folk music
Lisa-Marie Ferla
While there’s usually something for everybody on the Celtic Connections festival programme, where Glasgow’s midwinter festival tends to shine is in its collaborations and special events. Over the past 18 days the city has hosted folk icon Peggy Seeger on a cross-generational bill with her songs Calum and Neill MacColll; Glasgow singer-songwriter Beerjacket performing with the Cairn String Quartet; a new orchestral symphony inspired by the Declaration of Arbroath in its 700th anniversary year; and the annual Transatlantic Sessions shows, featuring lovingly curated lineups of musicians from Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The Dartmoor folk star’s latest album launches into a dramatic retelling of the voyage of the Mayflower, from its departure from the iconic Mayflower Steps in Plymouth (actually, the real steps are down to the women’s loo at the Admiral MacBride pub) to their landing on what the locals on the other side of the ocean called Patuxet. On the way, they set in to motion the founding of the United States and the decimation of the American Indian tribal nations.The local Wampanoag tribespeople and the newly arrived Puritan refugees – all 106 of them, including 31 children – would in time forge a Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Folk music has always thrived in times of adversity and danger and in times when (to coin a phrase) “nothing is real”. All the above apply now and folk music, its roots in the dirt of our septic isle, speaks to us eloquently as balm, warning, and call to action. As ice caps melt and seas rise, as coasts and woodland succumb to the exigencies of commerce rendering homeless their inhabitants, folk music offers a reality check in an era of corporate self-interest.Sam Lee’s name has been on everyone’s lips, in America as well as in Britain, since his 2012 recording debut with Ground of Its Own, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The first album from the Boston-bred songwriter Squirrel Flower opens and closes with autobiographical songs. “I-80” opens with the artist - real name Ella O’Connor Williams - giving up on lyrics, poetry and, later, giving up on love, its rootless melody channelling the road west to Iowa where Williams went to college before building to a relentless crescendo. By the album’s closer, and title track, though, Williams has embraced poetry again: the “swimming” lyric is a reference to her being born still in the remains of the amniotic sac, the shimmering heat of the hottest day of the summer of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
What a lovely surprise. A debut album with its own sensibility that’s come out of the blue. Aoife Nessa Frances is from Dublin and the terrific Land of No Junction – the title comes from a mistaken hearing of Llandudno Junction – signals the arrival of a major new talent.This Land of No Junction borders on zones traversed by Kevin Ayers, Cate Le Bon, The Eighteenth Day of May, the pre-Sandy Denny Fairport Convention, Bridget St John, Stereolab, Sumie, Trimdon Grange Explosion and Wendy and Bonnie.Highlights are many, but the nine-track album can be characterised. “Libra” is brilliant, a Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s a good few years since Judy Collins last toured Britain and Ireland, though in the US she’s rarely off the road. Over the last couple of years she has notched up more than 100 concerts (and an album) with Stephen Stills, who famously celebrated their 1960s love affair in the magnificent “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”. Her latest album, Winter Stories, with Jonas Field and Chatham County Line, had American critics reaching for superlatives and put her in the charts once more.Her eyes are still as blue and even up close you’d never guess she celebrated her 80th birthday last May Day. The pink Read more ...
Katie Colombus
2019 has been quite the year. Amongst other difficulties being a grown-up hurls at you on the reg, I lost my guiding light (may her adventures on the other side of this universe be everything and more). And the testing times that ensued sees me now, not only into the new decade but into a big fat birthday that ends with a "0". So I am looking back while trying to move forwards, doing things like wondering what advice I might have given to my younger self to prepare for the future – which means Sharon Van Etten’s Remind Me Tomorrow is hugely relevant; often giving hope, occasionally terrifying Read more ...
peter.quinn
A trio of standout US vocal jazz releases included one of the year’s most hotly anticipated albums, Jazzmeia Horn’s Love and Liberation, which showcased the Dallas-born vocalist’s ever-deepening artistry and songwriter’s ear for detail. Horn’s eight originals encapsulated the sense of joyousness, playfulness and vitality that course through her music.Veronica Swift’s debut for Mack Avenue Records, Confessions, was nothing short of spectacular, displaying impeccable time, emotional depth, timbral beauty, first-rate arranging skills and a storytelling gift. With her characteristically Read more ...
Tim Cumming
As one half of the BBC Radio 2 Folk Award-winning duo with Ben Walker, Josienne Clarke released four superb albums, including 2014’s Nothing Can Bring Back The Hour and their finale, 2018’s Seedlings All. There’s an absolute clarity to her voice, as if it's some lucid if troubled body of water through which you can see to the depths, and the powerful forces unfolding down there. Depth and clarity, melancholy and introspection are the axes on which her artistry turns. It's fuelled by a searing emotional intelligence that doesn’t spare herself, let alone any others depicted in these 13 compact Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The Barbican, a week before Christmas, and it’s British folk-rock legends Steeleye Span’s last gig of the year, a year in which its vigorous seven-strong line-up – featuring a new recruit in the shape of former Bellowheader Benji Kirkpatrick – celebrated a half century of Span by releasing a strong new album in Est’d 69. One of the highlights of that new set was blockbuster ballad “Old Matron”, featuring Tull's Ian Anderson on flute.No Anderson tonight, but it nevertheless came with some very special guests too – Martin Carthy, coming to the stage with the mighty fiddler Peter Knight and Read more ...
Tom Baily
A documentary about celebration, fellowship, and the comforting afterglow of cherished memories. What better way to spend a cold late-Autumn evening? Such is the effect of this charming, low-key investigation into the story of Scotch. Rich with personal stories, The Amber Light studies whisky via social history: how and why the golden dram has brought people together.Water, barley, yeast, a boiler and a barrel. Most of us know the basics of how whisky is made (the film devotes about 30 seconds to reminding us), but how and why did it originate? Director Adam Park teams with writer Dave Broom Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
There was something fitting about the Lumineers entrance in Glasgow. As “Gimme Shelter” blared around the SSE Hydro, lights pulsating over the crowd, it was drummer Jeremiah Fraites who took the stage and started the opening beat of “Sleep On The Floor”, an array of phones quickly whipped out to act as a welcoming committee from the crowd. The rest of the band followed in due course, but this is a group for whom the drums are at the heart of their stomping songs, no matter what.The other key element is, of course, the voice of Wesley Schultz , an unassuming and laid back frontman, who Read more ...