ALBUM REVIEW: Folk Song Innovator Sam Amidon Reimagines Folk Songs on ‘Salt River’

Sam Amidon has spent most of his career carefully deconstructing and reimagining (mostly) traditional folk songs. He always keeps one foot rooted to the folk scene of the 1970s, which his parents were a part of, while the other foot dances coyly with experimental, jazz fusion, and indie rock collaborators. An adept player on banjo, guitar, and fiddle, and with a plaintive, entrancing voice, Amidon carries himself with a purposeful vision of folk music as both a living tradition and something more progressively on the outer edges of musical expression than is typically understood. The resulting music is always good, and quite often revelatory.

As is his wont, on his latest album, Salt River, Amidon charted the course of the record alongside a few sympathetic and deeply adventurous collaborators that can test the possibilities and capacities of the source material. In this case, that’s percussionist Philippe Melanson and saxophonist/multi-instrumentalist Sam Gendel, the latter of whom is also credited as the album’s producer.

Gendel, who has collaborated numerous times with Amidon over the years, is a more than welcome foil here, thanks to his iconoclastic approach to jazz music. His musical impact on Salt River is both prominent and slippery, often utilizing his synthesizer as much as traditional winds or strings, but his irascible sensibilities often define the proceedings.

While several of the album’s songs are relatively straightforward—the graceful guitar picking on the opening “Oldenfjord,” the pastoral swirl of “Three Five” (a take on the traditional “Old Churchyard”)—many are decidedly more mischievous. Over the course of the album’s middle section, the trio gives Lou Reed’s “Big Sky” an art-rock deconstruction, and the fiddle tune “Tavern” gets played over a drum and synth loop and quickly spirals into psychedelia. Even more traditional numbers, like the story-song ballad “Golden Willow Tree” and the shape-singing standard “I’m On My Journey Home,” get woozy and made strange by Melanson and Gendel’s subversive contributions.

For all of the esoteric impulses on display, the key to the record is likely the trio’s rambling take on Ornette Coleman’s “Friends and Neighbors.” It’s originally a simple vocal chant attached to the free jazz giant’s typically avant-garde explorations. Amidon and company’s version captures the friendly and freewheeling vibe of the sessions, where adept, mutable players are trading songs both old and new, strange and familiar. They are less concerned with what’s folk or jazz, electronic or acoustic, than what they can offer to the song, and to each other in the process.

And maybe, Amidon seems to be offering, that’s what folk music is all about in the first place.

Sam Amidon’s Salt River is out Jan. 24 via River Lea Records.