root salad f16 Urban Folk Quartet
Twin fiddles, oud, guitar, percussion and music from all over. Simon Jones finds they’re as good live as on paper.
“T
he thing is you see…” Joe Broughton scratches his head. “It’s hard to say this but I don’t think people
know what to make of us really,” he earnestly continues after a due pause.
He strokes his chin and gives a small laugh, a hopeful laugh, that his new aggregation the splendidly named Urban Folk Quartet, will be accepted for merely what they are, rather than what people think they could be or what the members have done in the past.
“ We all come from such varied back-
grounds,” offers percussionist Tom Chap- man, the sort of determined bloke who later this evening will wallop seven shades out of a wooden crate in order to create just the right bouncy sound for a set of Euro-reeling to dance delightfully around.
“We don’t do anything by the book, a bit like the old Incredible String Band, but without the hippie ideals and with far more idea of where we want to go,” oud player Frank Moon chips in, a man so casual yet serious in his musical ability that after much research and testing he plucks his lute with an old cable tie. I respect his opinion, though personally I’ll ditch the String Band comparison and leave the explanation to Joe’s twin fiddler Paloma Trigas, once to be found in com- pany with Galician piper Carlos Nuñez, “Our personalities mesh well together and the way we play is to come at what we do from different standpoints, we meet in somewhere in the middle.”
The middle is rather a thrilling place to be as I’m attending their sound check and warm up for a gig at a venue that’s almost second home to Joe Broughton. He’s trodden the boards here as part of The Albion Band, in duo with his brother
and Kevin Dempsey, as part of folk-based orchestras and now with perhaps his most wild ride yet. The Quartet excuse them- selves from the fRoots mini-disk and gath- er for a quick head-to-head about what to choose to flex their muscles. After a while Paloma gives a whoop and they’re away, Joe moving his fingers light as air across his strings and stomping round the stage, she matching him with equally deft strokes of the bow. Moon, his eyes closed, runs his oud as if he were Django Reinhardt lost in the souk. Mr Chapman is just impossibly funky, hands and feet knock out grooves so deep you wonder he doesn’t fall through the stage. They finish up all smiles and nods of satisfaction having trodden on the toes of convention, liberally mash- ing up reels with gypsy dance, Arabian flourishes, Latin beat and a certain dash of individual confidence.
It turns out their creation was named
35 (Ways To Dance To The News) and is pretty much representative of what they’re about.
Why 35 ways?
“That’s about all you can fit into the average news programme isn’t it? Forty would be a bit much!” Joe smirks.
Paloma to the rescue, “we have this song which Frank sings, Gamberro, which is about a cheeky musician who says he’s got one foot in Cuba, the other in Brazil and his head in Cuba. That pretty much sums us up, we’re all that and more.”
And you won an international roots competition with was it your second gig or something?
“Fourth actually. I mean we’d been booked to play at this Spanish festival. It was all jolly, we went over played some tunes, the crowd loved us but really we
thought nothing of it. So later on we’re sitting there enjoying the other acts and they announce the results of the competi- tion, we won! It nonplussed us really,” Joe relates. Terribly handy for the promotional side of things though.
T
“Another thing with The Quartet is that though we’ve been together for a year and a half it still feels like a new band,” Paloma continues. “Because we haven’t really done that much in Britain, a lot of people think we’ve only just started.”
heir debut album, niftily titled The Urban Folk Quartet, is quite a convincing statement of intent, issued by the good offices of
Fellside whose ears are definitely tuned in the right direction. “They loved the album when we played it to them and could see the potential right away,” says Joe.
And as if that wasn’t enough, plans for world domination also include a down- load-only live album, Live At The Grand, which is free, if you scoot over to their website sharpish.
“No matter how much you try, in a band like this with such diversity we can’t reproduce exactly what you hear on the album. The music’s organic,” Tom adds philosophy into the microphone, “we change the tunes every time we play them, that’s what keeps it on the edge…”
We’ll leave to yer man Broughton to have the last word, “Look, we’re going to work at this because it’s too good to give up. I want to roll my sleeves up and get this group moving. I believe that if we get this right TUFQ will make some phenomenal music.”
You know what? He could be right.
www.theurbanfolkquartet.com F
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