57 f LEMON NASH


Papa Lemon: New Orleans Ukulele Maestro & Tent Show Troubadour Arhoolie Records CD 546


Recorded between 1956 and 1961 by both New Orleans jazz archivist Richard B Allen and FolkLyric Records founder Dr Harry Oster, this collection of songs and interview material is truly extraordinary stuff. Having first picked up the ukulele around 1915 during the Hawaiian music craze, Nash hit the road with a medicine show in the early 1920s, hawking Royaline Blood Tonic for an Indian Chief and a legless cowboy(!) and travelled with various circuses. With the exception of two stints on the railroad, an eight-year stretch with the merchant marine, and some time spent work- ing out of Nashville with a nine piece band, Papa Lemon spent the better part of 50 years playing blues, jazz, ballads, popular tunes or whatever else it took to earn a tip the streets and barrooms of New Orleans.


While much of the material is familiar – Sweet Georgia Brown, Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out, Stagolee, Big Rock Candy Mountain, the performances are anything but as Nash’s idiosyncratic, good- natured vocal delivery, phenomenal uke play- ing and the placing of each piece in context render every performance fresh and exciting.


With extensive biographical notes by Adam Machado and some terrific period pho- tographs, this is an absolute must-have for any ukulele players interested in the blues and further proof that pretty much nobody covers “the old, weird America,” as consis- tently well as Arhoolie Records.


www.arhoolie.com Steve Hunt


WILSON & SWARBRICK Lion Rampant Shirty SHIRTY4


Jason Wilson & Dave Swarbrick’s Lion Rampant is, on the face of it, a strange pairing. A stripped-back version of it featuring Dick Gaughan, Pee Wee Ellis, Dave Swarbrick, Fras- er Anderson and Jason Wilson was staged at Celtic Connections in January. It could never be the full monty that Lion Rampant delivers. Wil- son is a Scottish-Canadian reggae artist. Swar- brick is a musician so embedded in the British folk scene that it would take the cultural for- ceps of extreme prejudice to surgically remove him and his influence. Lion Rampant is far more than the sum of its parts.


One factor that sets Lion Rampant apart is the collective’s daringly quixotic mix-and- matchings. Red Rose Medley audaciously segues between Roberts Burns and Marley – from My Love Is Like A Red Red Rose to No Woman, No Cry – with the Bevvy Sisters (Lind- sey Black, Heather Macleod and Kaela Rowan) in close vocal support. Their adrenalin-rush take on Alistair Hulett’s Among Proddy Dogs And Papes from his 1992 album Dance Of The Underclass is a revela- tion while the short snatch of War Down A Monkland (“one of Jamaica’s first rebel songs” stated to be from Walter Jekyll’s 1907 volume Jamaican Song And Story) leads per- fectly into Damascus, the album’s master- piece manipulation of any number of musical building blocks. Over the course of reworking Sandy Denny (John The Gun), Richard Thomp- son (Why Must I Plead?), Ewan MacColl (The Fish Gutters Song) and Dick Gaughan (Sail On), with Lion Rampant Wilson & Swarbrick create an entirely self-contained musical world that reaches out insidiously and per- suasively. Head and shoulders, the most eclec- tic, catholic and coherent musical banquet of 2014 thus far. Toppling unlikely.


www.properdistribution.com/ Ken Hunt Malawi Mouse Boys


MALAWI MOUSE BOYS Dirt Is Good IRL IRL084


Big success doors opened last year for the musical barbecued fieldmice sellers of south- east Africa, and they showed themselves more than up to it. They made their first-ever plane trip to play Womad and were a mighty success. They sold more CDs than any other act at the festival.


Their first album – He Is #1 – was what started it all. Plucked from roadside obscurity by producer Ian Brennan, the human feeling generated by their gospel vocals and home- made guitars was infectious, soulful. Here on their second album the sound remains home- spun, but there’s a wider range of rhythm and feeling. Unchanged are the lovely vocals and the basic skiffle-jive momentum. But there are growling electric guitars, hilarious auction-shouting gobbledook, a good deal of whistling, and a sawed instrument with a sad, small sound somewhere between a fiddle and a mouth organ.


Resources are small, but it is remarkable how much diversity the Mouse Boys manage – lots of short tracks maintain interest. But these men are salesmen, after all. This is not an album that asks to be patronised. It stands up for itself.


www.facebook.com/MalawiMouseBoys Rick Sanders


ERIC BIBB Jericho Road Dixiefrog DFGCD 8750


Eric Bibb’s ability to write excellent songs that fuse a contemporary sensibility with older styles continues unabated. Jericho Road has one great song after another running in a continuous stream throughout, many co-writ- ten by the album’s producer/mixer Glen Scott who is also responsible for the album’s plat- inum quality. This is Eric’s most pristine recording to date, every vocal, every instru- ment, every note perfectly recorded and placed precisely in the album’s biospheric realm. As Eric has gained popularity and suc- cess he’s been able to call upon better techni- cal facilities and virtually any musician he would like to record with, which has led to a broadening of his musical base and to some serious creative collaborations like his 2011 duo album with guitarist Staffan Astner, Troubadour Live.


However, at too many points, Jericho


Road feels like a step too far with all its stu- dio wizardry and the sheer number of musi- cians obscuring the purity of Eric’s excellent


music. When Eric lets his music breathe it’s magic, but even a beautifully simple song like They Know, which starts with just Eric and his acoustic guitar, gets swamped with the arrival of an arranged string section. Oddly, the bonus track that concludes the album doesn’t even feature Eric at all but has kora player Solo Cissokho performing his own piece Nani- bali… its purity shines like gold in the sun.


Dave Peabody.


LATCHO DROM, PARNO GRASZT & ETNO ROM Paris Budapest Caravane Frémeaux FA 595


This is not a sonic adventure into authenticity, but a sinuous and tenuous songline between traditions. Three of Europe’s finest Roma music ensembles – Latcho Drom’s French swing, the Olàh traditions of Hungary’s Parno Graszt and the wider continental drift of Etno Rom – meet up, with all of their innate bril- liance and instinctive understanding.


We last met Christophe Lartilleux’s Latcho Drom on the belatedly released but excellent concert album, Live 2001. Here, his reconfigured band are the driving force behind what started out as a music residency, under his artistic direction, through the Orange Bleue Project. At the time it was all about research, experiment and tentative col- laboration. But here, nevertheless, is an album and accompanying international tour.


So it was a successful project and is a strangely insidious listen, as Lartilleux appears to dominate proceedings, linking these disparate and far-flung traditions and songs with his blazing guitar, diverting what might otherwise have been showy and chaotic soloing. There are even echoes and revivals of his previous signatures, though this time around Aurélien Trigot and others bring an often crystalline subtlety to the vio- lin, a contrast with Florin Niculescu’s robust, dominant, exhausting and brilliant playing on the previous release.


Three great bands convolute around Lar-


tilleux’s lead, excelling in the interaction, from the full swing guitar panoply and story- telling declamations of Ez A Vilag Nekem Valo, through the jagged and suspenseful series of introductions in the traditional Jaj Devla Mamo, a high point of Parno Graszt’s pensive first half dominance. As a band asso- ciated, for three decades now, with a timeless rural aesthetic, the isolation of being a small- er aspect in this intimate new context has forced a fascinating restraint onto their usu- ally expansive playing.


Photo: Judith Burrows


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