Waillee Waillee

A joint release between Palto Flats & Putojefe Records. The first ever reissue of the work of American composer Dorothy Carter, master of the hammered dulcimer, zither, and other instruments of the hammer chord zither/psalterium family.

A true musical vagabond, Dorothy was born in New York in 1935, though her spiritual pursuit of an expansive musical knowledge would take her to monasteries in Mexico, conservatories in France and London, and the founding of the Central Maine Power Music Company (CMPMC), with new-age / minimalist luminaries such as Constance Demby and Robert Rutman.

Dorothy Carter was many things - a virtuoso player, storyteller, historian of Celtic and Appalachian folk music, avid lifelong busker, avant-garde musician, and itinerant troubadour, laying a framework for music that existed both within and outside of standard folk idioms - never better represented than on her 1978 masterwork, Waillee Wailee.

Underscored by Bob Rutman's cavernous bowing of the steel cello, the richness of Waillee Waillee's sound produces an album unlike any other in her discography. In particular, its two side-ending pieces, "Summer Rhapsody" and "Tree of Life," glide with the shimmering filigree of hammered dulcimer and Dorothy Carter's ephemeral voice floating over Rutman's droning buzz of the steel cello.

The title track is one of her most enduring compositions, often performed in stripped-down versions throughout her career, and one of her sole recordings featuring a full band, with the contrapuntal interplay of tremulous flute, vibrating steel cello, bass, and drums.

She counted musical colleagues as diverse as Constance Demby, Einstürzende Neubauten, and Laraaji, as well as her lifelong artistic partner and friend Bob Rutman, whose imprint is felt throughout the grooves of this record.

The master tapes for this recording were fortuitously discovered in Rutman's Berlin studio, many, many years later. As recounted in Laraaji's contribution to the liner notes, Dorothy was "someone who really influenced my early zither exploration and vocabulary and inspired my shift toward hammered zither performance and recording," after encountering him busking on the sidewalk one day in the 1970s.

The recording of Waillee Waillee would mark the end of an era for Dorothy: leaving behind the familiar confines of the northeast, she embarked to New Orleans, settling with her family there.

For fans of Henry Flynt, Laraaji, Alice Coltrane, Karen Dalton, Sandy Denny, Grouper