63 f THE BROTHERS BRIGGS


The Brothers Briggs All Made Up Records AMU0010


This intriguing album of traditional songs by brothers Alex, Edward and Tom Briggs start- ed life as a 70th birthday present for their parents. Their father, Martyn Briggs, appeared on the 1971 Topic Records LP The Wide Midlands: Songs, Stories And Tunes From The Central Countries as a member of Birmingham group The Singing Tradition. His offspring sourced their version of The Painful Plough from that group, and sing it in excel- lent a cappella harmony, here.


Opener Bitter Withy and The Hunter are both crisply delivered and nice enough, but it’s on third track Sandy Daw that things real- ly get interesting. Learned from their Scottish mother and accompanied with Bagpuss auto- harp, it possesses the deliciously unsettling ambience of a Summerisle nursery rhyme. More sonic surprises reveal themselves in the accompanying soundscape of their rather threatening version of Soul Cake and in Maid On The Shore – sung by Briggs senior over harmonium drone. Further highlights include a melancholically modal version of Barbary Allen and closing track When Fortune Turns The Wheel, sung simply and empathetically over some skilful and apposite acoustic guitar.


“Darkly mysterious psychedelic folk” is a well-ploughed field (in England) in recent years, but the Brothers Briggs bring some- thing distinctive to the task and perform it with more panache than most.


thebrothersbriggs.bandcamp.com Steve Hunt


VARIOUS ARTISTS Colours Of Raga ARC Music 05111


In the immediate years after the Second World War, two collectors stood out for the way they preserved the music of the Indian subcontinent. Both were releasing that music commercially – no mean feat – by the first half of the 1950s. One was the French ethno- musicologist Alain Daniélou (1907–1994). His revelatory 1955 Anthologie De La Musique De L’inde for Serge Moreux’ Ducretet-Thom- son label is seminal, not least because he assembled a cast that included the Dagar Brothers (Mohinuddin and Aminuddin Dagar), Ali Akbar Khan, Chatur Lal, Ravi Shankar and MS Subbulakshmi. The other, less celebrated but similarly vital recordist was Bengali ethnomusicologist Deben Bhat- tacharya (1921–2001).


This audio-visual release rights a wrong long done to Bhattacharya’s canon of work as a whole (that is, music from elsewhere, too). Many of his field recordings fell out of cata- logue with the arrival of the compact disc. Only dribs and drabs of both Bhattacharya and Daniélou’s recordings have re-emerged. The audio part of this release is six tracks, mainly instrumental music. (The vocalist Durga Prasad Mishra is the one exception.) The main part of the CD is Bhattacharya’s 1954 recordings (aug- mented by Amiya Gopal Bhattacharya on sur- bahar, the sitar’s deeper-voiced cousin, playing an unspecified composition of his own in raga Todi from 1968). These are field recordings where sometimes the microphone captures the ambient atmosphere with children’s voic- es. And all the better for that.


The visual component is Bhattacharya’s forgotten 1969 documentary film Raga. The opening credits announce it to be “intro- duced by Yehudi Menuhin”. The first location is Rajasthan. It opens with outdoor footage shot in Jodhpur, with sarodist Damodar Lal Kabra and sitarist Manju Bhatt performing a jugalbandi (duet). The sitar, so totally schooled in the style of Ravi Shankar, sounded reminis-


cent. With no credits explaining who they were, it dawned that this sublime sitarist must be the modern-day Manju Mehta, the big sister of Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, in her youth. The film, with its Menuhin voice-over, is more than a Hindustani beanfeast. Woven into it is footage of folk customs and dancing. Rajasthan’s gender-segregated dancing proves the old truth evident way before NDTV or the other Indian television stations. Put a camera on an Indian man – or stick a microphone near his gob – and he will mug and go camera-hog. The film lasts a bit under 30 minutes. Even though the colour in real life or the original film stock, now drained, must once have been vibrant, footage of crafting instruments, cross-cut with market scenes of street food or carrying piled gobi (cauliflower), is evocative beyond belief.


More information about the material’s previous appearances (say on Argo or what- ever, if any) in subsequent Musical Explorers series releases, please. A truly outstanding Bhattacharya unearthing from the archives.


www.arcmusic.co.uk Ken Hunt


CARMEN PARÍS & NABYLA MAAN Dos Medinas Blancas Fol 100FOL1102


Carmen París from Spain’s Zaragoza and Nabyla Maan from Fez in Morocco first sang together in a 2015 collaboration between the festivals Pireneos Sur in Huesca and L’Boule- vard in Casablanca. Now they’ve put on record their duetting dialogue between their cul- tures, that of the Iberian Ebro and the north African Maghreb, which of course have much in common because of Iberia’s Moorish past.


Carmen, the deeper-voiced of the pair, sings powerfully and dramatically in Spanish, Nabyla soars melismatically in Arabic. Neither speaks the other’s language, so when they sing the same lyrics together one or other is doing it phonetically, but there are no awk- wardnesses; their voices blend very naturally. The songs are largely by one or other, with some by guitarist Tarik Hilal, all shaped by the traditional styles of their cultures and a con- temporary arranging sensibility.


They’re accompanied by two Moroccan musicians – Hilal on flamenco-style Spanish guitar and Mahmoud ‘Chouki’ on mandola, banjo and Berber loutar – and three Spaniards, bassist Peter Oteo, percussionist Pablo Martin- Jones and drummer Borja Barrueta.


Carmen París & Nabyla Maan


It all flows and gels with great spirit, as of sisters reunited across the Pillars of Her- cules. And the quality of the recording, as of the music, is always a cert with the Fol label.


www.folmusica.com Andrew Cronshaw


JIM CAUSLEY & FRIENDS


I Am The Song: The Children’s Poems of Charles Causley WildGoose WGS420CD


This is the third album of settings of poems to tunes written and sung by Jim in fairly rapid succession. First there was Cyprus Well devot- ed to the adult poems of distant relative Charles, then there was The Clay Hymnal to celebrate last year’s centenary of the Cornish poet Jack Clemo, and now this one. In many ways this is the most successful of the three.


Many admirers of Causley’s poetry, including this one, say that they can find little difference between the power of his work for children or for adults. As a junior school teacher he had a clear idea of the sort of well- constructed mix of sense and nonsense that would appeal. As a great folk song enthusiast, he had a full understanding of the metre and structure of traditional song and this come across clearly in his children’s verse. These fac- tors probably helped Jim in his settings, but he has constructed some fine fitting tunes here, some of them only a few removes from extant melodies. His performances are full of enthusiasm and joy but we can hear that we are listening to a very accomplished singer.


He has an impressive range of accompa- nying musicians here, mostly drawn from the WildGoose stable, Anahata & Humphries and Kendrick & Needham amongst them. They are allowed short bursts of better-known dance tunes to augment the arrangements.


It would seem likely that many of the 21 mostly shortish songs here will enter a wide range of repertoires. Items like Lord Lovelace, The Obby Oss and Here We Go Round The Roundhouse would seem to be ideal for folk club and singaround and it would be surpris- ing if the title track does not become popular with community choirs.


Of course, many will also be heard in junior classrooms but don’t regard this album a niche market children’s record; yes, it carries that youthful vitality but its appeal should be universal.


www.wildgoose.co.uk Vic Smith


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