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fRoots 71 : 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!
If there’s anything to celebrate in this
blighted year, it’s that women musicians finally started to get the recognition they really deserve. Scotland’s Kinnaris Quin- tet – Jenn Butterworth, Alieen Reid Gobbi, Fiona MacAskill, Laura-Beth Salter and Laura Wilkie – are a great example of why.
We can’t think of any other group where each individual member has had a cover of fRoots in their own right. The term ‘supergroup’ is over-applied but certainly works for The Furrow Collective: Lucy Far- rell, Rachel Newton, Emily Portman and Alasdair Roberts. Super, or just fab!
From Latvia, Tautumeitas are six women doing something new with Latvian polyphonic singing. As our review this issue says, “The result superbly manages a difficult high-wire act, both defiantly, aggressively modern, while retaining the innate delicacy and rawness of the old folk songs.”
We’ve talked a lot about the new wave of English instrumental music in recent times, but it’s not just happening here. Feast your ears on Canadian/Italian fiddle & accordeon (respectively) duo Emilyn Stam & Filippo Gambetta getting stuck into this set of Lig- urian dance tunes, for example.
Once upon a time, ‘progress’ was consid- ered to be folk musicians starting to write their own songs, but a nice recent thing has been artists who are best known as singer/
songwriters bringing their skills to bear on traditional music projects, as has John Smith on his latest CD. More of this sort of thing!
In the hands of a master, there are few traditional instrument sounds more thrilling than the West African balafon. Putting one of those masters, Mali’s Lansiné Kouyaté, together with a totally sympathetic pianist like France’s celebrated Jean-Philippe Rykiel is a musical marriage made in heaven.
Turkey’s young psych-folk-rock queen Gaye Su Akyol has been wowing audiences at festivals outside her politically tense coun- try these past few years. “I want to find my own language, my own music, my own way of telling my art and my feelings,” she told us in fR405. It’s happening fast…
Solasta are one of those bands who seem to appear fully formed as if out of nowhere. This trio of cellist Hannah Thomas, violinist Elisabeth Flett and guitarist Jamie Leeming (they also all sing) have their roots in traditional music, jazz and ambient music but boundless imagination.
A lot of people try hard to be tricksy, but simplicity can work just as well as flash, as proved beyond doubt by The Other Years. Heather Summers and Anna Krippenstapel (who you may have heard with Joan Shelley) take a banjo, guitar, fiddle and two beauti- fully harmonised voices and make magic.
The previous albums by Astrakan Pro-
ject – Simone Alves & Yann Gourvil, mixing up Breton and Turkish roots – were so won- derful that we gave them a cover feature. Their latest is truly a major work, telling a Portuguese legend in their characteristic style, wrapped up in a fabulous art package.
One of the best of the New Wave Of Folk Blokes, Jon Wilks is a superb guitar player
and born-again traditional music obsessive. For his first album, he’s made a special project of researching and arranging songs from his native West Midlands, including some real rarities like Colin’s Ghost featured here.
From that fine Cornish band Dalla, viola player Jen Dyer and fiddle/bouzouki man Neil Davey, imaginatively billed as Davey & Dyer, have come up with a really thrilling album of Cornish traditional or newly composed tunes. Though it has to be said that those Cornish Girls may also be known for their Nutting!
Those other French regional recipients of
a past fRoots cover, the marvellous Moussu T e lei Jovents from Marseille (which ought to be quite obvious from this track!) have been delving back into local roots, reviving songs from the music hall tradition of the 1930s in their multi-cultural Mediterranean way.
London-based Sudanese/Italian singer (and one-time SOAS student) Amira Kheir and her multi-national band just get better and better, as her latest Stern’s album proves. Quite why the UK’s festivals haven’t seized this great local resident with open arms is, frankly, completely beyond us.
And a third shot of France before the door gets shut. You’re unlikely to hear many more original and beguiling roots albums this year than the debut by French duo Bâton Bleue. Marie Laurent and Gautier Degandt do extraordinary things with voices, banjo, thumb pianos, Mongolian lutes and all…
And finally, we end as we began with a band of Scottish women giving it seven shades of virtuoso stuff. Fara – Jennifer Austin, Kris- tan Harvey, Jeana Leslie and Catriona Price – bring this CD’s F/M balance to approximately 29-16 and that’s pretty much how it ought to be for 2018’s best music making!
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