59 f

ing; flowing flute vs gritty bass clarinet; mel- lifluous vs spiky. The West Clare Reel sees a meditative calm build to an agitated urgency.

Both complex and conscious; simple and abandoned. No mean feat! Hear a track on fRoots 62.

www.ensemble.ie Sarah Coxson

CHRIS WOOD So Much To Defend RUF RUFCD014

Chris Wood might be the Ken Loach of songwriting. Very political, but at the same time full of compassion, and he grows sharper and more acute with each passing album. This disc starts with the devastating one-two punch of the title track and

This Love Won’t Let You Fail, as loving and real a love song – a piece of English soul music, really – to an offspring as has ever been writ- ten, and one any parent can instantly under- stand, but it’s a young life, growing more inde- pendent each day, beautifully observed.

That eye for the telling detail is wonder- fully apparent in So Much To Defend, a series of portraits of ordinary people in this Britain of 2016. People getting by, some of them barely. Brexit supporters? Maybe, but there’s no judgement here, just a sweet kindness of understanding and some glorious detail (“He says his season ticket’s not for sale/He’s Ebbs- fleet till he dies”). The pair of songs are breathtaking, and it would be impossible to sustain that kind of level all through.

But there’s no drop in quality in the wry Only A Friendly Or More Fool Me, a medita- tion on why anyone would want to be a musician today (and a small John Martyn gui- tar homage right at the end). The strong ele- ment of the English hymnal that’s long been a part of Woods’ music gets an airing here, both in 1887, his setting of an AE Housman poem, and the closer You May Stand Mute, as eloquent a call to a life of love as has been written. Is Wood at the peak of his powers? Possibly not, but my god, he’s good, quite probably the very best we have today, and we need him more than ever.

www.chriswoodmusic.co.uk Chris Nickson VOXTRA

The Encounter Of Vocal Heritage Muziekpublique 08

This works, wonderfully. Sar- dinian vocal group Tenore de Monte Arvu, Albanian vocal ensemble Gjini, Belgian Raphael De Cock (who’s also in both those groups), singer Talike Gelle of the Atandroy people of southern Mada- gascar, and Finnish singer

Anu Junnonen, all of them Belgian resident, bring together their distinctive traditional vocal techniques and styles. Not in the form of a sequence of separate songs in each style, but interweaving them simultaneously, each contrasting tradition maintaining its strong character without ever blanding into lev- elled-out sameness. Each singer is full of indi- viduality and ability, and there’s not a weak or even similar-sounding track on an album that flows beautifully through its bountiful 23 tracks, one of which you can hear on this issue’s fRoots 62 compilation.

For example, in the opening track Talike and Anu combine, each in their own lan- guage, a Malagasy song by Talike and a Finnish trad song, underpinned by a rhythm

Voxtra

from deep grinding Sardinian bass vocal. Or track five, where the down-drifting, melis- matic weep of Albanian singing alternates with the Finnish song Läksin Minä Kesäyönä Käymään, rhythm-propelled by jew’s-harp and pandero. Most tracks are unaccompanied and don’t lack anything, but in the track that follows, a duet between Junnonen and De Cock in an intertwining of Flemish and Finnish trad songs, Anu plays glockenspiel and Raphael kantele.

Throughout, the conjunction of these traditions brings out their differences, and each singer and ensemble uses a full range of their techniques; there’s no sense of suppres- sion of individuality to make it all blend. On the contrary, we hear each delving into what makes their tradition special, the contrast between them making those features all the more evident. And it touches areas that are rare in the traditions’ homelands, such as a female voice (Manuela Deledda) in the tradi- tionally all-male Sardinian cantu a tenore.

Superficially it might appear that this project has similarities to Breton singer Erik Marchand’s 2001 Albanian/Sardinian/Gali- cian/Malian/Breton Kan. But Peter Van Rompaey of trail-blazing multicultural Brus- sels organisation Muziekpublique, who put together Voxtra (and also this year’s very suc- cessful Amerli – Refugees For Refugees pro- ject, and much more), says, “The great album Kan was an inspiration to start the project. Originally there were Georgian singers in the band, but as two of them were expelled from Belgium, we were lucky to discover that the former Ensemble Tirana soloist Gramoz Gjini was living here. The result may on first sight resemble Kan but is quite different. We hope the result can match in a way the quality of Marchand’s excellent work”.

It certainly does, and more.

(So… Belgium, population 11.27 million; UK, population 65 million… I wonder…)

www.muziekpublique.be Andrew Cronshaw

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Bobo YéYe: Belle Époque In Upper Volta Numero 055

Reviewer removes jaw from floor. A re-issue of lunatic quality, right up there with the best that Dust-To-Digital offer. That’s the pin- nacle of praise – and apparently it’s to be showered on co-producers, compilers and writers Jon Kirby, Florent Mazzoleni, Rob Sevier and Ken Shipley.

The facts, man. At the heart of it are three magnificently mastered CDs of glorious

1970s ‘golden era’ music from the landlocked West African state now known as Burkina Faso, influenced by neighbours like Mali (in particular), Niger and Ghana, the all-conquer- ing Congolese rumba of the day, and local roots. One CD of Orchestre Volta-Jazz, full of chiming, twangfastic electric guitar, scurrying percussion, tooting horns and plangent vocals. One CD of the marginally more rootsy Coulibaly Tidiani (himself ex-Volta-Jazz) & L’Authentique Orchestre Dafra Star, who fea- tured the traditional balafon in amongst horns, and recorded and played in Mali where they befriended clear kindred spirits the Rail Band and Super Biton –mind you, there’s also one track of fabulously cheesy so- bad-it’s-good French pop, just to confuse! And a final excellent compilation featuring half a dozen pieces by the splendidly-named, well-drilled and versatile military band Les Imbattables Léopards (very Congolese on the driving Dja Tigui Kie, endearingly moody on Milaoba, very Cuban on Néné), a couple from the more Mali-esque Echo Del Africa, and two strays including the bizarre and haunt- ingly out-of-tune Arindo from Idy O Idrissa.

Accompanying the CDs are well- researched and deeply informative notes on the bands, lots of colour shots of evocative album and single covers enough to get any ‘crate digger’ salivating, and full discogra- phies of the main local labels.

Then there’s a profile of contemporary photographer Sory Sanlé and more than a hundred of his works, all beautifully repro- duced full-page on high quality art paper: studio portraits in a similar style to the more celebrated Seydou Keïta or Malick Sidibé, including some eye-popping costumes and the obligatory motorbikes from the hip Bobo-Dioulasso youth of the day, and lots of band and live action shots from night clubs. Flares-r-us.

I’m reviewing from the CD set that’s in a hardback book, itself inside a really sturdy hard slipcase, the whole thing an inch thick. There’s also a ginormous vinyl box version that’s actually substantial enough to be a cof- fee table if you attached some legs, and could genuinely have the often-misused term ‘stunning’ applied, were it to fall on you from a high shelf. Bonkers! Each deserves to sell in huge quantities just as beautiful artefacts, let alone a thrilling musical experience.

PS – a strange fact of this screwed-up modern world with its plummeting Pounds is that at the time of writing, it’s cheaper in the UK to buy it direct from the American label including paying shipping costs than it is to get it from Amazon UK. No, me neither…

numerogroup.com Ian Anderson