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JOSIE DUNCAN & PABLO LAFUENTE
The Morning Tempest Oakridge Records JDPL2018CD
This is the debut album from 2017’s BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Award winners. Glas- gow-based singer Josie Dun- can and guitarist Pablo Lafuente hail originally from the Isle of Lewis and Spain. Josie’s clear, youthful voice has an ingenuous,
innocent quality that lends itself well to the (mostly) Scottish traditional songs she per- forms here, such as the Night Visiting Song and Thug Mi’n Oidhche. Pablo’s guitar accompaniment is always empathetic with the mood of the vocal. The album features distinctive contributions from guest musi- cians Graham Rorie (mandolin, fiddle), Rufus Huggan (cello), Robbie Greig (fiddle), Conal McDonagh (whistles), Charlie Stewart (dou- ble-bass), David Foley (bodhrán), Neil Paton (percussion), Colin MacLeod (vocal), Hedley Benson (flugelhorn).
The traditional Gaelic Uamh An Oir has a soft, limpid vocal with sensitive guitar accompaniment, with a particularly relaxed and intimate rapport between the two – per- haps because this track was recorded live. Josie brings out the full sweetness of the melody, and Pablo counterpoints it beauti- fully on guitar.
Potato Puirt is a mouth-music set that starts at medium pace with crystalline vocal delivery, gentle guitar accompaniment and a loping percussive pulse. The set accelerates into the final tune, with crisp, bright vocal, rhythm guitar, fiddle and bodhrán. It is refreshing to hear a puirt-à-beul set that isn’t over-fast, over-arranged or over-accompanied.
Josie Duncan & Pablo Lafuente
The Glow Of The Kerosene Light features inspired cello and fiddle accompaniment that conjures the sense of a wistful, warm kerosene-lit darkness that is the song’s pre- dominant image.
But the standout track on the album is
He Fades Away, a powerful love-lament that takes the perspective of the wife of a miner who is dying of asbestosis. The words and melody are deeply moving. I didn’t expect anyone would ever match Paul McKenna’s version of this song, but Josie and Pablo have recorded a beautiful arrangement of it, with a sweet, tender vocal and a caressingly deli- cate guitar accompaniment. In a masterly touch, flugelhorn and cello join in midway through the song – like the ghostly echo of a colliery band. And, for the song’s closing cho- rus, the vocal, cello and flugelhorn come together in a plangent final requiem.
josiepablomusic.com Paul Matheson VARIOUS ARTISTS
Big Bend Killing: The Appalachian Ballad Tradition Great Smoky Mountains Association 200973
Produced for the non-profit organisation, the Great Smoky Mountains Association, this beautifully-realised two-CD package is the brainchild of Ted Olson, Appalachian scholar, poet, musician and Professor of Appalachian Studies and Bluegrass, Old-Time, and Country Music Studies at East Tennessee State Univer- sity. Olson’s extensive booklet essay earned him a well- deserved Grammy nomination for Best Album Notes, and Michael Mullan’s illus- trations make this an appealing package. There’s a really strong selection of artists drawn from the overlapping fields of folk, country and old-time music, with Rosanne Cash the most widely- known name here, clos- ing both discs – with Bar- bara Allen and The Part- ing Glass.
CD1: Old World Bal-
lads opens and closes with different versions of the Mama of ’em all Bar- bara Allen, and features performers from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Scots singer Archie Fisher supplies the most surprising (and very welcome) tracks with Thomas The Rhymer and Tam Lin – both record- ings sourced from a pre- viously unreleased 1998 BBC Radio 3 broadcast. England’s Simpson Cut- ting Kerr bring their impressive instrumental firepower to bear on The Sheffield Apprentice and Willie Taylor while Jody Stecher & Kate Brislin’s Eggs And Marrowbones is playful and hypnotic.
CD2: New World
Ballads includes the likes of Pretty Polly and John Henry (both performed by rapidly-rising star Amythyst Kiah), Knoxville Girl, Banks Of The Ohio, Tom Dula and Wreck Of The Old 97. One of the most notable features of this collection is the abun- dance of tremendous unaccompanied women singers. Sheila Kay
Adams is exquisite on Lord Thomas And Fair Ellender, while her younger cousin Donna Ray Norton delivers a hair-raising Mathy Groves and The Devil’s Curst Wife. Virginia singer Carol Elizabeth Jones contributes fine performances of Barbry Allen and Lord Bate- man and Alice Gerrard and Elizabeth LaPrelle are expectedly magnificent on The Bold Lieutenant and West Virginia Mine Dis- aster, respectively.
Professor Olson’s project provides both an accessibly well-researched insight into the past and present role of the ballad in Appalachian cultural life and a hugely enjoy- able collection of well-loved ballads by some of the form’s finest exponents.
smokiesinformation.org Steve Hunt
JYOTSNA SRIKANTH, MATS EDÉN, DAN SVENSSON & PÄR MOBERG Nordic Raga Riverboat TUGCD1108
A fusiony, grant-getting on-paper concept project – that’s how it might appear from the title. But not so; this is magnificent, played by musicians who really know what they’re doing, music with a real focus.
In the opener Mats Edén’s viola d’amore on the left of the stereo bows slow winding phrases, Jyotsna Srikanth’s fiddle on the right answers in keening, Carnatic style while in the centre Pär Moberg’s soft soprano sax and deep low sax enter. The viola d’amore picks up tempo into Edén’s wild, double-stopped halling Vildhonung (Wild Honey), the d’amore’s deep pitch and ringing sympathetic strings giving it a rich density of sound, as Dan Svensson’s big single-headed hand-drums boom and splashing, jingling metals clash. The Carnatic fiddle takes an ecstatic raga break, before all return to the halling.
It makes so much sense, and so does the whole album. There are high, cascadingword- less vocals from Svensson, shifting, edgy fid- dle drones, solkattu vocal raga mnemonics, traditional Swedish dance tunes meeting the shapes and twists of raga as if they were made for one another.
The quartet was put together by multi- percussionist and vocalist Svensson (of ensembles often praised in fR reviews, includ- ing Alla Fagra, Tarabband, Yölariis, and with Emilia Amper), and saxist and flautist Moberg, whose brilliant soprano sax soars over or sits right in the middle of the dance tunes, tracking, harmonising or counterpoint- ing with the fiddles or, in Srikanth’s composi- tion Folk Dreams, deeper saxes multitracking with percussive honk and velvety depth- plumbing lines, switching in Slängpolska Efter Munkberg to breathy wooden whistles and harmonica. I saw him in masterly duet with Norwegian accordeonist Jo Asgeir Lie at the first Vaka festival in Iceland, but generally Moberg is not as famous outside Sweden, or even perhaps in it, as he deserves.
To make this perfectly-balanced quartet they invited UK-resident Bangalore-born virtu- oso of the Carnatic violin Srikanth, and on viola d’amore Edén, a musician and composer who’s been hugely influential in Sweden’s folk music for decades in Groupa and much else. All three Swedes have clearly long absorbed a lot of Indian music, and Srikanth’s facility with Swedish tunes is flawless and spirited. There are no cultural collisions, just empathy, mas- tery and sense of shared direction.
It’s powerful, subtle, glorious and, indeed, culturally significant.
worldmusic.net Andrew Cronshaw
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