This will be just prior to Jon & Rika appearing at Mystic Seaport's Maritime Music Festival, so those that can't make the festival & or those that can, these guys are a dou that you just can't possiby get enough of.

Thursday, June 12, 2008, 8pm
W. Concord, MA
$12 for all at the door
Reservations required; email suzanne AT smrozak DOT com for
reservations and directions.
Jon and Rika are singers of traditional song and amateur (for-the-love-of-it!) scholars of ballads, shanties and other folk songs. They are teachers, too, and have always been interested in how these songs are passed on -- in both theory and practice.

Jon and Rika met at the Vancouver Folk Song Society (VFSS), where they were (and still are) active as singers, organizers and board members. They began singing together in 1976. At the time they focused primarily on Canadian folk songs and presented workshops to teachers and students from Kindergarten to the post-graduate level. Their educational work culminated in 1979 with the production of Songs and Stories of Canada, a sixteen-part radio series for the CBC schools� broadcast. In 1980 they produced The Green Fields of Canada, an LP of Canadian folk songs extracted from the radio shows.

During this time Jon and Rika were active in Canadian folk songs on a national level. They sang at folk festivals and folk clubs across the country and in the US. They published Canada Folk Bulletin, a bi-monthly national magazine about folk music.

Jon and Rika have incorporated singing into political action. Over the years they have sung at many marches, demonstrations and picket lines. They were founding members of Cultural Workers Against the Budget (CWAB), which organized the 70,000 strong march and rally of October, 1983. From 1991 to 1999 Jon and Rika were involved in organizing CityFest, a cultural festival presenting the music, dance, visual and spoken arts of Vancouver area ethnic and community groups. Jon was co-ordinator of the festival for its last four years.

Most recently Jon and Rika have been pursuing the singing and study of traditional ballads. They have put together an archive of cassettes of the traditional ballads from the F.J. Child collection and for two years they ran a ballad study group.


They are being put on by the Folk Song Society of Greater Boston

Barry