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Cheikh Lô


CHEIKH LÔ JammWorld Circuit WCD084


No-one quite does the pan-African roots-pop thing quite as well as Cheikh Lô, do they?


This is only the fourth international release from the Burkina Faso-born Senegalese in the decade and a half that he’s been operat- ing, but the wait is once again rewarded by an album replete with melody and supple rhythms and which, like its three predeces- sors, has very much its own distinctive musi- cal imprint.


With Lô now into his sixth decade,


Jamm’s overarching outlook is one of maturi- ty and repose, allying a soulful, slightly intro- spective mood to the customary rhythmic snap of earlier releases. This more considered, nostalgic mode is reflected in covers of decades-old Latin-tinged tunes by Bembeya Jazz and Amadou Balake, and a loose, Orchestra Baobab-style treatment of the Spanish-language Seyni, the first song Lô ever sang in public. Pee Wee Ellis stamps his authoritative tenor sax on this and other tracks. It’s deep and bluesy on the ballad Sankara, sharply focused in solo on Bourama and underpins the circular guitar melodies on the delightfully poppy Il N’est Jamais Trop Tard. And Cheikh’s voice sounds as good as ever, accentuated perhaps by the downbeat nature of much of the material. There’s not quite as much of the scat singing and jolting Wolof diction of the past, which gives more rein to the smoke-aged abrasions on his oth- erwise satin-smooth tonal timbre. You can almost smell the plumes as he reaches for the warbly falsetto on the title track, and there’s something satisfyingly Salif about the catch in his throat on Sankara.


So a more mature, reflective Cheikh


then, but Jamm’s none the worse for that. And for all the reworking of old tunes and balladry, there’s plenty enough in the way of positive, upbeat fare too. Dieuf Dieul – what might be called a typical Cheikh Baye Fall praise song, with its shuffling mbalax-lite rhythm punctuated by the clack of the sabar


Duck Soup – Kearey, Quinn, Bushell


drum, joyful praise vocals and hearty sax breaks – is possibly the highlight of an album that might be low on truly standout moments but which is a rare thing these days, an album that is consistently listenable from start to finish and a worthy addition to an already impressive canon of work.


www.worldcircuit.co.uk Con Murphy


DUCK SOUP Open On Sundays Hebe HEBECD 006


The second album by Dan Quinn, Ian Kearey and Adam Bushell is a splen- didly ebullient affair, defiantly maverick and quirkily adventurous, while forging deeper roots with a joyously unselfconscious rural tradi- tion. It’s fun – it’s delicious fun – especially seemingly for the band, who resonate resoundingly with country musicians of old, playing with smiles on their faces and a thousand tunes in their hearts for the plea- sure of their local communities.


There are no barriers either to the prove- nance of their repertoire or the instrumenta- tion in which they choose to shape it. Adam Bushell’s musical saw stars on the opening waltzes Valse De Peril and Marche Du Mont Saint-Louis, originally recorded by Alfred Montmarquette (also a source for several other tunes on the album) in 1928, while Bushell’s marimba and Kearey’s Dobro add a further twist to Quinn’s driving melodeon on Indian Intermezzo – from the playing of the American John Kimmel – which sounds like it belongs in a slightly wonky fairground ride. A bizarre digitally recorded phono-fiddle effect leads the 18th century American country dance tune Mr Turner’s Academy Cotillion, while other instrumental delights include jaunty arrangements of an old Chieftains set dance and various French Canadian tunes, marimba at the ready.


Duck Soup are irreverent but never disre- spectful… and that’s before we even examine Dan Quinn’s informally unorthodox vocal


excursions. In a style not dissimilar to Simon Ritchie, he tackles the Aberdeenshire ballad The False Lover Won Back, the Gypsy tale Young Morgan and the drinking song Little Brown Jug with the same rough nonchalance, occasionally teetering on disaster but invari- ably lifted by colourfully oddball arrange- ments. I’m not entirely sure their radical rein- vention of Bonny Bunch Of Roses in music hall style works, but Ian Kearey’s 12-string Dobro around Young Morgan is inspired and, marimba on the march, Little Brown Jug is classic knees-up fodder.


If anything can please granny, delight the neighbours, get the postman whistling and shut up the quiz teams in the local booz- er, then this, surely, is that album.


danquinn@ntlworld.com www.myspace.com/soupofduck


Colin Irwin STONE BREATH


The Shepherdess And The Bone-White Bird Hand/Eye H/E047


First, I digress [There’s a surprise… Ed.]. There seem to be many artists who get corralled into these


‘psych folk’, ‘wyrd folk’, ‘acid folk’ sub-genre boxes who are both insufferably twee and stuck in some faux-rural monocultural Anglo/ Celtic or corduroy Americana cul-de-sacs. Yet the true pioneers in the 1960s in going out there, Davey Graham and The Incredible String Band, went beyond that, magpie-pick- ing other cultures’ instruments, tunings, modes, melodic ideas and all sorts in order to hit an original vision. Wish there was more of that adventuring to be found. Like here.


Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of what the f*** ‘psych folk’ is any- way, mainly since records I made myself near- ly 40 years ago regularly get this label stuck on them. A certain amount of defensive bias was breached when imminent author Jeanette Leech kindly suggested that I might like this album by Stone Breath, and it turned


Photo: Youri Lenquette


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