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fRoots 40
The latest in our series of sought-after compilations, which you can download to enjoy on your computer or mp3 player or burn to CD –the download includes artwork for a slimline case and label.
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in your ears back for fRoots 40, the latest in our long series of carefully crafted and sought- after compilations. Most of the best roots music is being
made on smaller, independent labels these days, and this is a particularly intriguing and exciting cross-section sourced from around the planet – from the UK, around Europe, east as far as Indonesia and south to Australia.
Sunda’s Karinding Attack apply the ferocious energy of punk, hardcore and metal to traditional instruments made from bamboo – the eponymous karinding is a jews harp, and they have lots of per- cussion and wind instruments too, plus remarkable vocals .
The Weirdlore event didn’t happen, but the compilation CD most definitely did, and from this wonderful selection of tracks, many by fRoots favourites, we give you an inspired mash up of words and tunes from 9th – 14th Century sources put together by sound therapist Katie Rose.
You can put Salento’s Anna Cinzia
Villani up there with other great Euro- pean women singers like Hungary’s Marta Sebestyen or Portugal’s Mariza who have strong commitment to local traditions but are not afraid to push boundaries. She really is a force of nature!
Do we really have to tell you that Emily Portman has quietly blossomed into one of the most distinctive songwriters that the English folk scene has produced in years – widely admired by the greats of previous generations too. And as for weirdlore: it’s her trademark!
Café Aman music – from the Turkish and Greek cafés of the Ottoman empire in the days before the 1922 Asia Minor catas- trophe and the forced exchanged of popu- lations gave birth to rembetiko. The classy Cafe Aman Istanbul are a modern day band from Turkey reviving the classic style.
And meanwhile, back in Greece,
Loxandra also specialise in updating the same era of music. The track we have here came from the repertoire of Constantino- ple-born Sephardic rembetiko singer Rosa Eskenazi, and features the voice of Theodora Athanasiou from Apsilies.
If ever an English blues singer had a hellhound on his trail it was the great Duffy Power. Emerging as a rock’n’roller in the late 1950s, championed by Alexis Korner in the 1960s, an impassioned per- former – a new album this year from a more at ease Duffy is a surprise treat.
Champions of Tanzania’s mchiriku
street music, Jagwa Music spring out of hot and dusty Dar Es Salaam to take the world by storm. Hi-energy multi-layered percussion, cheap distorted hand-held key- boards, acrobatics and great singer Jackie Kazimoto should make them unstoppable.
When Norwegian fiddler Ragnhild
Furrebotten from the band Majorstuen teamed up with a five-piece brass ensem- ble, she hit on a great idea that goes well beyond the project for which it was origi- nally conceived. And ‘original’ certainly applies to the album they made together.
Meanwhile, Australian fiddler/ singer Jenny M Thomas has been applying grand designs to dark traditional songs from her part of the world, with an adven-
turous band she calls The System, named after the system which transported con- victs to Australia’s penal colonies.
Els Berros De La Cort are a band specialising in bringing medieval Catalan and Occitan street music howling into the modern world, and their latest album is a collection of tunes on the twin themes of gluttony and lust, suitably and graphically illustrated…
Tom Paley was a pioneer in 1950s
New York, co-founding the legendary New Lost City Ramblers. London-based since the ’60s, he’s now enjoying his own revival with a new album featuring Jason Steel on this song which was also a favourite of the late Derroll Adams.
Products of the fertile Birmingham scene, Joe Broughton, Paloma Trigás, Frank Moon and Tom Chapman make up Urban Folk Quartet, otherwise UFQ, who fearlessly mix up anything from anywhere that makes sense with their fiddle-led (one Galician, one English) folk music.
Ben Zabo (his stage name – his real
one’s Arouna Moussa Coulibaly) is a gui- tarist from the minority Bwa people of Mali whose fabulous new band featured here follows in the footsteps of past Malian Afrobeat greats like Super Djata, Super Biton and L’Orchestre Kanaga.
And finally, Kan, a veritable Anglo- Celtic sound system featuring the virtuoso skills of fiddler Aidan O’Rourke, flute play- er Brian Finnegan, guitar (and other stringed things) from Ian Stephenson and percussion from Jim Goodwin in a com- pletely original blend.
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