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PETER ROWAN The Old School Compass 4600
DIANA JONES
Museum Of Applachian Recordings Proper PRP CD 011
What joy. In the days of squeaky-clean, over- compressed acoustic recordings, two that sound like they were played, recorded and enjoyed by folks who knew what they were doing and what they were trying to achieve.
Rowan has been around for ever, had many highs early in his career, and has flirted with just about every musical genre there is. Whenever he returns to bluegrass he has few equals and here offers a collection of superb original songs. He is supported by the best. Blistering fiddle from Michael Cleveland, Stu- art Duncan and Jason Carter. Backup vocals from Del McCoury and Don Rigsby and the opening cut, Keeping It Between The Lines (Old School), declares what he is all about, pick it clean and play it true. Doc Watson Morning could have failed miserably, but suc- ceeds admirably as a cleverly worded tribute to Doc. Elsewhere Rowan writes and sings simple, straightforward bluegrass styled songs: That’s All She Wrote, Ragged Old Dream and even a gospel quartet My Savior Is Calling Me. A special word also for Letter From Beyond, a duet with Del McCoury that has all the pedigree of Bill Monroe at his peak. Rowan’s voice may have aged a little, but it is still a first class instrument.
www.compassrecords.com
Diana Jones is altogether more one- paced but no less satisfying as she comes up with another selection of original songs beautifully played and arranged with fiddle doing most of the decoration in a respectful old time sound. The songs, with titles like O Sinner, Drunkard’s Daughter and Orphan’s Home, still jog along at a nice pace, although as the titles suggest, Jones is not playing for laughs. Song For A Worker stands out with its theme and chorus thankful for Sunday as the day off. Ohio is a minor key lament, although not for the State. Two obvious love songs, Love Oh Love and Tennessee deal with bro- ken romance, to maintain the cheerful mood. Bravely Jones ends the recording with an unaccompanied duet, The Other Side, a song written following the death of her grandpar- ents. Mournful it may be but I love it.
www.dianajonesmusic.com John Atkins
AIDAN O’ROURKE Hotline Reveal Records, REVEAL017CDX
Aidan O’Rourke is a fiddler and composer from Oban in the Scottish Highlands who is best known as a member of the innovative, groundbreaking trio Lau. O’Rourke has been composing music for many years, and won Composer of the Year at the 2011 Scots Trad Music Awards.
Hotline is O’Rourke’s third solo album, mixing musical idioms and blurring the distinc- tions between folk music, jazz and avant-garde classical minimalism. Aidan O’Rourke on fiddle is joined here by musical comrades Phil Ban- croft (tenor saxophone), Paul Harrison (piano and synths), Catriona McKay (Scottish harp) and Martin O’Neill (bodhran and percussion). The music has a folk-tradition base, but leans further into jazz and classical avant-garde than O’Rourke’s work with Lau, giving him the opportunity to indulge his love of improvisa- tion, polyrhythms and electronics. Those who enjoy boundary-pushing composition and jazzy improvisation from a Scottish traditional base (such as Lau, Colin Steele, Catriona McKay, Chris Stout, Fraser Fyfield, Dave Milligan) are in for an atmospheric treat here.
DnA (DELYTH & ANGHARAD JENKINS) Adnabod Fflach:Tradd CD347H
Welsh harpist Delyth Jenkins and her violinist daughter Angharad (of young tunes band Calan) make a delightful foray into simplicity and beauty with their first album. The pro- duction is minimal with few overdubs (apart from the last track, of which more later), the delicately atmospheric tunes cohering to make the album overall a joy to listen to.
The title means ‘to know one another’, and the players certainly gel convincingly. The style is subtle and careful, altogether lacking in Eisteddfodic tweeness, due partly to the instrumentation: Celtic, rather than concert harp, and understated fiddle playing convey the tunes without too much fuss. The duo claim in the CD notes not to have good voices, but they make their instruments sing on what is an almost entirely instrumental album, with various folk melodies but also song tunes, mostly from South Wales and their native Swansea Bay. The album evokes the spirit of place and is unmistakably Cymric in a refresh- ing way, Angharad’s well-crafted original tunes fitting the blend perfectly and showing that she is more than just a fine fiddler. The
gorgeous Brandy Cove glides and swoops in waltz time like an air of old, and opener Gan Bwyll Jo! sets a perfect pace for the album, gently restrained, yet belying great skill and confidence. Even Sosban Fach, over-familiar in pubs and on rugby terraces as an inglorious singalong, becomes, in these skilled hands, a melancholy air, its cadences reclaimed and redeemed in a haunting arrangement. Delyth’s own Cassie En Lorient continues to mine the melancholy vein, much vaunted in Welsh folk music, yet rarely done so well.
This is an exceptional album which can evoke, if listened to in the right way, a kind of ‘awen’, a mystic inspiration; played while travelling on a coastal holiday, wafted across a festival field or a summer garden, the music creates a beautifully balanced pastoral atmo- sphere in which to lose oneself, yet its subtle arrangements can reward repeated listening.
Peter Rowan
Hotline was commissioned by An Tobar Arts Centre as a suite of new music to link Argyll to London’s 2012 Cultural Olympiad. O’Rourke’s inspiration was his memory of his father explaining that there was a building, built during the Cold War just outside Oban, which housed a cable that connected the world. This was the landing station for the first submarine telephone transatlantic cable, which carried the Moscow-Washington hot- line between the American and Soviet heads of state. The cable terminal was buried deep inside a massive cliff face, accessed through a series of bomb-proof doors and was designed to withstand an atom bomb. O’Rourke got access to this building and some of the music was recorded within the massive chambers. He says: “I was always aware that potentially world-changing conversations were happen- ing down the cable on the sleepy west coast of Argyll. This music was inspired by that cable, as a feat of engineering, but also by the feeling I had growing up in rural Argyll – which very occasionally felt like the centre of the universe”.
www.aidanorourke.net Paul Matheson
The final track, however, broke the spell for this listener: a hefty vocal arrangement of Y Glomen, performed well enough by Lleuwen Steffan and Vincent Guerin, sounds like something from another album altogeth- er, and a final hidden track with plagal piano ends the album puzzlingly – a favourite hymn? We’re not out of the chapels yet, per- haps. Nonetheless, one of the best Welsh instrumental folk albums available, and could become a classic in its genre.
www.dna-folk.co.uk Nathan Lewis Williams
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Sing Me The Songs: Celebrating The Works Of Kate McGarrigle Nonesuch 534872
Tribute albums tend to be rubbish. I mean, why bother, when you can just reach across and grab a CD by the original artist? But it’s a different kettle of prunes when genes are involved and family shows have been such a strong feature of team McGarrigle over the years – often so heartwarmingly unpredict - able – so a double album of live recordings focused mainly on Kate’s glorious composi- tions is an appetising prospect.
Taken from three live shows, it includes
plenty of Kate’s most revered pieces, includ- ing Kate herself singing her final song Proser- pina as the final act at her final concert in London, in addition to related favourites like sister Anna’s Heart Like A Wheel, ex-husband Loudon Wainwright’s Swimming Song and Emmylou Harris’s Darlin’ Kate.
Being live, the recording quality is vari- able, but the spirit is irresistible and the sheer range and diversity of the performances con- stantly surprising. Not merely the forthright interpretations of extrovert son Rufus Wain- wright and flamboyant daughter Martha, but some of the other guests too. Antony (of Antony & the Johnsons) virtually steals the whole show with the heartbreaking fragility of his solo reading of Go Leave while there are also unexpected gems from Norah Jones (Talk To Me Of Mendocino), Krystle Warren (a beau- tifully soulful I Don’t Know) and Teddy Thomp- son (Saratoga Summer Song). Richard and Linda Thompson are reunited on another, very different version of Go Leave, Peggy Seeger pops up singing Tell My Sister (also rather more grandly sung at a different point by Martha Wainwright) and Norah Jones forges an unlikely country partnership with Emmylou Harris on Fast As My Feet Can Carry Me. Emmy- lou is also involved in one of the most emotive performances of the whole set, majestically duetting with Rufus on I Eat Dinner.
The central core, though, is inevitably Rufus and Martha, both extreme performers who sharply divide opinion. Personally I’m a fan of both and to hear Martha singing Mata- pedia – a story song indirectly about her – and duetting with Rufus on First Born (Kate’s song about him) feels like a privilege.
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