Dorothy Carter was in her early 40s when she recorded her largely instrumental, entirely soulful album Troubadour. Although the 1976 release was her debut album, she had already lived many, many lives by then and was enjoying a storied career. An artist drawn to obscure, often unwieldy instruments, she studied music at Bard College and the Royal Academy of Arts, but it was a given that she would thrive on the rigidity of academia. He traveled the world in search of new sounds and new inspirations, even spending a year in a monastery in Mexico where he is said to have experienced superficial spiritual visions. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, she played in an improvisational collective called the Central Maine Power Company with a handful of fellow eccentrics (including New Age pioneer Constance Demby), and Carter always provided a melodic counterpart to what they called “not music”. ” But she found her greatest commercial success with the classical group Mediæval Bæbes, which in the 90s rode a wave of interest in early music (especially Gregorian chant, but also string ensembles) into something resembling popularity.
Throughout her life, Carter amassed a collection of instruments not taught in music schools: zithers, hurdy-gurdys, chanters, Irish harps and more, some with so many modifications that they barely resembled their originals. forms. She spent her final years in New Orleans, reportedly squatting in a warehouse that lacked heat and running water, but had plenty of room for her musical menagerie. All the obsessions that have driven her entire career are heard Troubadour. Tracked in a small studio in Boston and featuring members of the Power Music Company, who produced and added tambourine (an ancient Greek stringed instrument) and ch'in (a traditional Chinese chime), it plays like a map of Carter's musical passions. , tracing rivers and roads between popular tradition and the vanguard of innovation. He found a small audience in the folk scenes of Boston and New York, but did not travel much further. There is no conspiracy here about label abuse or listener apathy. Carter never set out to make a record with overt gestures toward commercial viability, though perhaps the new reissue of Drag City will spark a popular reappraisal, especially after last year's suppression of Carter's more vocally oriented sophomore album. Wailee Wailee.
As novel as an album with hammered dulcimer and psaltery sounds, Troubadour it's not just accessible but exciting, full of big ideas and moments of disarming beauty. At the heart of the album is the tambourine, an instrument whose sound is hard to describe. When Carter strikes these taut strings with her hammers, she produces an unusual sound – pointillist? pixelated?—with a lively, powerful slapback, as if we're hearing the note and its immediate echo at the same time. Her rapid pounding on “Visiting Song” sounds like sculpted rain. Because she's such a lively player, it's not hard to get lost in these songs, to lose track of time in the spiraling melody of “Lark in the Morning” or the gentle pulse of “Masquerade,” one of the few originals on Troubadour.
