Artist and discography

Tim Eriksen

One of the best singers in American roots music, Tim Eriksen "connects the present and the ancient with an immediacy that will make your bones tremble." A songwriter of rare intensity and an inventive multi-instrumentalist, he redefines American tradition with a "northern roots" sound that encompasses old Massachusetts murder ballads, chilling shape-note harmonies and originals alongside southern Appalachian and Irish songs.

Eriksen is a founding member of the prophetic underground bands Cordelia's Dad ("folk-noise"), Northampton Harmony (shape-note quartet) and Zabe i Babe (Bosnian folk and pop). The only musician to have shared the stage with both Kurt Cobain and Doc Watson (not to mention Jack White and Ralph Stanley), he is known to many for his extensive » show more

contributions to films including the Billy Bob Thornton vehicle "Chrystal" and Anthony Minghella's Oscar-winning "Cold Mountain." His work for "Cold Mountain" beyond performing has included teaching Nicole Kidman, Elvis Costello and Sting to sing 19th-century American "shape-note" music and leading a group of 40 people in an Academy Awards performance of his own arrangement of Costello's Oscar-nominated song "The Scarlet Tide." In 2004 Eriksen was featured on the six-week "Great High Mountain Tour" with Alison Kraus, Ralph Stanley and a cast of Americana luminaries.

Eriksen cut his teeth playing hardcore punk at New York's notorious CBGB and getting a degree in South Indian classical music (veena and voice), all the while honing his "northern roots" Americana style and mining local library archives, junk sales and obscure field recordings for gems of old New England and American song. Having graduated from the dank punk clubs of the 80's and 90's, he recently made his Carnegie Hall debut as a soloist in Evan Chambers' new symphonic work "The Old Burying Ground" and returned to New York for a six-night stint at The Blue Note ("the jazz capital of the world") as the special guest of world-jazz innovator Omar Sosa. A recording of the Sosa shows, "Across the Divide:"Across the Divide: A Tale of Rhythm and Ancestry" is now out on the Half Note label (March 24th, 2009).

TEACHING AND SCHOLARSHIP:
Eriksen's work as an ethnomusicologist and teacher, closely tied with his performing career, has included extensive research on "shape-note music" in New England and the venerable Sacred Harp four-part harmony tradition. He is a founder of what is currently the world's largest Sacred Harp singing convention, in Northampton, MA. In the words of Paste Magazine editor Josh Jackson, "no one has done more to help revive Sacred Harp singing among a younger generation." Eriksen has taught college courses including American Balladry, Global Sounds, Film Music From Hollywood to Bollywood, American Music, and Songwriting at Dartmouth College, Amherst College, The University of Minnesota and Hampshire College. He is currently director of the Northern Roots Music Collective at Wesleyan University. In addition, Eriksen has taught hundreds of hour- to week-long workshops and seminars in shape-note harmony singing, American music history, ballad singing and instrumental accompaniment at festivals, universities, museums and arts centers, including the Smithsonian Institution, Harvard University, the Society for Ethnomusicology Convention, Colors of Ostrava Festival (Czech Republic), Camp Fasola (Anniston, AL) and the Early Music Festival in Jaroslaw, Poland. His students have ranged from a group of kindergarteners at an inner city school in Portland, Oregon to a group of fifty Romanian extras in the film "Cold Mountain" and the senior citizen members of the now-legendary "Young at Heart Chorus."