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CALAN Jonah Sain Records SCD2657


Difficult second album syndrome? You might expect it since Calan have been awhile about follow- ing up Bling but from the cover shot you immediately recognise they’ve lost none of their cheek, pizzazz or determination to make the system work for them. The fact that the young Welsh cavaliers have chosen a broader melodic palette with quiet advances in arrangement and approach puts them out in front of the acoustic wing of new Welsh roots. Whereas Taran and the like jump all over with Doc Marten-like Welsh electro identity, equally enthusiastic Calan show a smidgen more decorum and stand up for unplugged corners. Yet even here things are changing. Slip Jigs is a rockist opening, drums and bass roll under the harps, fiddles and what I reckon are Welsh pipes.


Talabarte


Cronshaw’s fujara (long shepherd’s pipe) and duduk. Cronshaw’s live solo revisiting of the dreamy and elegant Mhàiri Mhìn Mheall- Shùileach (pronounced ‘VA-ri, veen, VYELL- hoolach’, he helps), also known as Gentle Dark-eyed Mary, is everything that this head holds to be Cronshawian. It is his equivalent of Hamza El Din’s Escalay (Water Wheel), a consummate piece of instrumental story- telling in steady growth.


The fifth track is The Unbroken Surface


Of Snow itself. It acts as the album’s centre- piece, too. At almost 35 minutes, it is an epic journey creating the effect of suspending time with him on zither, Ian Blake on soprano sax and bass clarinet, and Aleksanyan on duduk. Sanna Kurki-Suonia adds a Karelian Finnish vocal section to complete this other- wise instrumental album. Music of snowflake-like singularity.


www.cloudvalley.com Ken Hunt VARIOUS ARTISTS


Barbecue: Any Old Time Blues From The Pit 1927-1942 Old Hat CD-1008


Reviewing this from a vegetarian perspec- tive, it is perhaps odd that I can elicit so much joy from these African-American


meat-based classics. Classics from Bogus Ben Covinton’s gospel parody I Heard The Voice Of A Pork Chop (now, that’s what I call a song title!) to Brownie McGhee’s joyously plunky Barbecue Any Old Time to the inimitable Memphis Minnie’s Pig Meat On The Line, the theme is unrelentingly carnivorous.


A veritable feast of barbecue blues, these songs reflect a time in America when many rural black farmworkers from the South were migrating to the big cities and where ‘barbe- cue’ intimated that you had money to burn. In many ways, these are the early 20th Century equivalents of the bragging and bravado of gangsta rappers: just substitute bling and flash cars for a pit barbecue and a pork chop.


Barbecue restaurants became de rigueur in American cities, epitomising both down- home, home-cooked nostalgia on one hand but also heralding a new sophisticated era on the other. These songs are a fascinating insight into that phenomena – filled with flashy boasts, rollicking musicianship and oozing originality, sensuality and joy. Check that boogie-woogie kazoo/piano combo on Mississippi Jook Band’s Barbecue Bust, or the doo-wop predecessors The Four Southern


Singers’ Ham Bone Am Sweet, or the know- ing jazz-stylings of Frankie Half Pint Jaxon’s Gimme A Pig’s Foot And A Bottle Of Beer.


And of course, there’s the thinly dis- guised innuendo, there being certain other inferences relating to Pig Meat Is What I Crave which I’m sure I needn’t make explicit. “I know this is pig meat, the kind that you won’t regret, I’ve got something bout this pig meat I haven’t told you yet!” coaxes Georgia White. Bessie Jackson is more blatant: “If you want my meat, you can come to my house at twelve!” Say no more!


With this, Old Hat maintain their track record for producing fine records, crammed with wall-to-wall classic tracks and backed up by entertaining and informative sleeve notes. Raunchy, educational and great fun. www.oldhatrecords.com


Sarah Coxson


TALABARTE Talabarte Fol 100FOL 1054


The opening track, and the instrumenta- tion, suggest that this might be another of those skilful but undifferentiated albums of tune-playing. But as it proceeds it gradually draws one into a conversation that becomes progressively more interesting and adventurous, in which the tunes are engagingly varied in rhythm, melody and instrumental texture, and within their tight structure there’s a good deal of free-thinking improvisation, the certainly top-notch musicians confident in their com- munication, inventively spurred by one another, collaborating not competing.


Talabarte is a trio of Galicians getting the tonal and textural most out of a relatively small range of instruments: Quim Farinha of Berrogüetto on violin, viola and the dusky, deeply hollow resonances of nyckelharpa; imaginative diatonic and chromatic accordeonist Pedro Pascual of the band Mar- ful; and the woody plucking or bowing of double bassist Kin García of Susana Seivane’s band. No percussion, and none needed.


About half the material explores Galician traditional tunes, one combines and reinter- prets Romanian and Macedonian melodies with nicely lurching rhythms and soaring fid- dle, and the rest are matchingly substantial and springy originals. File under ‘really rather fine’; or rather don’t file, leave lying untidily around to play again.


www.boa.es UK distributor Discovery Andrew Cronshaw


The rhythm section (which includes the redoubtable Maartin Allcock, resident of Harlech and producer of this work) makes subtle appearances throughout. Acoustic minds need not fear however. Though I’d love to hear Calan remixed or at full cry with a proper rock back line, they move to a seem- ingly simple trad tune, Dawns Y Pelau, where not only do they blend in a full dance side from Nantgarw but also a three-piece brass section! And I have to say the combination is wonderful, as are the arrangement and mix- ing. A huge thumbs-up to Mr Allcock. Hats off also to Huw Williams who has gifted them a handful of songs that range from pure pop folk, the dreaming title track, to the almost Looney Tunes Anybody Else But You.


Vocally Bethan Rhiannon proves herself time and again, switching styles and emo- tions with ease, I love the ache in her voice on Y Gwydr Glas which reflects the beauty of Welsh lyricism. Playing is everywhere up to smart alec level. If you thought they could thunder before just feast your eyes on Patrick Rimes ethnic selection, pibgorn, bagpipes, whistles of differing persuasions. The harps from various members of the Jones family – no relation as far as I’m aware – trill and even leap in places, the guitar of Chris ab Alun is getting decidedly funky and naturally after adventures with fusion, fiddler Angharad Jenkins plunges in and makes up a major part of the whole glorious racket. Yep, most of the cuts are trad but Calan are bursting out, tak- ing chances, making left-field swerves, doing just what you’d expect them not to, making a whole new fist of Welsh folk and clearly hav- ing a ball doing it.


To repeat a question, difficult second album syndrome? Nah, not a chance. Just a bit tidy.


www.calan-band.com


www.sainwales.com Simon Jones


GUELEWAR Halleli N’Dakarou Teranga Beat TBCD 014


Mastered from a live 1982 recording at the Canari Club de Kao- lack in Senegal, recorded on four


microphones fed straight to a four-channel multitrack reel-to-reel, Halleli N’Dakarou cap- tures a distinctive Afro- Manding period which fuses experimental mini-Moog melodies and louche distorted lead guitars; ringing rhythm guitar and strong percussive thrust.


Never very prolific in terms of studio recorded albums, this release shows Guelewar as innovators, consciously moving away from


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