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fRoots 50
Lefter field than some, which is odd as it contains five trad ballads. Stick it in your iPod or computer or burn it to a proper CD –we give you the insert artwork in the download folder. Go get it!
H
ere’s the 50th in our long series of carefully crafted and sought-after compilations. They’re designed to let you hear the music – mostly on
small independent labels – that our writ- ers get enthusiastic about in the pages of fRoots. Mainstream radio and press largely ignores the majority of this, so we urge you to support the artists and labels by buying the original CDs.
A multi-cultural band based in
Switzerland, Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp are thrilling both live and in the studio, where they’re produced on their new album by John Parish. They described their music as “tropical post- punk” or “afro-avantpop”. That’ll do!
Another multi-cultural band, this time based in France (we think), Moriarty’s new album Fugitives takes the dusty ghosts of songs from old Americana, from Blind Willie McTell to Hank Williams, and reimagines them somewhere else in the musical universe.
You can’t fail with Fernhill: the guitar of Ceri Rhys Matthews, the fiddle and voice of Christine Cooper, the trumpet of Tomos Williams, and fronting it all the glo- rious voice of Julie Matthews, a deeply underrated international treasure. Wales is, we’re sure, rightfully proud of them.
Is it really nearly 30 years since
Toumani Diabaté first graced the UK with his extraordinary kora playing? (Yes it is: read elsewhere this issue!) And is he possibly the best in the world? It’s a good theory. And is his son Sidiki catching up fast? Quite possibly. A dynasty in action.
If you’re dismayed by the acres of tweeness abounding on the UK folk scene right now, then Stick In The Wheel may well be your new favourite band. Putting the rawness and energy back into tradi- tional songs, just don’t call them punk folk because that would be stupid, frankly.
Hopefully you’ll have read Andy Mor-
gan’s excellent feature about Egypt’s Nuba Nour last issue. Their Nubian cul- ture was displaced by the building of the Aswan Dam back in the 1950s, and now they’re proudly fighting to keep it alive in the big cities.
Take some musician alumni of Circulus, a vocalising Belle Of London City and a tra- ditional song made beloved by Shirley Collins and you’ve got The Lords Of Thyme. Add an exclusive remix of said song by legendary engineer John Wood and you’re lucky, lucky readers.
Multi-instrumental Breton trio
BivOAc meet up with a quartet of jazzers on their new album ✩✩✩✩, with excellent results. Thus accordeons and fiddles joust with brass and percussion and the whole thing has big band swing that’s a distant Breton cousin to La Bottine Souriante.
First came the splendid Rails (no track from them, they’re on a major) and now Jim Moray & Sam Carter’s noisy new pro- ject False Lights. See, folk rock can still work if it’s made by people who aren’t in thrall to the 1970s. See them make their debut at Folk East in August.
Benyoro are a fantastic Malian band based in New York. Their guitar and ngoni playing leader Sam Dickey is a native American, but he’s lived in Mali and was
taught by Djelimady Tounkara and Toumani Diabaté. Add great singer Yacou- ba Sissoko from Kita and it’s all win.
The Bonny Moorhen was one of the firing-on-all-cylinders standouts of the recent tour by this very issue’s cover stars Martin & Eliza Carthy. It’s about an 1818 fight over the black grouse, between starving leadminers and thugs with attack dogs sent by the landowners. So there!
Put together from a stash of previous- ly unreleased 1960 tapes by blues guitarist/ singer Smoky Babe, the album that Arhoolie Records have just released is an extraordinary thing that both thrills and leaves you wondering why so little is known about the man who made it.
Guitarist/ singer Greg Russell and fid-
dler Ciaran Algar (they both double on other instruments) won the BBC Young Folk Award in 2013 and the Horizon Award in 2014. Fellside Records launched Spiers & Boden at the turn of the century and now have another exceptional duo.
It’s nearly a quarter of a century since Noura Mint Seymali’s stepmother, the great Dimi Mint Abba, graced the cover of fRoots as the first Mauritanian artist we ever featured. Now, with her husband Jeiche Ould Chighaly on guitar, Noura takes the tradition onwards.
Mórga have an unashamedly vintage sound, harnessing the energy and drive of the great bands of the 1920s with a taste for unusual tunes. They combine the abili- ties of four of today’s leading Irish tradi- tional instrumentalists. Their website says that and, unusually, it’s absolutely true!
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