News & Project Updates

• Callahan's "Shelter" New Theme Song for Activist Podcast

9/3/2020

- MAT CALLAHAN's exquisite composition "Shelter" is now being heard as the theme song for
Shelter & Solidarity's podcast & broadcast.

Written and performed by Callahan and from his solo album A Wild Bouquet, "Shelter" is the perfect lead-in to the organization's new online community collaboration. Callahan is joined by his daughter, Berlin-based/Broken Arrow artist SHANNON CALLAHAN who elevates the track with beautiful, ethereal vocal stylings throughout.

Shelter & Solidarity's weekly interactive sessions feature artists, activists, authors and experts in different fields of concern, focusing on the "struggles, challenges & opportunities" the pandemic Covid-19 is creating. Hosted by Joe Ramsey, the sessions are live-streamed and then broadcasted on YouTube, and are a joint effort of the Labor Press, Hard Ball Press, encuentro5, and
Socialism and Democracy.

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• Broken Arrow Artists Now Available throughout SAARC

7/1/2020

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- Music fans throughout the SAARC union of countries in South Asia are now able to stream Broken Arrow artists.

Through a new deal with Broken Arrow Records' music distributor Orchard/Sony Music, audio/video streaming will be available in all SAARC countries via service provider AllSaints and all Oppo, Xiaomi and Vivo handsets. SAARC countries include Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. All but India and Bangladesh now have Broken Arrow content for the first time. The deal with AllSaints also covers China.

With this, the great music of Broken Arrow's artists is now available virtually throughout the world. Check them out yourself at the Spotify playlist above, or anywhere fine streams are sold.

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• Mat Callahan Hits Woodstock; Clearwater Folk Festival

6/13/2019

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- Author, singer-songwriter, provacateur...MAT CALLAHAN arrives stateside for a slate of appearances supporting his new release Working Class Heroes, with YVONNE MOORE. Mat kicks off the tour with two very special dates this weekend.

June 14 Mat appears at the Woodstock 50 anniversary conference at Marist College in Bethel Woods, NY. Mat will be speaking about music and the sixties' counterculture in his talk
"Music as a Rival of the State."

Then on June 15, joined by blues songstress Moore, Callahan will appear at the 41st annual Clearwater Folk Festival, aka The Great Hudson River Revival, alongside artists such as
MAVIS STAPLES and ANI DIFRANCO. This great and storied festival - the country's oldest & largest music & environmental festival - is rooted in the environmental causes spearheaded by local resident and iconic folk music pioneer PETE SEEGER, whom Mat collaborated with in, among other projects, presenting Seeger's program on Public Domain reform at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva, Switzerland in 2007.

This year's festival is celebrating Seeger's 100th birthday, as well as the 50th anniversary of the sloop Clearwater, the famous ship Seeger built to advocate cleaning up the Hudson River. Also appearing are such artists as Railroad Earth, The Wailers, and Immortal Technique.

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• New Album Release for Mat Callahan & Yvonne Moore

6/3/2019

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- Broken Arrow artists singer-songwriter MAT CALLAHAN and Swiss blues songstress
YVONNE MOORE have just released a special new album Working-Class Heroes. This represents the duo's forth major release together and will be supported by initial tour appearances in the U.S., U.K., and Switzerland.

The album arose out of Moore's exploration of Sarah Ogan Gunning songs after her acclaimed Blue Wisdom albums, which featured gems from the American blues songbook, and follows a parallel path with the duo's previous release on the songs & writings of Irish Eastern Rising
leader James Connolly.

From PM Press:
"The most essential music is conceived by real human beings; ordinary, anonymous, often poor who stood up and joined together to fight injustice and institutional oppression. This is the story of Working-Class Heroes, a collection of American working-class, pre-World War II folk songs revived by Mat & Yvonne. Here the duo presents 20 songs written by both folk cannon heavyweights and lesser-known but equally gifted songwriters. Both beautiful and emotionally arresting, the album is a collection of stories as much as songs - stories of the women and men who (sometimes literally) gave their lives to emancipate the working class. Heroes such as Sarah Ogan Gunning, Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson and Ella May Wiggins...and several more anonymous proletarian songwriters, whose names have been long forgotten but their words immortalized."

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• Mat Callahan Unlocks "SF Sound" Origins in New Book

1/16/2017

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- As the golden anniversary of the "Summer of Love" blooms before us, BROKEN ARROW artist
MAT CALLAHAN illuminates an engrossing history to this cultural phenomenon and its origins, in his new book The Explosion of Deferred Dreams - Musical Renaissance and Social Revolution in San Francisco, 1965 - 1975 (PM Press).

The book provides a fascinating and educational reexamination of a period which shaped San Francisco’s global reputation over the subsequent fifty years, exploring dynamic music and political links between the Black Panther Party and Sly and the Family Stone, the United Farm Workers and Santana, the Indian Occupation of Alcatraz and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and the New Left and the Counterculture. Callahan reframes the political and social contexts for the San Francisco Sound, and the vibrant subcultural uprisings with which it is associated.

A must-read for anyone who "was there", or longed to have been! Explosion invites us to rethink an era that assumes a mythical role in contemporary American culture. Callahan will be doing a promotional tour for the book in Spring, 2017, and be sure to check out his wonderful album
A Wild Bouquet featuring Les Claypool (Primus), Brain (Tom Waits) and Joe Gore (PJ Harvey).

"In this landmark work, Mat Callahan painstakingly braids disparate threads of the rich tapestry of San Francisco - music, politics, race, culture. In this vast, panoramic portrait, Callahan digs out social/political undercurrents that have never been more thoroughly explored."
- Joel Selvin, longtime chief music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, and
author of Summer of Love: The Inside Story of LSD, Rock & Roll, Free Love and
High Times in the Wild West;

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• Mat Callahan Brings Songs of Freedom Tour to U.S.

1/22/2016

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- 2016 marks the 100th anniversary of Ireland's Easter Rising, and Broken Arrow artist MAT CALLAHAN returns to the U.S. for a string of dates celebrating the life and work of James Connolly, the Irish revolutionary socialist and musician martyred by the British government for his role in the 1916 armed insurrection during Easter week. Joined by the provocative and powerful voice of blues-singer YVONNE MOORE, the Songs of Freedom tour will hit many cities throughout January during a California run.

The tour will pull songs from the Songs of Freedom album, wherein Callahan contemporizes Connolly's old revolutionary songs as well as creates new musical compositions for select Connolly writings. A true international cast joins Callahan on the album, and prominently showcases traditional Irish airs as well as American rhythm & blues. Callahan also authored a book under the same name released by PM Press, and an excellent interview with Mat on the project was recently published by Good Times.

Musician, author, producer, provocateur, Callahan is a former Bay Area Music Awards winner, and currently resides in Switzerland. His solo albums include A Wild Bouquet and San Francisco, and past books include The Trouble With Music. J.H. Tompkins of the Bay Guardian once wrote "he just can't help but write beautiful songs."

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• Callahan's "Shelter" New Theme Song for Activist Podcast

• Broken Arrow Artists Now Available throughout SAARC

• Mat Callahan Hits Woodstock; Clearwater Folk Festival

• New Album Release for Mat Callahan & Yvonne Moore

• Mat Callahan Unlocks "SF Sound" Origins in New Book

• Mat Callahan Brings Songs of Freedom Tour to U.S.

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