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fRoots 55 : 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!

H

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

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

Greek singer and lafta player Martha

Mavroidi has already provided some killer music to previous fRoots compilations (and graced our cover, and our Bridges concert) but here she’s teamed up with legen- dendary violinist Stathis Koukoularis from the island of Naxos. Up the Greeks!

We probably don’t need to tell you very much about the individual CVs of Martin Simpson, Andy Cutting and Nancy Kerr unless you’ve been hiding in the back of a wardobe for the previous three or four decades. As Colin Irwin said, some super- groups are more super than others!

“Shooglenifty invented a new and spellbinding way of playing Highland music as a groove-based entity. The band contin- ues to blaze a trail of ‘acid-croft’ that no others can touch,” says their Bandcamp page, which is a bit like saying Stephen Hawking is quite good at science…

Of mixed Algerian and Italian parent-

age, Faris grew up interested in the old country blues players. Then he went on a quest to immerse himself in the Saharan (maternal) side of his roots, until the light- bulb switched on to tell him to put the hand of one into the glove of the other…

Just before the sudden, unexpected death of guitar legend John Renbourn this year, he completed assembling and writing notes for a wonderful album of home and

live recordings from his earliest days, which is due for release by Riverboat Records in the autumn. Here’s an exclusive taster…

And while we’re quoting Bandcamp

pages, Bristol’s “Heg & The Wolf Chorus are an exciting blend of folk and dramatic pop, using theatrical drums, violin, frenetic piano and a rich wash of vocal harmonies to tell their stories.” They’re doing one of our Cellarful Of Folkadelia sets at Sidmouth…

One of the most charmingly inventive (and award-winning) blends of traditions in the past decade combined Swedish fiddler Ellika Frisell with Senegalese kora player Solo Cissokho. Now Solo has recorded a wonderful duo album with Lithuanian kan- kles player Indré Jurgeleviciute.

In Australia, Kate Burke & Ruth

Hazleton are a long-established class act, with five albums since they got together in 1998 and a string of awards and quotes to die for. Their latest is produced by Luke Plumb of the aforementioned Shooglenifty. Connections: we got ’em!

From Timbuktu, the fabled town that once was the most mysterious place on the planet, and in a country where women singers have big voices, one of the biggest voices of them all belongs to Khaira Arby. And to match it, she has one of the most outrageously rocking bands!

All good things come in threes, they

say, and Pekko Käppi & K:H:H:L are a trio made up of musicians who play three- stringed instruments – in Käppi’s case the jouhikko, a bowed lyre. Their raw and grungey approach to Finnish traditions is exhilarating and this track screams ‘classic’.

From the USA, a new name to us. Mon- tana’s Lindsay Straw, now Boston-based

after studying at Berklee College Of Music, has immersed herself in British traditional music, which she sings beautifully with par- ticularly striking guitar and bouzouki self- accompaniment.

2011 BBC Young Folk Award winners

Tom Moore, Archie Churchill-Moss and Jack Rutter (on fiddle, melodeon and gui- tar respectively) have evolved into a really notable trio with their second album. Nor- folk, Somerset and Yorkshire blend together like they share common borders.

Italian pianist Ludovico Einaudi’s

ambitious Taranta Project gets together lots of Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, Justin Adams and Juldeh Camara, singers Anna Cinzia Villani. Enza Paglira and Alessia Tondo and even Ballake Sissoko’s kora on this awe-inspiring Puglian pizzica epic.

Tom & Ben Paley – aka Paley & Son – have pedigree. After all, Ben plays superb fiddle with somebody who has played with Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly, founded the legendary New Lost City Ramblers, taught the likes of Ry Cooder and is still brilliant at age 87. And that’s Tom…

It gets hard to remember after 386 years, but we think that Muziˇ

cka are the

first traditional band from Slovakia to fea- ture on a fRoots compilation. They were part of their ’90s new folk music and dance wave that rejected kitsch folkloricism for authenticity (think Oak, Old Swan… )

And what was that about “up the

Greeks?” We finish in the same part of the world as we began but with an entirely dif- ferent anarcho take on local roots, put together by Ahetas and Dubulah under the collective project name of Xaos and featur- ing some more Greek legends.