f60 Chrissy made her debut recording in


2007 and The Departure has that ‘second album’ feel about it as she starts to look beyond her native Cape Breton Scots/ Gaelic tune repertoire to incorporate tunes from the Irish and French-Acadian musicians of her area, as well as slipping in some of her own tunes and bringing broader influences to mix with her tradition. She shares her tune The Doppelganger with a Jamaican pan player and, unlikely as this sounds on paper, it actu- ally works very well. Though she shows amaz- ing technical skill in the way she decorates her playing, and has an innovative approach to some of her arrangements, she is at her most effective when she is playing in a straightforward manner. This makes The War- lock Strathspey and the slow air Memories Of Archie Neil the outstanding tracks.


Trying to pick between the two albums would be invidious and would come down to personal choice in the end. I bet the Cape Bre- tons are delighted to have both these huge talents at the beginning of their careers.


Galandum Galandaina GALANDUM GALUNDAINA


Senhor Galandum Emiliano Toste EMTCD136/09


I ran into the gaitas, skin-headed drums and robust masculine vocals of Galandum Galundaina a decade or more ago playing on the stages and streets of a festival in Madeira, and subsequently in an fRoots piece described them as “the real thing from Terra De Miran- da”. They still are. They’re largely responsible for sustaining as a living entity the traditional music of Miranda Do Douro, close up to the border with Spain on north-east Portugal’s high rocky Trás-os-Montes plateau.


Brothers Paulo, Alexandre and Manuel Meirinhos and Paulo Preto are the sort of band one can’t imagine tinkering in a dark studio but that get out there and on with it live. They can do it on record too, though. This fourth album is titled after and includes the dance-song from which the band took its name; in Mirandês, which the group all speak, galandum and galundaina are both variations on the word for a gentleman, a gallant.


It’s a very fine piece of work, with all the spirit of a field recording while cunningly blending in with their raw, resonant baritone vocals quite a variety of instruments, many made by themselves, including Mirandese, Sanabrese and Galician gaitas, hurdy-gurdy, dulzaina, harmonica, rabel, pipe-and-tabor and other flutes over the gutty thudding and rattle of gutty skin-headed traditional snare, frame and bass drums. Guests, too, are woven in without any loss of direction, including well-known Portuguese singer-poet Sergio Godinho, a typically strong contribution from Galicia’s Uxía, and the characterful voice of the Meirinhos brothers’ mother Eliodora Ven- tura, from whom they learned many of their songs. Indeed, even with the strength of their instrumental sound, they never lose the emphasis on vocals, and delight in the insis- tent, uplifting, memorable song melodies.


During the penultimate track, a field recording of Eliodora and her sister Maria Helena Ventura duetting unaccompanied, odd and unexpected sounds begin to appear: electronic retouches from remixer Hugo Cor- reia, leader of ‘folklore hardcore’ band Fado- morse. The closer Nabos is a further surprise, a full-blown remix by Correia of a track (whose title means ‘Turnips’) from Galandum Galundaina’s first album; not the simplistic application of beats but getting in amongst and moving chunks around in a rather pleas- ing and stimulating way. A fellow ‘Trasmon- tano’, Correia is familiar with and sensitive to his traditional music.


In their booklet note the group say: “Since time immemorial, traditional music is renewed. We wanted with this album and especially with this theme to show that the Mirandese music is not only a souvenir from the past”. These people aren’t avoiding the 21st century, they’re embracing it on their own terms. And, with almost no chordal instruments – no thrumming guitars or bouzouki-citterns (well, actually there are subtle touches of guest bouzouki on a couple of tracks) – they’re pretty much bypassing the fashions of the last decades of C20.


On first listen I expected they’d return to a straight song as a coda. But better as it is, because this isn’t an album that evaporates as soon as it’s stopped whirling in the CD drive; in the silence after the end one’s left with a lingering audio memory of that last, recur- ring traditional theme in Nabos.


myspace.com/galandumgalundaina


www.emilianotoste.com www.galandum.co.pt Andrew Cronshaw


RACHEL DAVIS Rachel Davis own label RCD09


CHRISSY CROWLEY The Departure own label CCCD10


Canada continues to produce some outstand- ing young female fiddle players; here is another couple. Though on different ‘own labels’ they were both recorded in the same studio in Nova Scotia by the same producer.


Rachel is still a student at Cape Breton University studying for her degree in Celtic Studies, but she is already a very assured and accomplished fiddler in the Cape Breton style, interpreting its range of melodies and rhythms with her pleasing dry-toned playing. She usually plays to that rollicking piano that characterises Cape Breton fiddle accompani- ments but there’s also guitar, banjo and bouzouki used sparingly. There are also a number of fiddle duets and it is particularly apt that she plays one track with her inspira- tional first fiddle teacher who is also her grandfather. She includes one song sung in Gaelic – singing is also part of her degree course – and on this evidence, her singing reaches the same high standard as her fiddle playing. In fact, to have included more singing may have given the album a wider appeal, but there is time. This debut shows that it is by an emerging major talent.


www.celticmusicsite.com/shop/music.htm www.rachel-davis.ca


www.capebretonlive.com/shop/index.php www.chrissycrowley.com


Vic Smith VARIOUS ARTISTS


Analog Africa No. 8 – Afro-Beat Airways Analog Africa AACD 068


Subtitled West African Shock Waves – Ghana & Togo 1972-1979, here is another impressive piece of research and development by the tireless DJ Samy Ben Redjeb. First, by a fluke of chance involving a lost passport, missed flights, and a stroke of luck, he found himself in Accra where he met Dick Essilfie-Bondzie, formerly record company chief. Bondzie pro- duced a huge cache of recordings – over 800. Redjeb made a selection of tracks and then set about tracing the musicians who made them.


The result is here: a fascinating docu- ment of primal highlife remastered – this is poor people’s highlife, by the way, not the luxurious salon music that spawned it – and all fleshed out with a thick book of inter- views and history. The music is rarely sophis- ticated – some of the playing is quite serious- ly out of tune – but it invariably has enor- mous energy and verve, and every now and then a flash of pure inspiration: for example, the fabulous singing on Marijata’s urgent Break Through; the supercharged ambience of De Frank Professionals’ Afe Ato Yen Bio. This is music to keep you on your feet long after you should have dropped.


www.analogafrica.blogspot.com Rick Sanders BELSHAZZAR’S FEAST


Find The Lady Unearthed/ One Little Indian TPLP1080CD


For 15 years Paul Sartin and Paul Hutchinson, as Belshazzar’s Feast, have (ever so nicely) overwhelmed folk club and festival audiences with entertaining live shows marrying serious genuine musicianship to manic humour. Seven studio albums have tried to convey in strictly-audio terms the essence of the duo’s live act complete with musical pratfalls, belly- laughs and more academic in-jokes. Find The Lady signals a sneaky now-you-see-it label- switch, engaging Jim Moray as producer- engineer to conjure a soundscape encom- passing both an unparalleled degree of rich- ness and exemplary inner definition.


The often very beautiful sumptuousness of texture is given extra weight by the guest appearance of Jackie Oates on a handful of tracks, and Pete Flood adds some typically quirky percussion touches to the duo’s already sprightly musical invention. As on the disc’s ostensibly risky opening gambit, a


Photo: Judith Burrows


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