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the music of the Piedmont and deep South areas of the USA. He is particularly fond of the guitar styles of Elizabeth Cotten and Mis- sissippi John Hurt, and his own playing and singing is as delicately gentle as that of his inspirers. One of Thomas’s instrumental pieces is titled For Libba And John and else- where Echoes features covers of Cotten’s Freight Train and Hurt’s Louis Collins and Cre- ole Belle. The violin playing of Regina Mudrich adds flavour to these numbers as well as several other selections.


Using several different guitars, recorded in a controlled studio environment (by the excellent engineer Andre Klose who also made both the Shaka and Franklin live recordings), gives the album a nice tonal vari- ety. While there is nothing musically adven- turous or challenging here, Echoes proves very easy on the ear as it flows from one track to another, honest, straightforward and unpretentious. The accompanying booklet is enhanced by the inclusion of several of his own photographs taken during a road trip through North Carolina and Mississippi. Alto- gether a nice package.


www.blindlemonrecords.de Dave Peabody


COMPAGNIA SACCO DI CERIANA Tabulae Felmay fy8237


Ceriana is a small community in the moun- tains of Liguria above the main coast road from Nice to Genoa, not far inside Italy and the border with France. The tradition of singing the Latin religious texts of Easter to its own exquisite polyphonic harmonies goes back many years but was first formalised into a compagnia in 1926. Alan Lomax visited and recorded in 1954 but it was not until the late 1970s that the fame of this small choir began to spread and their compulsive sound was heard in the USA and across Europe.


Here there are seven male singers; a dis- tinctive lead voice supplemented by three tenors and three strong, booming bass voices that underpin all the singing and gives it the name ‘bordone’ that it is known by.


Clearly, this album is not one with a broad appeal but for anyone who likes to luxuriate in the sound of excellent traditional singers delighting in the contrapuntal harmonies that they are producing then this is for you.


Why is it that the large Mediterranean islands of Corsica and Sardinia and the French and Italian coasts to the north of them have such strong and persistent harmony singing traditions?


www.felmay.it Vic Smith SKANDERBAND


New Arbëreshë Albanian Music Cosmasola 201601


No, not – as the band name might suggest – Scandinavian, but Italo-Albanian music, and rather melodious and interesting it is.


At their nearest, Albania and SE Italy are only about 50 miles apart across the Adriatic, so it’s natural that there has been contact over the centuries. Indeed thousands of Alba- nian asylum seekers arrived in Italy in 1991, many by sea in overloaded ships. The Arbëreshë are descendants of earlier refugee Albanians who fled the gradual Ottoman conquest of Albania between the 15th and 18th Centuries and settled mainly in Calabria, Puglia and nearby regions of southern Italy.


Skanderband is a project, led by Michele Lobaccaro and involving about fifteen other instrumentalists and singers, including Alba-


London Klezmer Quartet


nian guests from Fanfara Tirana, which makes a new Italian-Albanian connection, drawing on the old Arbëreshë songs and traditional and new material from both countries.


Three women singers, all notable – Meli Hajderaj, Eleonora Bordonaro and Mimma Montanaro – front a line-up of clarinets, trumpet, accordeons, flute, piano, oud, harp, guitar, baglama, bass, percussion and drums. It’s a very attractive, cohesive and varied Adriatic blend of sobbing Albanian clarinet, asymmetric Balkan rhythms and spirited, sensitive singing, and with an inter- esting raison d’être. Given – as always – suf- ficient publicity, it could, and deserves to, reach a wide audience.


www.facebook.com/skanderband Andrew Cronshaw


LONDON KLEZMER QUARTET To The Tavern Ethnomusic LKQ004/ETM14


A Gleyzele Jaš / To The Tavern is striking: “I’m merry. Take my hands. My feet weave around in little circles. My soul is burning. I throw away the empty bottle and dance the sher.” This is the quietly meaningful destination that this superb klezmer group have been promising for a while, a promise of dance and understanding and interpreting arising from a brilliant sequence of records.


Borscht, a paean to a suitably sour soup, is beseeching: “So let’s get married, because I’m already old and grey! I’ll love you till the day I die.” The band follow vocalist Indra Buraczewska through extended and romantic despair. Authenticity and genre mastery have become standard aspects of LKQ releases and latterly, as here, Buraczewska’s sonorous and confident vocals have owned the constant flow of stories. The group’s fidelity to klezmer’s rich past has been consistently cou- pled with a subtle and forward-thinking experimentation. They have not eschewed the core concerns of klezmer, but they have unshowily expanded its world, having penned albums in and of London and Aus- tralia. This release, though, topically, is an unashamedly European album. Naturally.


“Food, drink and love” are the funda- mentals directly addressed. But there is also a deeper – and often metaphorical – examina- tion of klezmer’s preoccupations, in music steeped in dynamic character and linguistic faithfulness. The group demonstrate that there is nothing contradictory in pursuing the


celebratory and the mystical in the same breath or in the same bare bars. And so Sum- mertime Waltz is beguilingly drowsy, as it echoes the familiar, fragile and intricate.


This is contemporary klezmer, encom- passing familiar wedding music and dances while also reflecting upon cultural and per- sonal contexts and developing them into wide world modernity. It’s a record of uninhibited playing, of travelling from town to town, inn to inn, dismantling otherness and difference through singing, dance, humour and some- times emotionally wrought composition.


Goodbye New York is resolute: “Good-


bye New York, and wish me luck because I’m going home, I’m going back to Beryozevke.” There’s an appropriate hint of jazz and an anticipatory foreshadowing of accordeon. Reflective clarinet blends above a smoky new world into a nostalgic premise of a Central Europe that once was, maybe. The sounds of a Central Europe filtered through survival, migration, America, and London.


www.londonklezmerquartet.com John Pheby LORCÁN MAC MATHÚNA


The Arrows That Murder Sleep Lorcán Mac Mathúna LMM15001


The new album by renowned sean-nós and improvisational singer Lorcán Mac Mathúna is a collection of songs taken from ancient Celtic literature and mythology – particularly the epic story cycles: The Battle Of Clontarf and The Life Of Colmcille. A truly collabora- tive project, Mac Mathúna’s original vision is realised through the enlistment of Altan accordeonist Martin Tourish, Slide and Danú fiddler Daire Bracken, woodwind free- improviser Seán Mac Erlaine and experimen- tal artist and ‘extreme fiddling’ exponent Eoghan Neff.


Recorded live, without overdubs, these disparate musicians demonstrate extraordi- nary musical empathy both with each other and with the material. Contae Mhuigheo – an unaccompanied ballad concerning a Mayo man who becomes a pirate is immediately followed by Paddy Lynch’s Ship – an impro- vised, beautifully apt instrumental response. Sombre accordeon drones accompany the stately A Grey Eye, while fiddle notes flutter like small birds carried on the soft wind that moves the (clarinet and accordeon) reeds on Battle Lines, and Mac Erlaine’s clarinet enthrals on Love And Passing.


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