Atlas Travel, a solo disc by Don Rooke - with his pals from The Henrys and elsewhere, incl. Johan Hedin from Sweden

Atlas Travel is a 'solo' project by Henrys leader
Don Rooke. It's not actually solo, and has lots of
Henrys band members on it, but it's a different
approach to music on the acoustic lap slide
guitar - small compositions in a variety of small
settings. Among the contributors is Swedish
nyckelpharpa artist Johan Hedin.
------------
Reviews

Don Rooke is the guitar player for a Toronto
band called The Henrys. Atlas Travel is his first
solo album, and it provides an easy transition
from the world of Harry Manx. Rooke plays a
Style 3 Kona guitar, an acoustic slide guitar
made of Hawaiian koa wood originally
manufactured by California luthier Herman
Weissenborn in the 1920s. It's played on the lap
and fretted by a steel bar. And, like Manx,
Rooke creates music from other places.

He insists (in the liner notes) that "this is not a
world music record. Think of a person sitting at
home in the evening studying a book of maps. If
he tries to imagine music to suit whatever
obscure place he discovers, chances are the
sounds he hears in his head will not replicate
anything authentic. (At least they wouldn't in my
head.) This is the basic idea for these songs --
to suggest a faraway place without knowing
anything about it." Hence the name Atlas Travel.

Each song is titled after a place Rooke
discovered in his atlas. "Nueva Laredo," "Palma
de Mallorca," "Alexandria," "Donegal Bay," and
so on. And each song seeks to take the listener
on a journey. In imagination. It's a challenging
concept. Does it work? It did for me.

I didn't check the titles until I was more familiar
with the music, so I was able to travel to
different places than Rooke intended. I listened
to this CD as one long piece, broken into
movements. Movements of Rooke's finger on
the maps in his atlas; movements of Rooke's
musical imagination as he contemplated the
places he had discovered; movements of my
own mind as I imposed my own experiences
and imagination as I listened.

Like Manx's music, this is quiet and
contemplative stuff. Rooke surrounds himself
with sympathetic players, like Hugh Marsh who
adds violin to "Donegal Bay." There was no
mistaking the "Irishness" of this one. Johan
Hedin plays the nyckelharpa on several tracks.
The nyckelharpa is a Swedish keyed violin which
has both melody and drone strings, and is
played with a short bow. It adds a unique
complement to Rooke's kona guitar, and seems
to fit in very different countries than Sweden.
Look for it in "Palma de Mallorca," "Little Alpold,
Hungary," "Most, Czech Republic," and "62N
103E Siberia." But others join in too: George
Koller on string bass, Jorn Andersen on
percussion, Michael White on trumpet and
more. But like the Manx CD, the guitar sounds of
Don Rooke are the featured instrument.

Rooke is a precise and evocative player -- his
steel finds the note. His arrangements are open
and airy. This is music to think by, to hold an
atlas open on your lap and dream by.
Wonderful.

Greenman Review, David Kidney

~

Offbeat Archives
Rooke Takes a Sonic Trip With Atlas Travel
By Alexander Varty
Publish Date: 22-Apr-2004

Some performers live and breathe music.
Melodies come whistling from their lips as freely
as rain falls from Vancouver skies, and
whenever they sit at the piano or pick up the
guitar all the right chords just beg to be played.
Others, though no less talented, seem to lack
this gift. And while I can't say that Don Rooke
falls into the latter camp, the strategy he took
while creating his solo debut, Atlas Travel,
seems to indicate that, at the very least, he's
interested in finding ways of conceptualizing his
art before bringing it fully into being.

When the Toronto-based guitarist decided to
take a break from his long-running band the
Henrys--whose four CDs rank with the finest
music this country has produced--he also
reckoned he needed to distinguish his solo work
from his ensemble output. So he decided to
keep the tunes starker, if not simpler, and opted
to work with smaller instrumental forces. More
than half of the 14 tunes on Atlas Travel, for
instance, lack bass and drums. But Rooke also
felt that he needed to bring some unity to an
album that might otherwise seem a collection of
unrelated sketches, and so he started to
associate each piece with a particular imaginary
landscape.

"I had the tunes, and then I gave them working
titles, which were the names of countries," he
explains, on the phone from his home. "And that
did set the mood, but then I thought a country
name was too general; it didn't really imply what
I wanted it to imply. So then I resorted to the
atlas to find locations with interesting names, so
I would get the double benefit of having an
interesting name and also an evocative location
that would, ideally, suit the music that I'd written.
Once I knew the names of the tunes, I'd add
players and stuff that would reflect that; there
was a conscious effort to make music that made
sense in terms of the geography. But then again
I haven't been to any of those places, so it is
sort of a conceit."

Atlas Travel's global scope is reflected in the
instruments used in its making. The bandleader
plays a variety of strings, but his main instrument
is a Kona Hawaiian guitar, built in Los Angeles
during the 1920s by brilliant luthier (and alleged
bigamist) Hermann Weissenborn. Meanwhile,
his guests employ everything from the familiar
fiddle and mandolin to Armenia's clarinetlike
duduk, Chinese and South Asian flutes, African
kalimba, and the Scandinavian nyckelharpa. The
sound might be colourful, but the disc as a
whole tends toward the dark end of the
emotional spectrum, although Rooke isn't
entirely happy with that description.

"Well, I didn't intend to impose melancholy on
those parts of the world," he says. "I guess I
wanted to evoke a mood--and then I'm sure
some of those moods did turn out to be
melancholy, but that wasn't the original intention,
and it wasn't the philosophy behind it. I guess I
see them more as just miniatures, studies for
the Kona where I worked out melodies and tried
to harmonize them."

Melancholic or not, Atlas Travel made my top-10
records list for 2003, and I'm certainly planning
to be in the crowd when Rooke makes his first
solo appearance in Vancouver, at St. James
Community Hall on Friday (April 23). Adding to
the attraction is that he's not going to be alone
on-stage for the entire night: as the first stop on
a cross-Canada tour organized by local indie
Black Hen Records, he's sharing the bill with
accordion-toting agitator Geoff Berner and string
king Steve Dawson.

"I'm looking forward to playing with them, but I'm
also looking forward to meeting them," Rooke
says drolly. "But yeah, since we're all solo Black
Hen artists, we're planning on each doing our
own things and then teaming up in different
permutations. But I don't know Geoff at all,
although I've listened to his record. The one
thing I heard from him was something like, 'Do
whatever tunes of mine you want to do. Play on
whatever ones you want to play on.' He doesn't
want to be pinned down, so that'll be fun. But I
suspect things will get a little more concrete
when we get together."

Naturally, this raises the question of how Rooke
plans to prepare for making music and touring
with someone he's never met, which gets a
typically laconic response. "I don't know if
there's any preparation to be done, except to be
organized myself," he notes, adding that what
he's heard about Berner's relatively
confrontational on-stage style means the issue
of keeping audiences entertained is unlikely to
be raised. "That'll probably help us. He'll get the
audience's attention more than Steve or I
might." Which is true enough; both guitarists
depend more on tasteful and imaginative music
than showmanship. But the union of all three
players promises nothing less than an evening
full of delightful surprises.

-----------------
Sublime.

It might have been called Astral Travel, because
that's where it takes you. This man is top 5,
acoustic slide, on the planet. As a slide
composer, he's in a class by himself. And
though he's played in some illustrious concert
halls, festivals, and TV shows globally, his gifts
are not yet widely known. Not widely enough for
this reviewer, at any rate.

The concept of Atlas Travel is to take faraway
unknown places on world maps, and imagine the
music that might go on in such a place. Sounds
like Don Rooke to me. The genius of the
Hawaiian kona (a koa wood instrument from the
20s) and Weissenborn guitars (and lap steel)
and the mastermind behind the Canadian
wonder band The Henrys (see our review of
their most recent release) pushes the sonic and
harmonic envelopes in a very acoustic fashion,
with a few new cohorts in the mix. If we
introduce the players, it will give you an idea
what this record is about.

Johan Hedin is a Swedish virtuoso who plays
the nyckelharpa, described in the liner notes as
a keyed Swedish violin first made in the 14th
century, having melody and drone strings and
played with a short bow. Ron Allen plays two
transverse flutes, the bawu from China and the
bansuri from India. He also contributes on an
Armenian reed instrument of olive wood called
the duduk. Jørn Anderson plays an adapted
drum kit, percussion, and bass kalimba (must
get one of those). I believe that George
Meanwell on cello (must get a name like that)
and George Koller on acoustic and electric
upright bass are new to the fold. Fellow
Canadian luminaries Zubot and Dawson pop up
on a few tracks, Jesse Zubot on mandolin and
fiddle, and Steve Dawson on ukulele. More
familiar Rooke partners are Rob Piltch on nylon
string and electric and sustainiac guitars,
Michael White on trumpet, and John Sheard on
pump organ (the kind with the mouse-proof
pedal, which is, thankfully, pictured in the
booklet--can’t have the mice chewing on the
bellows, can we) and piano, and Hugh Marsh on
borrowed violin.

So, casting the players gives you a certain idea
what you’re in for here. But you must add to that
list winged angelic creatures outside the studio
windows. There is a humbling magic to these
fourteen tracks that truly mystifies.
• Frank Goodman, PURE MUSIC (Nashville)
----------------------------------

BEST of the BEST 2003

Alex Varty, Georgia Straight Mag, Vancouver,
Dec 11/03

Sublimely beautiful melodies and crystalline
arrangements feature heavily on Don Rooke's
first solo CD, with pump organ, steel drums, and
nyckelharpa backing the Henrys bandleader's
elegant and unhurried acoustic steel guitars.
Otherworldly, intimate, and familiar, all at the
same time.

-------------------------

****

Junior Bonner, Buscadero

Don Rooke è il leader degli Henrys. Questa è la
sua prima prova come solista, un viaggio
immaginario nel mondo con canzoni che
traggono ispirazione dai paesi visitati. Rooke si
inventa un disco splendido, dai toni morbidi ed
introspettivi che ha poco a che vedere con la
sua band. Lascia completamente da parte la
sperimentazione per addentrasi in un campo
caro ad uno come Fahey : Lo stile è diverso, ma
il viaggiatore ha le idee chiare e la sua musica è
affascinante e coinvolgente.

------------------------

By Paolo Carù , Buscadero, Milan, Italy.
Translation by Natale Arculeo

A record of purity.

Don Rooke, atypical guitar player, true artist, is
the leader of Henrys, a band often described on
this magazine.

A mostly instrumental ensemble, sometimes
using the voice of MMOH as an instrument, they
gave us strange records, merging in a peculiar
way the distant worlds of melody and
improvisation, pure experimentation and
dissonance.

Don Rooke, the guitar player, suspended
between Ry Cooder like research and Bill
Frisell's desire to be always different, is the
mind of the project.

This time, after a few records with the band,
Rooke decided to make a solo album. A world
music record, but backwards.

Recorded in Rooke's home studio in the
basement, Atlas Travel is the travel diary of a
true musician, of a very talented man at the
quest of the pure essence of sound, as if, as a
new John Fahey (there are some similarities
with the great American guitar player), he
decided to mould in his music sounds and
colours from far away countries.

But Rooke's work is more than that, because his
imagination and creativity work at full steam to
create something real from an imaginary
situation. Don imagines the sounds of far away
places, adapts them to his compositions and
doesn't follow the path of other people: he is
never been in the places he imagines, and he
uses the instruments according to his own logic,
for instance adapting a chinese flute to a song
located in Paraguay.

He follows his own path, as ever, but this time
dispenses with improvisation and experiments a
la Henrys and goes for melody, colour,
athmosphere and the purity of his heart. Atlas
Travel is an ethereal record, a distillation of
sound, and the guitar of the leader is
surrounded by a sparse instrumentation
including violins, ukulele, pump organ, piano,
guitars, drum, bass, trumpet, cello, nickelarpa (a
sort of ancient Swedish violin). Understandably a
record drawing its sounds from the pure fountain
of Rooke's mind and a collection of folk inspired
songs living through perfect performances and
sounds.

More than 50 minutes with titles like Nuevo
Laredo, desertic and lonesome, Palma de
Mallorca, deep and evocative, Alexandria,
carried on by organ and drums, Donegal Bay,
sad and touching, Villa Huidobro, with a latin
theme; then we go to Hongary, Czec Republic,
Guadalupe, Siberia, France, Paraguay, until we
arrive to the windy island, Mahaina, pouring its
sounds on the green surface of the sea.

Listen to it in respectful silence, eyes shut, trying
to imagine the landscapes created by Don
Rooke with the magic of his sound.

------------------------
http://www.cdroots.com/rooke-fake.html
-------------------------
Ton Maas, Ode Magazine, The Netherlands

"The places Rooke conceives are remarkably
rural and pastoral. The music is sparing and
quiet. Those prepared to go adventuring from
the comfort of their own armchair may take the
musical journey of their lives. This is music that
conjures up unsuspected vistas and resonates
in the furthest corners of your own interior."

--------------------------

Brent Hagerman, Exclaim

Don Rooke took a journey into an atlas inside
his mind, conjured up faraway places he openly
admits he knows very little about and
constructed a worldly album from the confines
of his basement. The main songwriter for the
Henrys, Rooke has jammed out an instrumental
cartography projecting his musical prowess at
various points on the compass ("Donegal Bay,"
"Alexandria," "Filadelfia, Paraguay") but hasn't
bothered to shade any of the territories visited
with traditional world music colours. Instead he
has ceded each state and made it his own in this
stringed acoustic feast. Rooke not only
assembled a kaleidoscopic cast of musicians
and instruments (ukulele by Steve Dawson;
nyckelharpa by Johan Hedin; violins by Hugh
Marsh and Jesse Zubot; Dudek, bawu and
bansuri by Rob Piltch; and John Sheard on
pump organ) he has instructed us on their
unique characteristics in the liner notes. Fans of
Zubot and Dawson, Nordic folk music and
armchair travel will delight in Atlas Travel for its
love of acoustic textures, melodies and far off
places. Perhaps if you buy enough copies you'll
even score some air miles.

---------------------------------

--------------------------------------------------

Dec. 4, 2003. 01:00 AM
Don Rooke shuffles up the musical atlas
Album mixes, matches various world sounds
A departure from The Henrys' usual aproach

GREG QUILL ~ ENTERTAINMENT
COLUMNIST

"I liked the idea of someone imagining the world
from his basement," says eccentric Toronto
guitarist Don Rooke of the 14 exotic and
evocative instrumental pieces that make up
Atlas Travel, his first solo album. In content and
form, the folk-based "songs" suggest uncharted
landscapes and off-the-map nooks and crannies
in Ireland, Spain, Egypt, Hungary, France, the
Czech Republic, Siberia, England, Latin
America, Mexico, and remote Pacific islands,
places familiar only to the curious composer, the
lonely basement traveller.

Working with his kona - a distinctive and rare
hollow-bodied, hollow-necked slide guitar made
from Hawaiian koa wood in the 1920s, a distant
relative of the Dobro and National resonator
slide guitars that are ubiquitous in country and
roots music - and with the instrument's peculiar
ability to sustain and blend overtones and
harmonics into eerie, modally complex chord
structures, Rooke has crafted an astonishingly
rich, textured impression of places he has yet to
see, yet which he has assimilated into a musical
atlas of his own design.

"I know nothing of these places," continues
Rooke, who fronts the rarely seen popular cult
band The Henrys, writes most of the
ensemble's material, and is considered by the
world's music press to be a truly innovative
master of his chosen instrument. "The premise
of Atlas Travel is a pure conceit, but the effect is
appealing to me. It's like a dream, an aftertaste,
not a literal musical journey at all. The additional
instruments are mixed up geographically - a
Chinese flute, for instance, is featured in a piece
set in Paraguay - and nothing is culturally distinct
or necessarily appropriate to the location. I'm
not attempting world music here."

What Rooke is doing on Atlas Travel - with the
help on this recording of mandolin player and
violinist Jess Zubot, Steve Dawson on ukulele,
Hugh Marsh on violin, John Sheard on pump
organ and piano, guitarist Rob Piltch, drummer
Jorn Andersen, bassist George Koller, Michael
White on trumpet and modcan (a modular
synthesizer), cellist George Meanwell, Johan
Hedin on nyckelharpa (an ancient Swedish
keyed violin with melody and drone strings), and
Ron Allen on primitive flutes from China, India
and Armenia - is continuing his journey toward
the realization of a culturally indistinct but
inclusive fusion of universal folk forms, sounds
and musical structures.

"It's the same trip as The Henrys are on, but
these pieces weren't conceived with structured
changes; they were meant to be improvised
solo pieces that could grow organically from
fragments of melodies ... that's why it has my
name on it. It's not The Henrys, but it's definitely
Henrys-ish." Three of The Henrys - Marsh,
White and Andersen - will join Piltch, Allen and
bassist Maury Lafoy and Rooke Sunday night at
The Music Gallery in concert to launch Atlas
Travel.

The CD was recorded - with microphones only,
and no direct inputs - in Rooke's basement
studio in Toronto and is released on Dawson's
Vancouver-based Black Hen Music label. "It's
not the kind of music you can play in a bar,"
Rooke says. "It needs space, lots of air, a place
where the all the acoustic tones, resonant notes,
harmonics and drones will carry, because that's
what the music is built on.

"It's not easy music to play, but the right space
brings out something in it that wouldn't be
otherwise revealed." Rooke turned away from
conventional guitar after stints with The Cuban
Fence Climbers and Mary Margaret O'Hara's
band in the 1980s and '90s, and after he
discovered the unimagined possibilities of
luthier Hermann Weissenborn's peculiar
instrument.

"I've never had any formal training in music, but
with the kona I was able to find my own voice,"
he says. "I concentrated on developing that and,
in the process, The Henrys came into being."
With four CDs - the latest, Joyous Porous, was
released a year ago and has won unanimous
international critical approval - to their credit, and
several key festival performances in Europe,
Australia and the U.S., The Henrys remain an
enigma, even in their hometown, appearing only
under optimal concert circumstances, or when a
new recording is released.

"I guess you could call it a strategy," says
Rooke, whose spare time is mostly consumed
by the needs of his sons, aged 3 and 9. "I'd like
to work more often, to be able to support
myself. "But you can't compromise this music. It
doesn't work any other way."

-----------------------------------------------------

ROOKE MOVES
GUITARIST'S BRAVE NEW WORLD MUSIC
by Matt Galloway

DON ROOKE at the Music Gallery (197 John),
Sunday (December 7), $16-$18. 416-204-1080.

There's a kind of armchair exoticism to Don
Rooke's sublime new CD. Atlas Travel is the
first solo set by the slide guitarist of Toronto
abstract twang ensemble the Henrys. It could
loosely be called a world music record, but in
typical Rooke fashion, he's come at it from an
unusual angle. Rather than focusing on
authenticity and simply playing music from
around the world, Rooke sat in his basement
studio, thumbed through an atlas and imagined
what the music in places with names like Villa
Huidobro, Filadelfia, Paraguay and Shimoda
would sound like.

"This was initially conceived as a kind of fake
world music record, where someone would
actually be looking at a map and imagining the
sound," Rooke confirms. "I like the image of
someone sitting in their basement looking at the
world. I initially had used country names, but that
sounded too vague to me, so I ended up
actually getting out a map and hunting down
places that sounded interesting to me. "They're
pretty loose interpretations. Villa Huidobro is a
town in Argentina, and there's a bit of a tango
feel to that piece. Shimoda to me sounds kind
of Japanese, but more in the space and
simplicity of it, not really the music. And there's a
tune set in Guadeloupe that has steel drums on
it. Other times, the music has no relevance to
the geography. Ron Allen plays Chinese flute on
a tune set in Paraguay, for instance."

At the risk of encouraging the letter-writing wrath
of Paraguayans upset that their national sound
has been wrung inside out, let me say that Atlas
Travel is anything but authentic. The clanking
steel drums on Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe and
Alexandria's wheezing pump organ occupy a
geographic space all their own. "There's
obviously so much great, authentic world music
out there," Rooke laughs. "This isn't that at all. I
saved myself a few centuries' worth of research
by faking it. I was going for textures, not
authenticity."

Admittedly, global inspiration aside, Atlas
Travel's sound doesn't differ wildly from the
Henrys' own woozy music. In part, that's down to
instruments, particularly the distinctive tone of
Rooke's Kona slide guitar. If anything, the
instrumental disc is more elliptical, filled with
pauses, echoes and long periods of silence. "I
wanted to give these tunes such a spare
treatment that it wouldn't really be fair to call it a
Henrys record. There would be a lot of standing
around. There are a lot of duos and trios, so I
think it made sense to think of it as a focus on
my instrument and a chance to try it out in
different contexts."

It also gave Rooke the opportunity to reach out
beyond the Henrys' open-ended lineup and work
with players he's known for years as well as
people he's never even met. "Johan Hedin is a
Swedish nyckelharpa player whose music I
heard over the phone," Rooke explains. "It
sounded like a violin with no vibrato, and I was
just blown away. I arranged through a friend to
have him play on some tunes, never having met
him. I still haven't. I guess that reinforces the
idea of travelling the world from your basement
even more."

--------------

Finally, the damning with very faint-praise award
goes to one David Ingram w. Alberta's Penguin
Eggs magazine. The following has been
paraphrased:

"....There are some promising ideas here....A
dozen musicians play well enough....hither and
thither.....an inoffensive, backgroundy
experience.... hardly evocative or stimulating...a
bit noodley..."