The Burlington Free Press from Burlington, Vermont • Page 49

JHUP5D6Y fcQ woiPstZJWPfi. JXQ I A contemporary ballad. Vermonter Pete Sutherland creates new music out of old-time traditions I 1 o. -f 'lJn 'rlX5h Two concerts WHAT: "Songs for Winter," two upcoming concerts by Pete and Karen Sutherland and Social Band. The Sutherlands sing and play a variety of instruments.

Social Band is a 24-voice choir that sings early American music, as well as English, Balkan, Renaissance, Georgian, African and other world music. The group also performs music by Vermont composers Sutherland, Don Jamison and Bill Drislane, members of Social Band. WHEN: 7 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday WHERE: Saturday at St.

Mary's Church in Northfield; Sunday at College Street Congregational Church in Burlington. l. niii.ii Photos by KAREN PIKE, Free Press Songwriter Pete Sutherland taught himself banjo and fiddle. He could play by ear and learned the instruments drawn especially to the fiddle with relative ease. By Sally Pollak Free Press Staff Writer If Vermont had a state songwriter, it would be Pete Sutherland.

He's got the pedigree: Ancestors who settled in Woodstock before Vermont was a state and musicianship that settled in Sutherland before he was 2. "Peter could hum a recognizable tune before he could talk," said his mother, Marylou Sutherland, a musician in her own right who is still playing piano at 71. He's got the dedication to spend months writing and revising lyrics, as he did with "Traitor's Gold," a ballad about Benedict Arnold that opens with a scene in the Champlain Valley. Sutherland got the range to handle group songwriting sessions, leading schoolchildren away from hip-hop and toward tuneful narratives about their schools, their families. choice, please," Sutherland said to students who voiced a hip-hop preference as he gathered musical ideas).

He got the sensibility to rec ognize that Vermont's culture and heritage have been exploited in every way possible. "There always a market for Vermont-iana," he said. Why not throw in music? Especially the kind Sutherland is interested in writing: Ballads born of a traditional form but with a contemporary tone and intensity; songs whose meter and rhyme tell a story about a significant event or influential person, a river rich in history or a mountain alive in the imagination. Perhaps most important for the position of state songwriter, Sutherland's got the inclination. "I have a dream if I get the songs out to the right people, someone's going to call me and up and say, 'We want to pay you a salary to Sutherland, 49, said recently, sipping green tea and playing songs in his Monkton living room.

"If I could keep body and soul together, I'd do it." The phone call hasn't come. So Sutherland, like scores of Vermont artists and musicians, does a little of this and a little of that "to pay for more Sheetrock" to fix up his house. He writes songs when he can at 4 in the morning in his living room or late at night in a motel room after a day in the studio recording a traditional string band or a folk music album. "I'm exploding the myth that you're only a musician if you are doing a gig," he said. "I'm a freelancer.

Everyone I know is. We go out and do whatever. TICKETS: $5 for students, seniors and children. Available at the door. INFORMATION: 863-1277.

TO FIND OUT ABOUT RECORDS: Write: Epact Music, P.O. Box 123, Monkton, 05469 or e-mail: epactsover.net. North Carolina, to the heart of bluegrass. He had odd jobs, one of them picking apples. On his time off, he visited old-timers.

He'd just drop by carrying his fiddle. "As soon as they'd see you had an instrument, they'd want you to take it out and play. Test your chops. "What I wanted to learn was the effect, the tunes, what it was like to play in Carolina. It was like going to Oz." What they taught him was this: You don't play the tunes.

You breathe them. Now it's Sutherland who spreads the word. He does so through his patchwork of musical endeavors engagements that have him booked about a year in advance. And through albums he has made with a variety of bands (including one with a group called Metamora on Windham Hill Records) and on his own, such as last year's "A Clayfoot's Tale." "We are just out there doing it all the time," Karen Sutherland said. "I see Pete sometimes once a month, but I know he's out there doing what he loves." Charlotte to Moab Sutherland produces and engineers other musicians' records.

He spends hours hunched over a digital editing machine, punching in the preferred tone of bass or fiddle, making sure the note is on cue and on pitch and at a volume Sutherland senses is right. In the studio, he's typically low- See ni tvi A 7r nib 'I. i i i i "I'm the musical version of specialty food. What's going to sell this year?" Fiddle epiphany Sutherland, who took the obligatory piano lessons as a child (but not from his mother), became serious about music at Castleton State College. He was turned on to the banjo there and holed up in a little room in a house with nothing but a bed and a banjo album.

He was intrigued, finding the music "fresh and pretty." An epiphany struck one day at the Craftsbury fiddler's contest. "I thought, 'Gee, where has this So, the musician whose talent had emerged as toddler taught himself banjo and fiddle. He could play by ear and learned the instruments drawn especially to the fiddle with relative ease. "I decided to go in the path of old-time music," he said. "That stirred me." After two years at Castleton, Sutherland transferred to the University of Vermont, where in the early 1970s he met his future wife, Karen.

"He was playing hammer dulcimer in Billings (Student Cen- Musical string instruments hang on the wall of Pete and Karen Sutherland's Monkton home, a converted country store. Among the instruments is a banjo that once belonged to Karen's great-uncle and a mandolin once owned by Pete's grandmother. ter)," Karen recalled, "and it turned out he had built it." Soon, they were living together in a cooperative house, hanging out and playing music with a group of friends bound by a common interest. "All of us began to learn folk music and dig into the folklore scene. For some of us, it never stopped." (Karen Sutherland now teaches folk music at UVM.) A few years after graduating, Pete Sutherland headed sooth ten.