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is devoted entirely to Shetland fiddle music: jigs, reels, wedding marches and ceremonial tunes. As Kevin himself says: “I decided to make an album of purely traditional Shetland tunes as I’m finding the older I get, it’s the music I am going back to more and more”. Kevin is accompanied superbly by Sweden’s Mattias Perez on guitars and mandola. The sequencing of the tunes generates striking contrasts, from soaring, uplifting jigs (such as Da Fields O Foula) to beautiful slow airs of almost baroque elegance (such as Da Unst Bridal March and Minnie O’Shirva’s Cradle Song for which Mattias’s wife Nina joins them on second fiddle.). www.kevinhenderson.co.uk


Shetland fiddler Chris Stout is also a member of Fiddler’s Bid. Chris has frequently been praised in these pages for being one of the great innovators in the Scottish tradition- al music scene, creating gloriously unclassifi- able crossover music that blends folk, classi- cal, jazz and world influences. This engaging and atmospheric album, recorded live at Glas- gow City Halls in January 2010, is a perfect example of the maestro at his best.


Back in 2003 Chris went to Brazil as part of a collaborative project called Orquestra Scotland Brasil and made a particular connec- tion with Swiss Brazilian violinist-saxophonist Thomas Rohrer who specialises in the music of the rabeca (traditional Brazilian fiddle). A return trip to Brazil followed and led to Chris forming a ‘dream line-up’ for this concert, with Stout on fiddle, Rohrer on rabeca and saxophone, Catriona McKay on harp, Carlin- hos Antunes on guitars and vocals, Ian Stephenson on guitar and melodeon, Rui Barossi and Neil Harland on double bass and Martin O’Neill on bodhran.


The warm and heady Latina opens the album, with the fiddle and saxophone duelling in a mixture of Latin rhythms. Pe Quebrado has a feverish medieval dance qual- ity to it, and the rhythmically infectious Baiao De Cinco takes the north-eastern Brazilian baiao style and changes it to 5/4 to reference the Moors, Arabs and Jews who came to Brazil with the arrival of the Portuguese.


Inspired by an old Shetland tune, Fisher-


man’s Prayer is a jaw-droppingly beautiful composition, full of love and yearning. One of the pleasures of a live recording is the abil- ity to share the audience’s reaction when the band switches tempo from fast rhythmic dance tunes to a wistful slow melody, and during Fisherman’s Prayer you can feel that the atmosphere in the auditorium is electric. The whole album is a window into an evening where, as Chris Stout says, “innova- tion and spontaneity complemented our desire to perform music from the heart”.


www.chrisstout.co.uk Paul Matheson


BRATSCH Urban Bratsch Abacaba WVF479057


This is the 18th long player from Bratsch. As usual, rather than resting on laurels or enter- ing a comfort zone of well-worn groove, this is yet another departure. The splendid book- let shows the brilliant nomadic band, resplen- dent and grizzled, posed in front of gaudily grafittied and decaying urban dead ends. This is a bittersweet homage to those streets, a gloomy cabaret for the cities that have inspired and developed the group and its constituent parts over the many years. Here are songs from or about Berlin and Barcelona and Istanbul, and many other far-flung ports of call. And here, obviously, are songs from a very particular Paris, too.


The album is driven by the band’s occa- sionally familiar and constantly exciting per- cussive guitar, furious accordeon and raw


straining fiddle. New listeners, seeking more along the lines of the re-released classic Plein Air from earlier this year, may be perturbed, though, by the stripped-down and austere simplicity at work here. But repeated listens do reveal a wealth of textures and thought in the darkly magical cityscapes, as Bratsch pas- sionately reinvent themselves yet again, this time in grime and drama.


The difficult opener, Sirba Din Joc De Constanca/Hora, sets Bruno Girard’s fiddle on a disjointed, almost discordant path, scraping from a backstreet somewhere in Europe way after dark. Then things get darker. Scetate is very Brel and doomladen, while Fuego is a half-hearted and languid conflict of disparate Europe-wide motifs and influences. Ska Fonce is both discordant and easy, an orchestra that just can’t stop its tuning drone into a host of bleak but stir- ring voices. There’s an inspired and insou- ciant Gainsbourg-type gravelly vocal in the otherwise traditional On Peut Toujours RÍver, Girard’s fiddle playing an unsenti- mental but heartbreaking hum of urban theme gone utterly wrong.


The emphasis here is on the small places, the shadows, the small hostelry. But also, given the band’s avowed and traditional sta- tus as musical itinerants, the album is about the termini in cities where cultures and lan- guages and aspirations mingle, for it is there that songs arrive from the countryside, often tired, often as immigrants. These are those songs.


Via Harmonia Mundi/World Village www.bratsch.com


John Pheby


MALIKA ZARRA Berber Taxi Motema 233293


Having travelled from her birthplace in the southern Moroccan city of Ouled Teima via a childhood in France to Jersey City, New Jersey, Malika Zarra can certainly claim to have taken a lengthy ride in the Berber Taxi. As an adult, it wasn’t until she left France and relo- cated in the US that Malika, working as a jazz singer, found herself encouraged to explore in her music her Amazighe (Berber) heritage. She does so explicitly in this, her second album: in opener Tamazight – a seductive cel- ebration of Berber women – her liquid vocals flow over low, gentle Moroccan castanets and a slinky bass.


Elsewhere there is a rich linguistic mix (she sings in French, Arabic and Moroccan dialect) matched by a variety of rhythms and styles. As languages shift so does the rhyth- mic quality of the record: gentle reggae, gnawa and free-flowing jazz syncopation.


Jazz is the seam that runs through the record, the ribbon that ties together these disparate styles, and the playing is sophisti- cated, smooth and discreet enough to pro- vide a sensitive setting for Zarra’s voice. The recipe produces its loveliest moments on the delicate, semi-wordless Houaria, where sweet vocal harmonies swirl around Michael Cain’s piano. Mossameeha is a surprisingly melodic rebuke and an expression of seriously quali- fied forgiveness.


The CD is largely self-composed, but an exception is her version of Saudi singer Abdel Rab Idriss’ Leela, a conventional love lyric given a gentle jazz guitar treatment. This Berber Taxi is well worth hailing: a gently funky, eminently listenable record and you’ll struggle not to get caught up in the mean- dering, positive vibe of the limpid, jazzy Berber vocals.


www.malikazarra.com www.motema.com


Tom Jackson Malika Zarra


BASCO Big Basco Go’ Danish GO 0811


The first time I heard Swedish/Danish band Basco, I have to admit to getting a bit of an English folky bee in my bonnet. They were featured in this year’s WOMEX showcase events and also on their WOMEXiser sample CD, playing a traditional English song, crack- ingly well done but ostensibly a version not far removed from Martin Carthy And Home Service…so why can’t WOMEX just book Mar- tin Carthy And Home Service?, I thought. Not that I want to impose border controls on what people play, more that (with the excep- tion of Eliza) English traditional music seems to have a fairly low profile at WOMEX.


I still think that. But actually Basco turn out to have a little more about them… and have, I believe, an English singer… so they’re off the hook. They are a corking band, cast- ing a nod to a number of European traditions – mainly Scandinavian and British – as well as jazz noodling and funky sensibilities. The instrumentation and arrangements are velvety- textured and original, created by a tight unit of brass (including helicon, trombone, French horn and some sumptuous flugelhorn), sweetly-plucked cittern and strings, romping fiddles and chord-rich accordeon.


Yes, I still can’t help making the odd synaptic links (to Bellowhead and certainly Home Service) but the wall of sound they make is warm and inviting. This, coupled with the mellifluous vocals of guest vocalist Kim Andre Rysstad on Storebror & Lillebror and Lova Lova, the ringing Swedish strings, the musicianly (I know it’s not a proper word) ease with which they twist and turn within their chosen roots and the stylish production values have shaken me out of my curmud- geonly ways. I am won over.


www.bascoband.com Sarah Coxson


TARA NEVINS Wood And Stone Sugar Hill SUG-CD-4064


For a previous Tara Nevins album you have to go back to Mule To Ride, which Sugar Hill brought out in 1999. On that release, the Donna The Buffalo fiddler wrote, arranged and/or sang only a minority of the album’s 20 largely old-time pieces. What she did claim sole credit for was the production, and a fine job she made of it.


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