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If these were the only two good tracks I’d still be recommending it hugely, but we also get a rumbling, heart-tugging close-harmony version of the shanty Shallow Brown; a thoughtful Mary & The Soldier restrained enough to bat off comparisons to Paul Brady’s sprightly version; and an evocative take on Boo Hewerdine’s Harvest Gypsies, about migrant workers in depression-era America.


The prominence of the banjo – beautiful- ly played throughout by the lithe-fingered Aldridge – is key to the album’s informal charm, egged on by members of Teyr, giving more urgency to their more modern songs of social injustice, The Ballad Of Yorkley Court and a lively variant on the old Australian song Along The Castlereagh, once recorded by AL Lloyd. Almost inevitably their own original material pales slightly alongside such classic material, but it’s a fine line and this, their second album, deserves to propel them substantially further into public conscious- ness. jimmyandsidduo.com


Colin Irwin Mose Allison


ton, Elvis Costello and Bonnie Raitt, and his music influenced many more from the Stones to Hendrix, Tom Waits and beyond. Even his covers of blues classics by others, like Sonny Boy Williamson’s Eyesight To The Blind or Willie Dixon’s Seventh Son and I Love The Life I Live – all included here – became the iconic versions beyond the originals. He’s one of the ‘definites’ for my Desert Island Discs selection.


Five tracks that were anthologised on Mose Allison Sings are here, along with nine- teen other favourites from more than a dozen Prestige, Atlantic and Columbia albums covering the fourteen years in the subtitle. Excellently compiled and with exten- sive notes by Dean Rudland, and great remas- tered sound by Duncan Cowell, this is a fabu- lous testament to those early years and, if you’re new to him, as fine a belated introduc- tion to his work as you could ask for.


Whether inter-label muzikbiz politics could make a second volume possible with the best of his later works for Discovery, Elek- tra, Blue Note and Anti, I can’t imagine. For he went on from here to other, occasionally even greater things, especially in the ’80s and ’90s when he was creating things like Middle Class White Boy, Ever Since The World Ended and Ever Since I Stole The Blues. But start here and then you’ll want to track down those later ones too which, right now, are looking a bit pricey. They deserve this kind of treatment too.


www.acerecords.com Ian Anderson


JACK HARRIS The Wide Afternoon RootBeat RBRCD34


Jack Harris is credited with “vocals and guitar” for this, his third album but the first to cross my path. The all- encompassing “Everything else” is credited to Gerry Diver and since Diver has had his fingers in several pies that have engaged these


taste buds, that is some recommendation. Two pies in particular from his kitchen are Lisa Knapp’s Wild And Undaunted and Sam Lee’s Ground Of Its Own. The product of a crowdfunded project through Kickstarter, the promised album came with inducements for people pledging money, such as a signed and illustrated lyric sheet. The standard edition of The Wide Afternoon, as here, is a collection of eleven self-penned songs of intricacy and


deftness with signature touches. Lyrics are of the CD booklet kind. What is really pleasing about this word-hoard is that in this world blighted with a surfeit of songs, few of his songs set up situations where the listener can anticipate the content, rhyme or direction.


His engaging Molly Bloom is a shining example. It is a monologue that addresses the deliciousness in James Joyce’s Ulysses. It has an awareness that alludes to Molly Bloom’s soliloquy without getting self-consciously laboured or literarily weighted about mat- ters. As to end rhymes, the line “And would you confess under mild duress” beautifully sets up and then dodges the couplet’s ‘dress’ end rhyme with, “How many hands have lift- ed up your tresses?” Nothing untoward or extraneous gets in the way of the songs. They sing themselves. A most remarkable discovery for me and a man and a music I shall follow.


Hear a track on fRoots 62 rootbeatrecords.com


Ken Hunt


JIMMY ALDRIDGE & SID GOLDSMITH Night Hours Fellside FECD278


Any young(ish) musician attempting to master mighty ballads like Bonny Bunch Of Roses and Willie O’The Winsbury needs to be brave, foolhardy and/or incredibly good, given the long line of epic interpreta- tions by some of the folk


revival’s most celebrated names across the last half-century. But East Anglian duo Jimmy Aldridge and Sid Goldsmith – who may very well meet all three descriptions – had me at “By the margin of the ocean one pleasant evening in the month of June” and “The king has been a prisoner, a prisoner long in Spain”, the opening lines of each.


You might have thought June Tabor and Oysterband had taken possession and locked the key on Bonny Bunch Of Roses for a cou- ple of generations to come, but determined- ly forthright singing and an empathetic arrangement ushering in Dominic Hender- son’s wondrous uilleann pipes give it com- pelling intensity and freshness, while the unaccompanied opening and deceptively simple arrangement – lovely banjo at the helm – draw you imperiously into the tale of Willie O’The Winsbury.


TRIO DHOORE Momentum Appel Records


For those who witnessed or participated in it, the single most blissful moment of Sid- mouth Folkweek 2016 was the all-too-fleeting tunes ses- sion that spontaneously erupted late one night in the corridor of the Bedford Hotel. At its epicentre were three


Flemish brothers who, along with the likes of English musician Anna Rheingans, American Anna Roberts-Gevalt and Scots fiddler Carol Anderson, somehow transformed familiar folk melodies into joyously unified refutations of the odious Nigel Farage’s dreary visions of UK isolationism. Or, er, something…


Crikey. OK, so that was then, but how’s a CD listened to in splendid isolation going to fare now?


It turns out that Trio Dhoore’s third album is appositely-titled, as the Dhoore brothers (Koen – hurdy-gurdy, Hartwin – dia- tonic accordeon, Ward – guitar, mandolin) have honed their Franco-Belgian trad-based music into one of the folk scene’s most unas- sumingly euphoric acoustic sounds


Their primary intent is clearly evident in tracks like Endless Dancing, Transatlantic Groove (clunky title but an ecstatic melody), The Goodrich Tornado and Maasland Jig (a veritable ass-shaker of a tune that sounds like a Flemish relative of John Kirkpatrick’s Jump At The Sun).


Their supple musicianship is showcased in arrangements which take enough surpris- ing twists and turns to keep the listener’s attention, but not so many as to lose the focus of the tunes. Accordeon-led melodies gather momentum, breakdown into subtle guitar passages and build dynamic tension before the hurdy-gurdy propels everything forward again. It’s exhilarating stuff and, on Eb & Vloed, they show they’re capable of effective vocal harmonies too.


There’s a quality to Trio Dhoore’s music


that isn’t easily explainable in terms of tech- nique or arrangement for composition. It’s that mystical sibling hocus-pocus that we last identified and eulogised in The Rheingans Sisters Already Home. It’s also got a lot to do with their self-professed ‘rootedness’. For all its originality, virtuosity and complexity this music is fundamentally a bunch of beautifully simple tunes that demand and deserve to be danced to, rather than written about. So let’s get to it! Hear a track on fRoots 62.


triodhoore.com Steve Hunt


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