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Vamm
VAMM VammVAMM002
Heard the one about the two fiddles and the Låtmandola? No? How about the one about the Shetlander,
the Norwegian and the Perthite? There’s no punchline sadly but they do make fabulous music together.
Vamm is an old Shetland word for ‘bewitch’, apparently, and, playing with an unusual purity laced with an avalanche of melodic ideas and arresting tunes, they cer- tainly do that. But then, you’d probably expect this from three musicians of their pedigree: Catriona Macdonald spent 12 years as a Blazing Fiddler, Patsy Reid built her repu- tation as a top-notch fiddle player with Bre- abach and the rhythm powerhouse Marit Fält has built an impressive reputation playing her Nordic mandola in a duo with Rona Wilkie.
Easing themselves away from the com- parative rigidity of their previous incarna- tions, they clearly relish the relative freedom afforded by this line-up, playing a bountiful array of tunes written by the varied likes of Aidan O’Rourke, Jim Sutherland and Jerry Holland. They create a big sound too, which is both vivacious and elegant, without grand- standing or milking it as they glide from pipe tunes to a Canadian Creole dance, a gorgeous Scott Skinner piece (Castle Grant) and, per- haps best of all, a liberal taste of Scandina- vian folk music. In particular there’s a com- plex and thoughtful arrangement of Lurkas by Olof Misgeld; but some of the most memo- rable tunes come courtesy of Marit Fält, whose percussive style gives the whole thing a meaty presence.
While they offer contrasting styles, the fiddles of Reid and Macdonald flit lithely and almost impudently around one another –
switching from gentle and alluring to wild and dynamic with one stealthy sweep of bowing and a subtle change in rhythm. There are no songs and they don’t need them – joy- ous playing speaks volumes.
www.vamm.co.uk Colin Irwin
SIMONE ALVES & YANN GOURVIL Astrakan Project Carga 015
Sometimes I get hoist by my own prejudices and preconceived ideas. So it was that I glanced at the back
of this album, noted the legend “A colourful and delicate oriental shine over wild Celtic music”, and the dread vision of Loreeena Newage materialised. And so it festered unplayed in the ‘oh f*** do I really have to listen to this?’ pile on my desk for several weeks, until we were just about to go press with this issue.
Don’t do that at home. Should a copy of this CD appear in your letterbox, hopefully because this review may have alerted you to it, seize it and put it in your player straight away. You will not be disappointed.
For ‘Celtic’, do not read ‘wifty-wafty-syn- thy-twee’, but instead gloriously full-throat- ed, truly inspiring Breton singing and melodies from Simone Alves. For ‘a colourful and delicate oriental shine’, read ‘roaring, intricate, fiery, imaginative accompaniments’ from multi-instrumentalist Yann Gourvil on oud, electric saz (or baglama as the Turks call it), violin and programmed percussion.
Indeed, for ‘oriental’, don’t read ‘Far East’ as we Brits tend to use it, but ‘from the Eastern reaches of the Mediterranean’. It’s the
Gourvil & Alves: Astrakan Project
sort of production that wouldn’t sound out of place on the better contemporary Turkish roots records – it turns out that they’ve lived and studied in Istanbul for the past few years – and it’s obviously a close relative to what Kristi Stassinopoulou & Stathis Kalyviotis did with Greekadelia. In fact I’d christen it Breton-Turkadelia if I hadn’t run out of credit in the ‘name a genre a day’ fund.
When I hit them up for a copy of the biog that this maltreated review copy had obviously got separated from, I found that they were involved in one of the sainted Erik Marchand’s inspiring projects that included Ross Daly, Thierry ‘Titi’ Robin and Keyvan Chemirani. That makes complete sense, and they are justifiably spoken of in the same breath as those iconic names. And if that doesn’t get you people who know about that sort of thing reaching for your credit cards, I don’t know what will.
A truly fabulous, spirit-raising album.
astrakanproject.com
Ian Anderson
RADIO COS Radio Cos Fol Música 100FOL1067
Quique (Henrique) Peón and his sister Mercedes learned from and recorded musicians around Galicia’s villages, and he played percussion in the band put together to play the music on her wonderful first album Isué. He’s become a leading choreographer of folk-dance- based spectacles, but in the duo Radio Cos, with fellow singer-pandeireteiro Xurxo Fer- nandes, he’s a singer and player of pandeire- ta (tambourine), making robust, jubilant music with its heart in the old way of gutsy acoustic music that was the sound of Galicia’s
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