About Me
Peter Joseph Burtt, a lifelong percussion student spent 3 years in the Gambia, Ghana, and Zimbabwe living with traditional musicians and learning to play music with them. The ultimate lesson was to take the music, studied with respect, and to reinterpret the music he had grown up listening to: the blues, folk songs, Bob Dylan, the Clancy Brothers, Hindustani music, and 3 originals. It became clear to him during his travels to Africa is that he should be himself within the context of the music, to resist the urge to simply reproduce the music that he was learning as the Africans played it; to build bridges between the western and the African cultures by playing in a way that an American could understand.Sunken Forest features the instrumentation of a souped up Mandinka kora or harp, lush acoustic guitars, lap steel guitars, light percussion, and evocative vocals. The record plays like a river and allows listeners who are not died in the wool world music or traditional folk fans to hear the kora in an arrangement that is hopefully more accessible.As a student in the prestigious graduate writing program at San Francisco State, Peter focused on the connections between spoken word, rhythm, and music, doubling his studies with Ghanaian master drummer, Kwaku Daddy at City College. He learned about arrangement of rhythms in different times. Kwaku taught him how everything works together, things he had always suspected, like the concept that everything has a song; the ocean, the birds, the wind in the trees. It's all music and you can hear it if you know how to listen.
