Peter Ostroushko: Postcards

A musician recently shared with me his theory on folk music. To paraphrase: Much of the traditional music we hear these days is so good because of natural selection. No one wanted to remember the bad folk songs, so the ones that made it through history are the best. Which works well for pieces created before the advent of recorded music. Since then, it has become easier and easier for everything to be remembered. So the great (say a Woody Guthrie song), the not-so-great (such as most of Arlo Guthrie’s songs), and the truly awful (“Puff the Magic Dragon” comes screaming into my mind) sit side by side by side in our memories.

Postcards, a new collection by Minnesota fiddler Peter Ostroushko, is drawn from songs he wrote for A Prairie Home Companion. These are pieces written from the road, tied specifically to the location the show was visiting for that episode (along with a couple of other pieces tied directly to a specific place). Since they were originally conceived as pieces for broadcast, they have an ephemeral quality, as if this was music rescued from deep-space signals and then returned to earth.

Listeners of A Prairie Home Companion will recognize the unmistakable style from the first notes of “Manassas Junction”. There is a certain familiarity to the songs, as if the tunes have been part of the American lexicon for decades. Ostroushko has studied hard through his career, and pulls together these different parts of traditional music — the ache of the blues and country, the stomp of traditional folk, the vibe of jazz — into a cohesive whole.

More importantly, Ostroushko understands the importance of place, and he evokes the various communities clearly throughout the collection (even if the artist does admit to taking liberties: On “Montenegro” he notes that the resulting song “ended up all over the map”). His travelogue takes us from one side of the country to the other — from Virginia and Massachusetts to the smog-filled wonders of Los Angeles — and draws distinctions throughout.

Postcards does suffer from some of the usual instrumental album pitfalls. Though the musical styles are varied, the songs still tend to run into each other in the mind. If you want the album to be more than background music (and it really deserves that from the listener), it is best to listen to in small bursts.

Two other pieces are of note, as they are drawn more from current events than a sense of place. “Baghdad Blues” — so titled as it was written at the start of the Iraq War — is a fairly generic instrumental folk tune and did little for me, but “Meditation on the Thin Space at St. Paul’s Chapel” brought our collective tragedy from 9/11 back into focus. Fueled by a lonely mandolin line, the piece literally aches with the pain, but is also buoyed by the hope for peace, even if it is just a temporary peace you can find in a small church adjacent to the Ground Zero site.