Notorious by Eden MacAdam-Somer and Larry Unger

She has been a guest artist at the Aspen and Beijing International Music festivals, soloist at Texas and Wimberly jazz festivals, performer at Texas and St. Louis Renaissance fairs, and has appeared on numerous recordings in folk, rock, jazz, and classical genres.

Larry Unger has been a full time musician since 1984 and has presented a diverse range of musical performances at dances, festivals, and concerts across the United States,England, Canada, France, Scotland, Denmark, and Sweden. He has played guitar, banjo, and bass with many top contra dance bands, including Notorious, Uncle Gizmo, Big Table, and the Reckless Ramblers, and has accompanied such fiddlers as Judy Hyman, Elke Baker, Rodney Miller, Alasdair Fraser, Matt Glaser, Ralph Blizard, and Lissa Schneckenburger. His solo concerts include a wide variety of music, including fingerstyle blues and slide guitar, rags, and oldtime banjo tunes as well as melodies played on a handful of unusual instruments including banjo-guitar, fretless banjo, and piano-harp. Larry's original waltzes and fiddle tunes have been played and recorded by musicians around the world. He has a great breadth of understanding of traditional music to complement his considerable technical proficiency and enjoys telling stories about the origins of his music and the people who taught him.

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netrhythms.co.uk

nov 2006

"Notorious is

the working “band name” for these two musicians when performing as a

duo, and refers to their love for Hitchcock films, but in the end this

too proves a bit of a MacGuffin, for their reputations by all accounts

remain unsullied! Larry's name may be familiar to those readers who are

enthusiasts of dance, for he's written over a thousand tunes (mainly

fiddle tunes and waltzes) over the past 20+ years and regularly plays

for contra, waltz, swing and Scottish dances. As instrumentalist, he's

a skilled fingerstyle blues, ragtime and slide guitarist and banjo

player; he's accompanied many notable fiddlers including Alasdair

Fraser, Matt Glaser and Rodney Miller, and recorded with Ginny Snowe as

well as the Reckless Ramblers. But his current musical partnership with

Eden appears made in heaven. For Eden is a versatile young violin

player from Texas who has her roots in classical music but is readily

and eagerly branching out into traditional, oldtime, jazz-swing and

world-folk. And she's not a bad singer either, making a fine fist of

anything she tackles, from (Working On) The New Railroad (on which she

also plays viola) to the old Andrews Sisters hit Bei Mir Bist Du Schön

and the blues chestnut Sitting On Top Of The World (where she's ably

backed by Larry's National Resonator guitar); what a shame she only

gets three vocal outings on the disc! If performing with any lesser

musician, Eden's fiery and florid violin pyrotechnics might well

threaten to overwhelm the exciting guitar fretwork, but this never

happens with Larry and Notorious. Sure, her playing's often somewhat

technique-driven, but it always remains primarily musical in its focus

and impact. I find the oldtime-flavoured numbers especially

scintillating, in fact. Larry's proven compositional skills are

spotlighted on around half of the album's tunes, whereas Eden's own

compositions (on the evidence of The Watermill and the snappy Schottis

Fran Palmer here) are equally inspired, and, like Larry's,

authentically idiomatic rather than pastiche. Just occasionally there

may be hints that Notorious are just a little restless in their

wandersome eclecticism, but any such minor reservation need not concern

the listener who's open-minded and keen to embrace a wide range of

musical styles especially when they're so sparklingly and engagingly

played as they are here."

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"superb duet recording.

the power and drive that the two fine musicians impart to the music is just wonderful. "

Sing Out

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