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family that are proud upholders of the Bre- ton tradition; Florian’s father is famed expo- nent of bombarde and biniou-koz, Jean Baron. The areas covered in this album are similar to those of the previous one, but there is more of a contrast between the two styles. When Anne sings a gwerz it is some- how bleaker and more austere but its very lonesomeness is also very attractive. When she sings kan ha diskan, she follows the increasing trend these days for the lead part to be sung and the response line to be played on an instrument. Here, it is the nimble flute playing of Gurvant Le Gac that follows her singing, sometimes on their own, at other times effectively underpinned by Florian on guitar or oud or by her own harp playing.


Bercy, south of Nantes has become the venue for a huge series of concerts and dances to celebrate St Patrick’s Day (or night in this case). From the same stable as the two previ- ous albums comes the album to mark this event. First thoughts were that this would be live recordings from those events, but in fact it is a sampler of artists scheduled to appear, so we get a very varied selection of stuff from the title track of Louise’s album to local heavy rock hero Pat O’May with everything from chanson to a bagadou band along the way. Oh, and yes, there are a couple of Irish tracks in there; a couple of instrumentals from Lunasa provide the high spots of the album.


To complete a quartet of Breton releas- es, how about three squeezebox players. Overcoming a prejudice towards cocktail anything – when applied to music – was the first stage. The music is in fact much better than its title. The best known of the diatonic accordeonists is Yann-Fañch Perroches and he is joined by two others, Ronan Robert and Fañch Loric on a programme of tunes mainly either traditional or composed by members of the band. The two striking and interesting things about their playing is the way the two accompanying instruments sometimes set up different cross-rhythms against the one taking the melody lines and their occasional use of interesting and adventurous, at times dissonant, harmonies.


And as a point of information – there was, confusingly, a previous eponymous album called Cocktail Diatonique involving Yann- Fañch and Ronan, released by Keltia KMCD36 in 2003; this is an entirely different album.


www.keltiamusique.com – UK distribut- ed by Discovery: www.discovery-records.com


www.coop-breizh.fr/ Vic Smith GAVIN DAVENPORT


Brief Lives Hallamshire Traditions HATRACD03


Gavin, best known as one quarter of Crucible, here releases his first solo record, and it’s shot through with his dynamic personality. The disc exudes immediacy; life being brief, it’s almost as if Gavin’s own life depended on making it. At the same time, though, its con- sidered air indicates that Gavin’s clearly thought long and carefully about his chosen material and his approach to it before com- mitting his interpretations to CD. The quali- ties of starkness (direct, uncompromising vision) and tenderness (affection and respect for sources) go hand in hand in his keen reali- sations (in some cases, recompositions) of tra- ditional ballads and broadsides.


The bold attack of Gavin’s singing voice, and its commanding sense of expressive import, are complemented by its distinctive tremulous vibrato. He turns in two storming unaccompanied performances here, the disc being brought to a memorable close with a dramatically charged rendition of House Car- penter that he’s wrought out of the base met- als of versions by artists as diverse as Peter Bel-


don early. And, more pertinent to Viva La Canadienne, the potential of Guantanamera, interpreting it in 1964, two years before The Sandpipers turned it into international gold. As a songwriter herself, she was responsible most famously for Morning Dew, featured prominently in Folker editor Michael Kleff’s booklet notes, though it doesn’t appear here.


Viva La Canadienne combines her Mer- Gavin Davenport


lamy and Kelly Joe Phelps. The other unac- companied song is the extraordinary Silent Alarm, an original composition of Gavin’s, tak- ing the form of an unambiguously contempo- rary narrative that’s every bit as masterly in its own way as Chris Wood’s One In A Million.


On the remainder of the record, Gavin accompanies himself (Anglo concertina, gui- tar, cittern), with supportive contributions from Ian Stephenson (422, KAN), fellow-Cru- ciblers Richard Arrowsmith and Helena Reynolds, Matt Quinn, Tyler Carson, Natalie Fischer and the album’s producer Tom Wright (PBS6). The aforementioned a cappella moments are offset by decidedly chirpy rendi- tions of Seven Gypsies, Ratcliffe Highway and British Man Of War, suitably accessible and respectable (no criticism intended!), and Gavin opens the disc with a neat chunk of “misery in a major key” (Two Pretty Boys), while his creative treatment of On Board A Ninety-Eight is set to a transposition of a morris tune. But for me, highlights among the accompanied tracks are Gavin’s inspira- tional version of the ostensibly unpromising Dutch folk song A Snow White Bird (using Jenny Reid’s “fabulously singable” English words), and a superb account of Young Hast- ings (itself a slightly mangled variant of Tam Lin) sporting Helena’s harmonious, atmo- spheric fiddle playing within its fulsome box- driven setting. False Knight, another stand- out, finds Gavin solo with a spectral echo effect placed in the opposite channel to his concertina, somehow seeming to evoke the very ghost of his own grandfather who gave his life in WWII and whom this personal take on the ballad commemorates.


Brief Lives is a carefully crafted record, containing thoughtful, original and personal responses to traditional material.


www.gavindavenport.com www.hallamtrads.co.uk


David Kidman BONNIE DOBSON


Viva La Canadienne Bear Family Records BCD 16720 AH


The Toronto-born singer Bonnie Dobson championed Anglophone and Francophone Canadian folk song and the new songs being written by Ian Tyson and Gordon Lightfoot south of the border before any of her gener- ation. (Authors included.) Blessed with a soar- ing voice and a sharp-witted song editor’s mind, she was the first New World singer to include MacColl’s First Time Ever I Saw Your Face in her repertoire. She similarly grasped the potential of Ralph McTell’s Streets Of Lon-


cury album, For The Love Of Him (1964) and Argo’s Bonnie Dobson (1972), recorded after she settled in England. (Incidentally, contrary to what you read, the latter has been released on CD before – in 2006.) She rounds off the collection with two fresh recordings from 2010, Sweet Somerset – her only composition here – and Ian Rankin’s Special Sense Of Kind. Blessed with a voice of commanding presence, here she lifts off on a diverse song-bag includ- ing Tyson’s Someday Soon and Lightfoot’s Six- teen Miles To Seven Lakes, the traditional Land Of The Silver Birch, Un Canadien Errant and Lord Gregory. On a note of inconsistency… while the correction to Dobson’s charmingly phonetic, original spelling of Quantanamerra – an indication of how early she recorded it – goes unmentioned, Un Canadien Errant is not traditional, being the work of Antoine Gérin- Lajoie. Viva La Canadienne is a slab of Canadi- an folk history with a capital A for Art.


www.bear-family.de Ken Hunt MATS EDÉN,


DANIEL SANDÉN-WARG, LEIF STINNERBOM, MAGNUS STINNERBOM Anno 2010 Giga GCD-73


Downloads, pah! With many roots and tradi- tional music CDs, and especially Giga’s many releases, the booklet notes go beyond the sound, revealing the world of the music and its players. Here Mats Edén and Leif Stinner- bom, founders of one of Sweden’s most influ- ential folk bands, Groupa, tell the colourful tale of their quest, beginning in the early 1970s, for the old musics and fiddlers, particu- larly those of their region, Värmland.


And, as with some British folk-musical families, the next generation has also grasped the baton and run with it. As teenagers, Leif’s son Magnus and Daniel Sandén-Warg (who has also become a top player of the music of Norway’s Setesdal) made an album called Harv, which became the name of their duo and subsequently more albums and a band. Magnus, as well as spending several years with Hedningarna and current membership of the Ale Möller Band, gathered his contempo- raries a couple of years ago as the Outhouse Allstars, originally to play the music of Groupa for his dad’s birthday celebration.


Now the generations come together in the Outhouse studio, playing the old tunes – polskas, waltzes, rejländers, halling – from the preceding generations of fiddlers, plus a few of their own, and the booklet notes tell stories about them too. For some they play all together, for some they split into duos, trio or solo, on fiddles, the sympathetic-stringed viola d’amore and violin d’amore whose incorporation into Swedish folk music have stemmed largely from the work of these musicians, or adding in moraharpa, diatonic accordeon and harmonica. No bass instru- ments, just the dense textures of all those harmonising and droning bowed strings and wheezing reeds, and massive drive.


Their note to a polska from Lejsme-Per captures the spirit: “A music full of porridge and poverty, but also strength and an irre- pressible longing for beauty.”


www.giga.w.se Andrew Cronshaw


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