folk music
Kieron Tyler
When Shirley Collins appears at The Roundhouse next week, it will be 50 years since she last played there. On 30 May 1969, she and her sister Dolly were on a bill promoting their then label Harvest Records. When she plays there on 31 January, she is the main event. After her comeback album Lodestar was issued in November 2016, the knowledge that Shirley is the most important voice of traditional English music has been reinforced.Lodestar was released 37 years after her last full-length album, 1979’s Shirley & Dolly Collins set For as Many as Will. The – as she puts it – “long layoff Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s more than 10 years since Katie Doherty, a new-minted music grad championed by the Sage-based Folkworks collective, was named Newcomer of the Year and released Bridges, her debut album. And Then is only her second – which is not to suggest she’s been resting on her laurels. In the intervening years she’s worked as a musical director for the RSC among other stage companies and has appeared alongside Ray Davies and the McGarrigles – and, as “Tiny Little Shoes” suggests, she has had a baby. The album comes elegantly packaged, a gatefold with pull-out lyrics and credits, and the CD contained Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Any of the individual elements making up Ilmamõtsan would be enough. Unified, they imbue Ilmamõtsan with beauty and an understated power. That questing Estonian singer-songwriter Mari Kalkun does not sing in English is no barrier to being affected.The most immediate component is the pure, though commanding, voice. The melodies Kalkun sings are carried with apparent ease, yet they are sinuously unpredictable while instantly memorable. The arrangements seem spare but her accordion, harmonium, kannel (the Estonian zither), chimes, bells and sound-colour from a bone spinner lock together in Read more ...
mark.kidel
Rudderless, and under the unpredictable and self-interested leadership of crazy and authoritarian populists, the world finds, as ever, some solace from music. I’ve spent a lot of time exploring '90s Dub Techno this year, not least the work of Moritz von Oswald, Mark Ernestus and Carl Craig. Prince’s early demos on Piano & and a Mircophone 1983 were a revelation as well. I was at a loss, however, to pick a single outstanding album, but perhaps the most timely and stirring came from Ry Cooder, whose The Prodigal Son combines soul and politics, faith and social engagement, in a way all Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The Irish American supergroup was only meant to be a one-off, but the fervour of their audiences’ passion for the music – across two studio albums from Real World, and some magnificent concerts in the UK, Ireland and the US – has given The Gloaming the crown when it comes to radically reinterpreting and performing traditional folk.There is no other group like them, and few with the sheer heft of brilliance displayed by fiddler Martin Hayes, viola/hardanger player Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, sean nos singer Iarla Ó Lionáird, American pianist Thomas Bartlett and guitarist Dennis Cahill.Their live Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The Albion Christmas Band is as much of a fixture as Yuletide itself and their tour runs right through till Christmas – and of course there’s an album, Under the Christmas Tree. Specially formed for the festive period and featuring Simon Nicol (Fairport Convention), Kellie While (Albion Band), Simon Care (Edward II) and of course Ashley Hutchings, it’s a journey through Christmas and its traditions, with songs, instrumentals and readings. The fiddles and accordion certainly add a warm festive feel of chestnuts roasting on an open fire and all that and all is beautifully played.It’s a long way Read more ...
Barney Harsent
In 1974, a saggy old cloth cat and his rag-tag bunch of friends managed, in just 13 episodes, to influence a generation. Ask pretty much anyone who watched Bagpuss what their first experience of traditional folk music was and the answer is unlikely to be Fairport Convention or Steeleye Span. The music of Sandra Kerr and John Faulkner, multi-instrumentalists with links to Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger and the London Critics Group, earwormed its way into a nation’s consciousness via a cloth cat, a rag doll, a carved wooden bookend in the shape of a woodpecker and colony of mice who were more Read more ...
peter.quinn
After failing to make the charts on its release 50 years ago this month, Astral Weeks has long since passed into pop mythology, its unique amalgam of jazz, folk and soul influences inspiring musicians, writers and filmmakers alike.Martin Scorsese said that he based the first 15 minutes of Taxi Driver on the album, Rickie Lee Jones has called it “still daring, still innovative”, Bruce Springsteen, who chose “Madame George” when he was a guest on Desert Island Discs, stated that the album “made me trust in beauty, it gave me a sense of the divine”, while in the 1979 anthology Stranded: Rock and Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Many established artists, when out on tour, can get all a bit bashful about their new material. In fact, it’s not unusual for bands to hide a couple of new tunes in the middle of their live set with embarrassed mumbling about “you don’t really want to hear the new stuff anyway” before launching into a note-perfect rendition of a tune that was a hit several years previously. This is not the way of Florence + The Machine, whose High as Hope tour features a set that pulls almost half of its material from their recent, Mercury-nominated album.Without even a “hello”, Florence Welch and her eight- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Faithful Fairy Harmony is in the tradition of The Beatles’ White Album, Todd Rundgren’s A Wizard, a True Star and The Clash’s London Calling, all double albums because an outpouring of songs couldn’t be stemmed. Also like these, Josephine Foster’s 18-track double-set plays with listener expectations. Though she doesn’t tackle musique concrète like The Beatles, soul like Rundgren or jazz like The Clash, Foster disrupts notions of how she is perceived: in her case as a country-folk stylist. The pedal-steel-driven country flow of “Force Divine” is subverted by twangy surf guitar and some string Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The road to full musical theatre production has been a long one for Hadestown. It began back in 2006, with Anaïs Mitchell’s song cycle – a folk/jazz take on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth – toured around Vermont in a school bus, then grew into an ecstatically received concept album in 2010, and has gone through further development with director Rachel Chavkin in Off-Broadway and Canadian stagings. Now, it comes to the National ahead of a Broadway run.Whatever its past or future forms, Chavkin’s staging is a superb fit for the Olivier. Rachel Hauck’s spare, multi-level speakeasy set, which Read more ...
Liz Thomson
What adjectives best describe a performance of The Ballads of Child Migration? None of those you’d normally expect to see applied to an evening of superlative music-making, for the song cycle chronicles the deprivations suffered by child migrants sent from Britain over the course of one hundred years. Mostly they were sent to Australia, poor children in need of a loving home and an education who were used as slave farm labour. Some were also sent to New Zealand, others to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and a smaller number to Canada, where they fared somewhat better. More than 100,000 Read more ...