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fRoots 61 : your free album


Our pick of the very best new stuff. Load it onto your iPod or computer or burn it to CD. Go get it!


small independent labels – that our writers get enthusiastic about in the pages of fRoots. Listen, then buy the original CDs!


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The Mekons featured on the very first free music item we ever gave away with this magazine – a flexi-disc some 30 years ago – and continue to be one of the UK’s finest roots-infused rock bands. Their wondrous new album (housed in a paperback book) was recorded in just one evening.


Mo’ Greekadelia! Kristi


Stassinopoulou & Stathis Kalyviotis pared everything right down for their first duo album after years with a band. This time they’ve taken a middle path for a fabu- lous new one that comments on the current situation in their battered country.


After many years of being struck down with dysphonia, the new album by one of the true icons of English folk is as mesmeris- ing as it was unexpected. Welcome back, Shirley Collins, and big thanks to Ian Kearey for the encouragement, production and playing on it.


Jim Moray has produced some of the inventive gems among English folk music albums this century, and they may all have been leading up to his new one Upcetera. If the launch concert in September was any- thing to go by, it’s a major live production too. Festivals take note!


With musicians from Sardinia, Russia and the Catalan region of Spain, all sorts of influences from traditional music to baroque, pop, jazz, minimalism and elec-


ere’s the latest in our long series of carefully crafted and sought-after compilations that are designed to let you hear the best music – mostly on


tronic experimentation, Piccola Orchestra Gagarin are among the most adventurous space explorers you’ll encounter!


Take one Scottish folk musician and one environmental and political activist who wrote a viral Guardian feature about loneli- ness, put them together and you get a grip- ping album of social commentary for today. Watch out for Ewan McLennan & George Monbiot’s live shows too.


British acoustic guitarists don’t get any more legendary that John Renbourn & Wizz Jones, so we are blessed that they had just finished an album together before John’s untimely death last year. Here they do a song by a mutual friend who also left us much too soon, the great Al Jones.


When the blind kamalé ngoni master


Vieux Kanté from Mali’s Wassoulou region died unexpectedly at age 31 in 2005, he was on the verge of being discovered interna- tionally. It turned out recently that he and his band had recorded an unreleased album for the local cassette market…


When English string wizard Martin


Simpson, brought up on old American roots music, got put together with ex-Car- olina Chocolate Drop and ‘American Song- ster’ Dom Flemons for a project, they got on like a house on fire with their enthusias- tically shared repertoires.


Maggie Holland’s songs have been recorded by the likes of June Tabor and Martin Carthy, but she’s kept a low perform- ing profile in recent years. Back in action this summer, her song about the More- cambe Bay tragedy has been wowing them on gigs: we have its first recording.


A capella trio Coope Boyes & Simpson are winding up their ten album career with


Coda, as gripping and sharp a collection of their beautifully rounded gems as any they’ve done. This traditional song about Bonaparte was collected from Sam Larner, but they make it unmistakeably their own.


Khartoum-born Alsarah is a New York-


based singer, songwriter and ethnomusicol- ogist from a family of human rights activists, now leading Alsarah & The Nubatones. Their self-styled ‘East African retro-pop’ explores themes of migration, home and cultural exchange.


Now ten years old, folk string quartet


Methera are part of the growing English new instrumental music movement that includes the likes of Leveret and Spiro. Lucy Deakin (cello), John Dipper & Emma Reid (fiddles) and Miranda Rutter (viola) make thrilling chamber folk at its best.


Indeed, it was Leveret’s Andy Cutting


who wrote Lady Grey for northern sextet The Shee, who are also celebrating their tenth anniversary at the moment. To mark it they have an album of music commissioned for them by individual members (in this case accordeonist Amy Thatcher).


Norwegian multi-instrumentalist Stein


Urheim recorded his third album Strande- barm in a church near where he lives. It includes his original interpretations of everything from a Norwegian fiddle tune to this setting of words by the great writer Kurt Vonnegut.


Paride Peddio & Jonathan Della


Marianna, who play diatonic accordeon and launeddas – the Sardinian mouth- blown bagpipe – respectively, are young Sardinian musicians steeped in local tradi- tion and bringing the energy and enthusi- asm of a new generation to it.


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