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Chris Wood
Long Gone Out West Blues is a cohesive piece of work – the glue being the warmth of tone and integrity with they perform. Both are classy and dextrous players, but under- stated in their poise and control. The instru- mental tracks are really exquisite: both the traditional track Sally Goodin and Jason’s own melancholy Long Lula, with their earthi- ly plucked banjo make me want to cry spon- taneously. I take this to be good thing.
www.pharisandjason.com Sarah Coxson
CHRIS WOOD None The Wiser R.U.F RUFCD013
You have to be careful reviewing Chris Wood albums. Lyrics, arrangements and even melodies aren’t often as they seem – Wood doesn’t do obvious, and here again he’s a master of deception as he wades on an unmarked road into the sometimes murky soul of England.
Hammond organ, string bass, flugelhorn,
Wurlitzer and piano are introduced as Wood himself plays an electric guitar for the first time, but if this implies he’s suddenly become a funk soul brother, the reality is considerably more oblique. Scarcely a note is played in anger but plenty are played with menace in a dark and gritty backdrop for Wood’s taut portraits of resignation and bewilderment in a browbeaten nation.
It’s not spectacular, it’s hardly singalong
and it’s never cheerful but Wood’s remark- able eye for detail and ability to deliver telling insight in one couplet [“Out here in our market towns with our pound shops and our bookies the Argos catalogue is our tor- menter/ I saw a young lad and his mum, he all but held her hand as they went into the Army recruiting centre” – None The Wiser] go a long way to successfully delivering a seeming- ly barking musical notion, apparently forged when Hamish Stewart of the Average White Band invited him to perform some of his songs in front of a jazz funk band. Deciding Justin Mitchell, a trumpeter, was the ideal man to sit in front of the Hammond organ, Wood completed his trio with Neil Harland on bass combining to create a sound he play- fully depicts as “estuary soul”.
Along the prickly path we encounter a stark deconstruction of Jerusalem with William Blake’s poem stripped of its tri- umphal Hubert Parry tune and re-interpreted as a dour rejection of all the values habitually ascribed to it. The disconcerting spectre of
midlife bafflement lingers over tracks like A Whole Life Lived (“Though there ain’t no mir- ror here I’m certain that I wear the frown my old man wore than half the time”) and the wonderfully bolshie hymn Thou Shalt. We also get a weatherbeaten return to the John Clare story on a painstakingly delicate piano arrangement of I Am, while one traditional song – The Little Carpenter – helps to lighten the pervading gloom.
There is, too, a tenderness of sorts in The Sweetness Game and Hugh Lupton’s delicate homage to marriage, Tally Of Salt, while The Wolfless Years offers a relatively acquiescent parable to close things off at the end.
But Hammond organ and Epiphone elec- tric guitar or not, this is challenging stuff, for artist and audience alike. It’s an album that cooks with a slow simmer… yet you daren’t take your eye off the gas for a second.
www.chriswoodmusic.co.uk Colin Irwin
SAMBA TOURÉ Albala Glitterbeat GBCD 004/GBLP 004
Albala, a blues cut from Niger delta, is an instant classic of the genre and a must-have for aficionados and casual fans alike. While steeped in the traditions of the Touré name, Albala also packs an urgent message about the present, and the dire situation which per- sists in northern Mali. It is this situation which gives the record both its name – ‘Albala’ meaning something akin to ‘danger’ in Song- hai – and also its sound.
From the outset it is clear that Samba is a master at work. Unlike his previous, perhaps more gentle releases, this one has a distinct sense of anger and anxiety. Opening track Be Ki Don sets the tone. It has the bright guitars and hypnotic rhythms of Ali Farka Touré (Samba cut his teeth in Ali’s band back in the ’90s) but also a swagger and confidence that is all Samba’s own.
The record features Zoumana Tereta on souko, a traditional violin, and I for one have never heard it played so well. The effect is often both beautiful and disturbing all at the same time, as on Idjé Lolo where the sound is like a cross between a barking dog and a wailing siren. Samba himself, a man who could well have taken the easy road, instead chooses often to do a kind of rap against the souko as on Fondora. It’s a risky strategy, and in lesser hands could have flopped, but here it works fantastically.
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