65 f Not before recording a couple of albums,
however. The first – Force Of Habit – was a live recording taken from their 1995 concerts, and they followed it in 1997 with the studio album Welcome To Hell. Neither sold in vast quantities nor attracted much interest; but now, without the weight of fashionable cir- cumstance weighing them down, time can view them more kindly through the re- emergence of both on this double CD.
Force Of Habit is fast and it’s furious and
JK’s vocals sound somewhat rough and unready on George’s Son and Seventeen Come Sunday, and they’re positively raucous rocking out in muddy blues territory on Blue Balloon, but there’s no disputing the strength and power they generate with a selection of formidable dance tunes, even if the audience do sound faintly underwhelmed.
The Welcome To Hell CD is a far more interesting proposition, however. Built around the quirkiness, humour and musical twists of JK’s title track, it is confident, accomplished, vigorous and positively bel- ligerent. Indeed, Graeme Taylor’s climactic electric guitar and Mike Gregory’s intense drumming make them sound radically differ- ent to the group who gave us Force Of Habit. In fact they sound so convincing you fondly imagine they might have held their own at the rock end of the folk rock divide if they’d actually had any money to do any gigs by then. We hear a version of Fields Of Gold that was surely instrumental in Sting’s bizarre conversion into a belated hero of the folk revival while the combination of Kirk- patrick’s more relaxed singing with his own chunky accordeon, some lovely flowing fid- dle from Burgess and the tempered aggres- sion of guitar and rhythm section on Lovely Nancy still sounds genuinely exciting.
Wrong place, wrong time, but it’s never too late to catch up.
www.johnkirkpatrick.co.uk Colin Irwin
DEN FULE Contrebande Kakafon KAKACD014
The path between Swedish polska and Sene- galese kora griot music was first blazed by fiddler Ellika Frisell and Casamance’s Solo Cis- sokho, their BBC World Music Award-winning duo now expanded to a trio with Mexican percussionist Rafael Sida Huizar for the new CD Now.
The surprisingly effective blending of traditions is spreading. Long-lived sax and flutes-fronted polska-jazz-Afro band Den Fule toured Senegal with Solo Cissokho and his sister Adama a year or so ago, then brought the project to Sweden for shows and recorded Contrebande.
It’s titled as a Den Fule album, but it should really be ‘Den Fule And Solo Cissokho’ since each of the tracks intertwines a compo- sition by Solo with one by either Den Fule’s (and Groupa’s) Jonas Simonson or famous Norwegian fiddler Hans W Brimi (1917-1998), and Solo sings or plays kora, or usually both, on all of them, with Adama joining for one.
The result is remarkably natural, touches of polska and halling melodies and rhythms gleaming out from what overall has a warm, rolling Senegalese feel. These are all flexible and very experienced musicians, with no-one trying to imitate the others’ music, just responding to it and making it a single band rather than band-plus-guest.
Den Fule’s line-up – Jonas Simonson on flutes, saxist Sten Källman, guitarist Henrik Cederblom, bassist Stefan Bergman and drummer Christian Jormin – hasn’t changed except that, as on their 2010 third album Halling I Köket which came after a sixteen- year break, they no longer have a singer or
There is the occasional frank sexuality – main- stream bluegrass is still prudish in that regard – plus hints of leftish political sympathies in the ballad Empire, on the collapse of a min- ing community.
Balancing the tried and true with the inventive and innovative, Della Mae shape an approach which even those who know their bluegrass, old-time, and folk generally will not have heard before. Whatever it is these young women are doing, it does not lack astonishment and joy.
www.dellamae.com Jerome Clark
INTAKAS Uliokim, Braliukai Kuku SMF 053
ARINUSHKA Rusu Liaudies Romansas Own label
LINAS RIMSA Old Faith Begantis Menulis BMCD-002
Den Fule
fiddler. Ellika Frisell and Ola Bäckström were the fiddlers in the 1990s; here guest fiddler Erika Risinger plays on a couple of tracks.
The final track has Canadian poet Sofia Baig speaking in English over a slow kora groove that’s musically fine, reminiscent of Alagi M’Bye and Knut Reiersrud’s Jarabe on the latter’s Tramp album, but her first-person poem Lame And Mute, while laudable in intent – a Muslim speaking about fear – is an addition that doesn’t really reach out and seize the ears with its meaning, on early lis- tens at least.
www.kakafon.com Andrew Cronshaw
DELLA MAE
This World Oft Can Be Rounder 11661- 9135-2
Among the most exciting acts on the current American roots scene, Della Mae is a five- woman string band based in Boston. Record- ed in Johnny Cash’s studio in suburban Nashville, produced by acoustic guitar wizard Bryan Sutton, This World Oft Can Be is their second album, their first on the powerhouse Rounder. It’s a triumph on every level. Consid- er, for example, the harmonies, at once celes- tial and grounded, out of the sweeter side of bluegrass singing. The songs, mostly originals written or co-written by lead vocalist Celia Woodsmith, are marvels of concise story- telling and emotional power.
When interviewed, Della Mae’s members declare theirs to be a bluegrass band, and one hesitates to dispute the claim of perform- ers so knowing and self-aware. Maybe blue- grass is indeed coming to this, something that, if once defined by its presence, can now eschew Scruggs-style banjo to explore other aspects of the genre tradition, notably its geography and its hard-driving rhythms. Though not exactly an old-time outfit, Della Mae are clearly versed – as not all blue- grassers are – in venerable Appalachian sounds, which they incorporate in sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle ways. If one hears a banjo (as on the terrific title tune and else- where), it’s likely to be played in the pre- bluegrass clawhammer fashion.
The sensibility is a modern one, however, with a feminist underpinning in its celebra- tion of the lives of admirable but un-famous women (Maybeline on the current disc, Sweet Verona on the earlier I Built This Heart).
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Ethnosphere – A New Life of Traditions Sutaras SMF DVD 003
Here are three CDs and a DVD from a country not much written about here in fRoots – Lithuania. One of them, if given the right exposure, would probably pick up a lot of international interest.
Rytis Ambrazevicius, leader of Lithuani- an male vocal trio Intakas and a professor at Kaunas University of Technology and the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, writes in the notes to their CD Uliokim, Bral- iukai: “From our vantage point in the recording studio we gaze from afar at the pure and genuine vitality of these songs with a pleasing nostalgia that is hard to explain. There and then, the faces start to fade, yet the eyes are surprisingly full of life and depth, making the stories inexhaustible and everlasting. Then the distance becomes personalised: the songs, like objects, belong to a particular ‘him’ or ‘her’.”
It’s an expression of the universal dilem- ma for those who love and want to sing the old songs but are no longer in the village. He continues, “Sometimes an even greater mira- cle occurs – when it is not we that sing, but they sing by making use of us. We remain on the sidelines, as spectators.”
Of course, that’s one relationship, of singer to song, but there’s another: that of listener to CD. Are we drawn in, or just wit- nesses? How can one make a recording that reaches out to people?
Intakas takes the straight, set-of-songs path, delivering 23 traditional Lithuanian war, wedding, haymaking, drinking and emigrants’ songs, their three resonant male voices in unaccompanied call-and-response and harmony.
www.sutaras.lt
Arinushka, a Russian folklore ensemble from Lithuania’s capital Vilnius, formed in 1998 and is connected with the School of Tra- ditional Slavic Music. It takes the large-folklore- ensemble approach, the strong voices of up to fourteen men and women using the hard- edged ‘white voice’ in arranged Russian songs, sung with rough, rousing gusto, accompa- nied on some tracks by instruments including accordeon, violin, guitar and balalaika.
The rural-work-costumed stage presenta - tion and probably the audience of ensembles such as this hasn’t changed much since Soviet times, but it’s a rather fine, stirring noise.
www.arinuska.lt
Arinushka does, however, get involved in collaborations. One is with Lithuanian pro-
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