12 Mar 2005: Zeke Hoskin & Flip Breskin House Concert

Flip Breskin's and Zeke Hoskin's combined performance was a wonderful combination of humor and talent. Zeke has a way with clever lyrics and Flip was urging us all on as we laughed, having us join in of some of the choruses. Flip's own songs honored her family and Bellingham neighbors; they were uplifting, positive and very listenable. And we loved her final number executed with her newly learned skills playing in slack-string (Hawaiian) style. (Zeke commented lyrically on his humorous opinion of the slow cadenced number!) While here eating dinner before the concert, Zeke wrote a song about our bunnies, and performed it for us. It was about Noah's ark and it seemed that the two by two animals were behaving OK until they got to the bunnies, then, oops more than just two. Maybe we'll see this on a future CD some time.

Zeke writes occasional straightforward things, but most of his songs are ironic and humorous. As he says, "I do it because many people don't like to listen to singers who take themselves too seriously. Since I, like everybody else, would like more people to think the way I do, I try to write songs that people with different opinions will listen to and enjoy, hopefully without noticing that I'm also trying to change their minds.

"I play the Celtic harp (actually, the Irish and the Scots seldom used nylon strings while there were Englishmen to disembowel) because I'm in love with the sounds it makes. It is not now traditional to sing rowdy songs with harp backup, but it used to be, and that's what I do."

Zeke also plays beautiful traditional Celtic music when he can be persuaded to refrain from singing. You may have seen Zeke in his sculling shell in the waters around Bellingham - he's the one with the white beard who is singing in time to his strokes!

These days Zeke is often accompanied on the acoustic guitar by Flip Breskin, who has mastered a very listenable fingering technique. Flip has spent the greater part of the past 25 years teaching others how to play and how to teach music. She publishes a collection of hot tips every month and she teaches guitar at music camps around the west, many of which she helped design.

If you appreciate folk music in the tradition of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, mixed up with some old-world instrumentation and wry humor, you will not want to miss this performance which will surely bring smiles and generate some great memories.