W E OPEN OUR 33D SEASON with a singer-songwriter who describes himself as “undoubtedly the least famous person with a boxed set”— Jack Hardy. “The Collected Works of Jack Hardy” spans 30 years of a musical “vision that successfully blends history, mythology, romanticism, and politics” (The Boston Globe). Jack’s songs range from the American West to the ballads and jigs of Celtic ancestors. Their composer is so steeped in his subject that his “Tinker’s Coin” was introduced as a traditional song by an Irish folk singer.

Well loved by European audiences (so much so that an Italian encyclopedia of rock n roll gives more space to him than to many prominent rock stars), Hardy has been a driving force in America as well. He established the Fast Folk Musical Magazine in the early 1980s, a combination magazine and recording that documented serious, non-commercial songwriting in the United States. For fifteen years FFMM presented 600 different writers performing 2000 original songs (you may have heard of Fast Folk alumni Suzanne Vega, Michele Shocked, Lyle Lovett, David Massengill, Christine Lavin, John Gorka, and Shawn Colvin, to name a few). The magazine went hand in hand with Jack’s weekly song swaps at his Greenwich Village apartment.

Hardy’s latest CD, “Omens,” was recorded live to 24 track analog in only two days, with no overdubs. The 14 songs include a diversity of styles: the uptempo Celtic “Sile na gCioch” to a magical myth of a song called “West of Dingle.”

next concert >