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fRoots 72 : free album!
Our pick of the very best new stuff. Download it to play on your device 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!
Celebrating their 40th anniversary last
year hasn’t slowed down the creativity of England’s finest “insurgent roots band,” the mighty Mekons: in fact, if there’s a finer trad-based rock track released this year we’ll be very surprised indeed. Not bad for a bunch of ex-Leeds art school punk rockers!
It’s a decade and an almost total change of personnel since we last heard from Californian alt. old-timey adventurers The Crooked Jades, but time and re-band- ing have done Jeff Kazor’s merry crew no harm at all. Cock your ears to this finely evolved take on a Fred McDowell song.
Nice Northumbrian pipe and fiddle tunes, all delivered in a sprightly, virtuoso fashion – that’s what you expect from that nice Ms. Tickell, right? Well, nobody expect- ed the Kathryn Tickell & The Darkening experience: a crucial and exhilarating new band setting the world on fire.
Brighde Chaimbeul has gone from winning the 2016 BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Award to being a bona-fide major folk artist on a hip new label in no time flat. With Lau’s Aidan O’Rourke on fiddle, she’s already taking the Scottish small pipes into entirely new realms.
You can read about the Oran Bagraidh project (inspired by the only remaining song in extinct Galloway Gaelic) elsewhere this issue. This track features the extraordinary
mediaeval Welsh music duo Bragod (Robert Evans & Mary Anne Roberts) in their setting of a 9th-century Welsh poem.
Roland Van Campenhout is a veter- an, revered Belgian blues, folk and rock singer and multi-instrumentalist whose early career included recording with Derroll Adams and Rory Gallagher, and continues to date with all manner of adventurous recording and gigging projects.
Bluegrass is just… bluegrass, right?
You’ve heard it all before. Except you’ve probably not experienced the real deal in Bill Monroe mould that’s David Davis & The Warrior River Boys. Their latest bril- liant CD is of the songs of the legendary Charlie Poole and live they are sensational!
Your second dose of Welsh music this compilation comes from the debut by “chamber folk” (their description) pioneers VRï – Aneirin Jones, Jordan Price Williams and Patrick Rimes. The background of their music is in the Welsh chapel tradition, mix- ing finesse and guts.
That prolific Alasdair Roberts got a bit besotted with the music of French trio Tartine de Clous to the extent that he even wrote a piece about them for fRoots – then roped in Scottish fiddler Neil McDer- mott and set up a live recording session with them all all. Result here…
Banjoist/ singers Rhiannon Giddens, Leyla McCalla, Amethyst Kia and Alison Rus- sell collaborate as Our Native Daughters for an album of songs based on the histori- cal realities for black women and slavery in the USA. Producer Dirk Powell adds the nice West African guitar.
Sheffield-based Ghanaian Kweku Stack- ey orchestrates the high-energy whirl of the
multi-national K.O.G. & The Zongo Brigade as they mix up soukous, afrobeat, funk, hip-hop and reggae into infectious grooves that have already been big festival and club hits (e.g. at last year’s Womad).
You may have spotted Em Marshall as
a member of Tim Jones & The Dark Lanterns, whose 2017 CD was our Editor’s Choice Album Of The Year. Now here she is with a beguiling debut of her own. “This is lo-fi, late-night music from a brave and beautiful new voice,” says our reviewer.
Liverpool fiddle player and songwriter Mikey Kenney is steeped in English and Irish traditional music (and also a member of Band Of Burns). He regularly visits Italy to play with Vinicio Capossela and out of that experience came this song inspired by the atmosphere of Campania.
Thom Ashworth. He’s unusual: his main instrument is the acoustic bass guitar, which is not exactly a standard choice to accompany traditional songs. Works though! On this EFDSS-funded album he’s joined by Stick In The Wheel’s Ellie Wilson on fiddle and Mike Randon on drums.
Continuing their series of themed albums (they’ve already done politics and heartbreak), Naomi Bedford & Paul Sim- monds’ forthcoming one is a set of repatri- ated traditional ballads from Appalachia that originated in England and Scotland, all produced by that clever Ben Walker.
Finally, an inspired pairing: a traditional sevdah song from Bosnia’s magnificent Amira Medunjanin with arrangement for Norway’s great chamber string orchestra TrondheimSolistene – the Trondheim Soloists – by long-time Amira associate, Croatia’s Ante Gelo.
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