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THE OWL LIGHT TRIO Owl Light Owl Light Trio
The Owl Light Trio are Jane Griffiths on fiddle and viola, Colin Fletcher on guitar and Jim Penny on concertina. Indi- vidually, they’ve served with the likes of Tim Van Eyken, Duotone and Red Dog Green Dog, but it’s their collective work as the core instrumen-
talists within the late and much-lamented Telling The Bees that really cemented their reputations. An amiable and unassuming bunch, they describe their musical process thus: “We take good tunes to pieces and put them back together again. Sometimes the insides end up on the outside.” It’s an approach that’s become increasingly familiar on the UK folk scene since Lau first scared the donkeys on Sidmouth beach a decade ago. The Owl Light Trio’s instrumental arsenal and their fondness for a Scottish tune or two (Mike Vass’s Cavers Of Kirkcudbright and Niall Kenny’s Trip To Pakistan both appear here) invite superficial comparisons with Talisk, but closer inspection reveals a very different beast.
Anna & Elizabeth ANNA & ELIZABETH
The Invisible Comes To Us Smithsonian Folkways SFW40229
Ah, ‘the difficult third album’. We all know how that story’s supposed to go, right? It’s taken Anna & Eliz- abeth six years (and the 550 miles between Cedar Springs, Virginia and New York City) to get here, but this sounds like the place
they’ve been headed toward the whole time.
For this album (their first for the venera- ble Smithsonian Folkways label) the dynamic duo have enlisted the services of Dirty Three drummer Jim White and pedal steel voyager Susan Alcorn (whose occasional collaborators include fellow travellers of the musical outer- verse like Pauline Oliveros, Eugene Chad- bourne and Mike Cooper) along with some cunningly-deployed brass, woodwinds and synthesisers.
Anna’s enthusiastic integration into New
York’s experimental and improvised music community has clearly been a liberating experience. Always a highly accomplished musician, here she and co-producer Benjamin Lazar Davis subtly wreathe the songs in lov- ingly-crafted and surprising soundscapes. Elizabeth’s still that extraordinary traditional singer who first bedazzled us with Rain And Snow back in 2004, but her willingness to explore these old song texts within a new, contemporary context has resulted in perfor- mances in which she sounds somehow even more authentically connected to her materi- al. This time it’s personal.
Always scrupulous collectors and researchers (they spent a whole year in col- lecting these songs) Anna & Elizabeth credit both their source singers and and their sonic influences as equally important. The latter category includes the likes of Laurie Ander- son, Patti Smith and Meredith Monk. (Interest- ingly, Monk is also acknowledged by English singer composer Kerry Andrew on the similar- ly-configured and contemporaneous You Are Wolf album Keld – also reviewed in this issue).
This is an album of traditional songs on which each track offers the listener some- thing uniquely satisfying – from Black Eyed Susan’s minimalism to Ripest Of Apples’ more conventional rock structure and from Irish Patriot’s jazz saxophone textures to Virginia Rambler’s fractured drumming. The bowed
drones behind Farewell To Erin are reminis- cent of Lankum (another acknowledged influ- ence) while Woman Is Walking is just a lovely high and lonesome thing. By The Shore is a piece of storytelling with overlapping spoken word and sung passages that is strange, hyp- notic and beautiful.
It turns out this isn’t ‘the difficult third album’ at all. It’s a straight-up masterpiece.
annaandelizabeth.com Steve Hunt
ZANMARI BARÉ Voun Cobalt/Buda 860304
The name Zanmari Baré may be a new one, but the style in which he plays, maloya, the mournful, minimalist blues of Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean, could well be familiar to regular readers, thanks to the acclaimed recordings of the genre’s best-known
exponent, Danyel Waro who, it would appear, is something of a mentor to Baré.
A bit of rooting about on the net reveals
that Baré’s been making music since the 1980s. Waro took him under his wing more recently and this is (I think) his second album. It sounds a lot like Waro, only even more so. Maloya is a music of gentle yearning and sim- plicity. Mostly just heartfelt Creole lyrics deliv- ered by passionate call-and-response vocals over understated percussion. Much of what’s on offer here is so minor key as to make Waro’s output sound like Knees Up Mother Brown by comparison (I exaggerate for comic effect only slightly).
Baré is accompanied by five other musi- cians who mostly provide harmony singing and that signature pattering percussion. The one blot on this perfect roots music landscape is the title track, a nine-minute piano ballad that sounds as though it’s wandered in from an entirely different, more saccharine, more middle-of-the-road recording. The rest is all sweet ache and swing.
But don’t take my word for it. Have a lis-
ten to In Sor, the track from the album included on the compilation free with this issue and I’m sure you’ll hear what I’m get- ting at.
labelcolbalt.com Jamie Renton
The Oxford trio don’t share their Scots counterparts’ propensity for speed and showmanship, but instead tend to explore tunes from every conceivable (and some inconceivable) angle at their leisure. Lucy Farr’s (one of those simple-yet-perfect tunes that’s long been a personal favourite) pro- vides a good case in point. Initially delivered dead straight, it subtly mutates via barely- perceptible harmonic alterations to all-out realignment. Coming Home is a gorgeous Griffiths fiddle tune enhanced by Fletcher’s light-as-a-feather jazz chordings, while Penny’s intriguingly-titled The Politician, The Lighthouse & The Trained Cormorant is espe- cially joyful and uplifting.
Swathed in a CD cover painting by cellist chum Barney Morse-Brown, Owl Light is a fine CD album of beautifully-crafted music that is both memorable and clever.
owllighttrio.com Steve Hunt HEDY WEST
From Granmaw And Me Fledg’ling FLED 3106
The mark that American musician Hedy West left on the British folk scene war- rants re-evaluation and exe- gesis. In terms of impact and influence on the British scene, off the top of my head, the only expat Ameri- can musician who ever
exceeded her is Peggy Seeger – herself a great admirer of West’s music making and command of American folkways. Factor in her importance for the West German folk scene, whether through her appearances at the Burg Waldeck Festivals or her Bear Family recorded legacy, and you have an expat musi- cian of incomparable European importance. Hedy West’s principal output was released on Vanguard and Topic. Other LPs came out on Fontana (with Martin Carthy accompanying) and, as mentioned, Bear Family.
The left-field From Granmaw And Me is a truly important addition to her body of work. It is all the more welcome because its very existence was seemingly unknown or forgotten outside the family. Hedy West her- self sets the scene in the booklet notes: “My grandmother [the granmaw of the title], Lil- lie Etta Mulkey West, narrates this recording, and she chose its songs. The setting is Gilmer County, Georgia, where my grandmother was born in 1888…”
Photo: Brett Winter Lemon
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