CARTHAGE — New England Celtic Arts will present old-time music legends Ken Pearlman and Alan Jabbour Tuesday, Feb. 23, at Skye Theatre Performing Arts Center.

Instrumentalist, teacher, performer and award-winning folklorist, Pearlman is both a pioneer of the five-string banjo style known as melodic clawhammer and a master of finger-style guitar.

In fact, he is considered one of the top clawhammer players in the world and is known particularly for his skillful adaptations of Celtic tunes to the style.

Pearlman draws his material from traditional sources: the music of Scotland, Ireland, Cape Breton, Prince Edward Island and the American South. His approach to the music, however, is innovative. He has developed many new instrumental techniques, and much of his repertoire has never before been played on five-string banjo or guitar.

Around the folk scene, Pearlman is often referred to as a musician’s musician — a player whose style is so accomplished and unique that other musicians go out of their way just to hear him.

Pearlman has spent more than a decade collecting tunes and oral histories from traditional fiddle players on Prince Edward Island in eastern Canada. Two outgrowths of his research are a tune book called “The Fiddle Music of Prince Edward Island” and a two-CD anthology of field recordings called “The Prince Edward Island Style of Fiddling.”

Jabbour was born in 1942 in Jacksonville, Fla. A violinist by early training, he put himself through the University of Miami playing classical music. While a graduate student at Duke University in the 1960s, he began documenting old-time fiddlers in the Upper South. Documentation turned to apprenticeship, and he relearned the fiddle in the style of the Upper South from musicians like Henry Reed of Glen Lyn, Va., and Tommy Jarrell of Toast, N.C. He taught a repertory of old-time fiddle tunes to his band, the Hollow Rock String Band, which was an important link in the instrumental music revival in the 1960s.

After earning a Ph.D. in 1968, he taught English, folklore and ethnomusicology at UCLA from 1968 to ’69.  He then moved to Washington, D.C., for 30-plus years of service with federal cultural agencies. He was head of the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress, 1969-74; director of the folk arts program at the National Endowment for the Arts, 1974-76; and director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, 1976-99.

Since his retirement, he has turned to a life of writing, consulting, lecturing and playing the fiddle.

The concert will begin at 7 p.m. There will be a preshow jam session at 6:15 p.m. when audience members can play their musical instruments with the featured artists. Concert tickets are $10 at the door. Call 562-4445. Skye Theater is at 2 Highland Drive off Winter Hill Road and U.S. Route. 2.