey Larsen, each well-known and loved for their decades of music making, have joined musical forces as a musical duo, inventing and performing music since 2004. Cindy is a superb singer, guitarist, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist. Grey is one of America’s finest players of the Irish flute and tin whistle, as well as an accomplished singer and concertina, fiddle, piano and harmonium player. As composers each has contributed to the unique tapestry of contemporary folk and world music as it exists and flourishes in America today.
Kallet and Larsen will be performing a free concert in the Camden Amphitheatre at 7:00 pm on Thursday, August 1, as part of the Camden Public Library’s Summer Music Series. Bring blankets or chairs for seating; the concert will move indoors in the case of rain. The series is supported by Allen Insurance and Financial.
Cindy is well known for her years making music and raising a family in the Camden-Rockport area. Grey’s music is widely known through his performances and recordings with Metamora. The duo’s repertoire includes Cindy’s sparkling original songs, distinctive settings of traditional Irish music, Scandinavian fiddle duets, old-time fiddle and guitar tunes from southern Indiana, and new music that Cindy and Grey are inventing together. There is plenty of variety and breadth of musical territory here, all deeply rooted in folk traditions, and interwoven with the renaissance and baroque counterpoint in which both Cindy and Grey, coincidentally, were immersed while growing up. Included are vocal duets, guitar, Irish flute, Irish alto flute, tin whistle, concertina, harmonium, and duet fiddling, and plenty of stories that put the music into a personal context.
Cindy Kallet
Cindy Kallet has been writing music and playing the guitar since she was eleven years old, and has performed throughout the US for more than thirty years. She is a gifted songwriter, singer, and guitarist with five solo albums to her credit. In the twenty-five years since the release of her first album, Cindy has built a devoted audience of all ages and from all walks of life. Her fans find many reasons to love her music, from her deep and intricate guitar playing to her clear and heartfelt singing to her honest and intelligent songwriting to her quietly outrageous humor. Her passion for folk tradition is deeply personal and challenges listeners to draw their own connections with the music.
Cindy’s songs embody her love for the natural beauty of the New England coast. Through her years as a musician, traveler, teacher, naturalist, carpenter, and mother, she has honed and distilled unique insights and imagery. All of this she wraps in her songs, delivered with clarity, depth, and the realism of life understood and the poetry of dreams heartfelt.
Kallet’s albums include Working on Wings to Fly and Cindy Kallet 2, which are on Folk-Legacy Records, and Dreaming Down a Quiet Line, This Way Home, and Leave the Cake in the Mailbox. In addition, Cindy has recorded three albums with Ellen Epstein and Michael Cicone, Angels in Daring, Only Human, and Heartwalk as well as a duet album, Neighbors, with Gordon Bok. In 2003 she put together The Cindy Kallet Songbook -- A Collection for Guitar and Voice which contains words, music, chords, and guitar tablature for 32 original songs. In 2007, she recorded Cross the Water with Grey Larsen.
Grey Larsen
Grey Larsen discovered Irish traditional music in the early ’70s and pursues it with devotion to this day. Regarded as one of America’s leading Irish flute players, Grey joins the silken grace of the East Galway flute style with the driving momentum found in Irish music at large. He has spent decades learning from elder masters, both in the US and in Ireland, and combines his traditional training with an academic background in composition and early music. Through the playing of many traditional musicians in Ireland and other Celtic lands, several of Grey’s own tunes have been adopted into the common repertoire.
While he is best known for Irish music, Grey plays half a dozen instruments and is at home in several musical styles. He is a fine fiddler and has devoted a great deal of his musical life to the old-time fiddle music of his native southern Midwest, situated in the northern fringe of the Appalachian cultural region. In particular, Grey delights in sharing the lovely crooked-tune repertoire of southern Indiana fiddler Joe Dawson, and loves to tell stories about his musical mentors like Joe and Irishmen Michael Kennedy, Tom Byrne and Tom McCaffrey.
Grey has performed and recorded widely since the mid 1970s with Cindy Kallet, Malcolm Dalglish, Metamora (Grey, Malcolm, and Pete Sutherland), André Marchand, Paddy League and many others, throughout the US and in Canada, Europe and Australia. Virtuoso Irish fiddler and educator Séamus Connolly has said of Grey that he is “one of the few players who has mastered an older style of playing which has been heard in East County Galway, Ireland. . . . It is refreshing and gratifying to hear such a true understanding of the soul of traditional Irish music in the playing of an American-born musician.”
One of Irish music’s most articulate teachers, Grey has taught at festivals, workshops, colleges and music camps in the US, Canada, Ireland, Australia and the Netherlands. He is also widely recognized for his work as a record producer, mastering engineer, and as the Music Editor of Sing Out! Magazine.
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