63 f SHE’KOYOKH
Wild Goats & Unmarried Women Riverboat Records TUGCD1080
There’s a tension in opening medley, Bere- govski Sher / Honga / Freilicher Yontov, between a smooth café-orchestra take on standards and a profound percussion-driven originality. A little later, in Hora De La Munte, Zivorad Nikolic’s febrile accordeon and simple stark patterns picked out on guitar and violin, splinter and sway us quietly back to an earlier tradition. Throughout the album, in fact, this is the story of a restless band who keep tak- ing in the next horizon, and the next one, becoming one of the more unpredictable of klezmer ensembles in the process, but also achieving a rare majesty of sound.
Such wandering, of course, is authentic. For fourteen years now, the various band members have journeyed, collected, studied, experimented and honed through a myriad of other projects and skills and influences and countries, reconvening every few years to spark. Last time out, on the assured and excit- ing Buskers’ Ballroom album, their influences were confined more or less to the music of east and south-east Europe, stretching histor- ically and culturally into the traditional music of Turkey, this latter further explored here, with real verve, in the oddly serious goat- inspired dances of Teke Zortlatmasi.
This is a deeper and stranger journey than the band have attempted before, fea- turing a preoccupation with spirit in a con- stantly wide-eyed adventure. There’s manouche and menace in the Romanian Tiganeasca De La Pogoanele, for example, while the desperate Greek lament, Selanik Türküsüis, a love song about illness and immi- nent death, ranges, as it should, from a fraught quietude to a primal clarinet wail, Çi˘gdem Aslan’s cracked and elegiac vocals caught in a perfectly honest moment.
Location is much more than a place for She’Koyokh, and the band are a convergence point for the wandering wedding musics of the world. After numerous extra-curricular projects, including Susi Evans playing through a brace of atmospheric albums by her other band, London Klezmer Quartet, and a set of storming reviews for Aslan’s luminous rebetiko release a few months ago, comes this smouldering record. The whole is an unsentimental but graceful deconstruction of the familiar, allied to emotional and story- telling vocals and inquisitive and daring play- ing, through waltz and high drama, almost into revelation.
www.worldmusic.net
John Pheby She’Koyokh
BOTH MIKLÓS FOLKSIDE Csillagfészek Fono FA 280-2
In his astute reviews of the 2011 Womex per- formances, Nick Hobbs quite rightly bemoaned the lack of discernible “heart” dis- played by the acts showcased in the ‘Hungari- an Heartbeats’ opening concert, before going on to suggest that the whole was even a “trav- esty” of the raw and vital Carpathian folk and blues that he had fallen for many years before.
Entirely valid criticism. And since 2011, matters in Hungarian traditional music have become even more confusing, perhaps even worrying. While world famous classical artists and literary figures have voiced their con- cerns about developments in their country, there has been near silence from folk musi- cians. Taking advantage of this silence, the extreme right have appropriated whole swathes of folk music to announce new defi- nitions of nationalism and exclusivity. The heart might have gone.
Miklós Both and his formidable band (including the exceptional Miklós Lukács on driving cimbalom, Balázs Szokolay whipping up storms on a variety of Carpathian wind instruments, and the always in-demand Andras Des on percussion) went down partic- ularly well with the audience that evening at Womex. And this is their debut, a strange, syrupy and often beautiful record. These are the sounds that result from a childhood immersed in traditional music, while also growing up in a country where punk never really dealt with prog.
There’s a truly cavernous production in
opener, Kelj Fel Napom, wherein satisfying cimbalom bursts lead into some heavy fun power chords and a chaotic clash of fantastic soloing and oddly anaemic vocals. More inter- esting is the delicate guitar and distant plain- tive piano on Kövek Között, evoking an ele- mental melancholy before morphing into more rocking guitar solos. The traditional Juhászkutyák Ugatnak, meanwhile, a tragic tale of finding oneself with “neither bread nor salt nor wife”, is both energetic and inventive, if lacking the inspired pyrotechnics of Both’s work with Rendhagyo Primastalalkozo.
While he claims to be influenced by both Bartók and Hendrix, he fails on this album to channel the essential wildness of either. He does, though, succeed in marrying the folk sensibilities of Transylvanian Hungarians and Hungarian Roma, surely making him an important musical player in the years to come, in terms of dissolving boundaries and restating commonalities.
www.fono.hu John Pheby
Photo: Pierre Marcar
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