Black Savanna

When Gillian Barker and Dave Pearson met, they brought together musical elements that seemed predestined to combine. Gillian has been singing all her life. She grew up surrounded by folk music of many cultures, and sang in Toronto choirs as a teenager. Since then she has developed her own dark and expressive vocal style, inspired by traditional Scots and English ballads, mountain music from the southern Appalachians, and early delta blues. Dave Pearson was a fourteen-year-old in small-town Pennsylvania when he first heard the music of fingerstyle legend John Fahey, but he knew right away that he had to learn to play like that. He taught himself fingerstyle technique on his department-store guitar by studying recordings of Fahey, Leo Kottke, and Michael Hedges. By the mid-1990s he was a leading fingerstyle artist in Philadelphia. He released three solo CDS, and shared a stage with artists like Chris Smither and the Moody Blues. Just two years ago, Dave took up the harp guitar, an extraordinary instrument with six sub-bass strings in addition to the usual complement of the steel-string acoustic guitar, and began using its unique sound to create arrangements to combine with Gillian’s vocal artistry. Black Savanna is now a one-of-a-kind duo in which Gillian’s rich and expressive vocals interweave with Dave’s powerful guitar arrangements to take listeners on an entrancing musical and emotional journey.