folk music
Katie Colombus
Jewel fans from circa 1995, when the folky rebel-poet-warrior's first multi-platinum album Pieces of Me (one of the best-selling debut albums of all time) was released, have been longing for more of that fresh, raw, melodic artistry ever since.But after the fiercely made Spirit, a world tour and This Way, what came next was a seemingly experimental series of new sounds – the bewildering intellectual pop of 0304, a Christmas album, two kids' CDs released by Fisher Price, a country album and a starring role as June Carter Cash in a Lifetime Channel film.Twenty years on and Picking Up the Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Two years ago, Dylan played his best concert in years here at the Royal Albert Hall, the dim stage circled by vintage movie studio lights, and circling Dylan a band seasoned enough to bottle its own oil, delivering a new kind of quiet, late-night music. The broad unpredictability may have had gone, but so had those too-common troughs in quality and penchant for urban barns in Wembley. Could this new quality – forget the width – be sustained?After the release this year of Shadows in the Night, recorded at the same Capitol studio Sinatra used, with the same band that joins him tonight, a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bert Jansch: It Don't Bother Me, Jack Orion / Bert Jansch & John Renbourn: Bert and JohnWhen theartsdesk last caught up with Bert Jansch, it was April 1965 and he had just issued his eponymous debut album – a set which now, as it was then, is a benchmark take on what acoustic folk and blues would be if a singular, all-embracing vision was applied. As much singer-songwriter album as template for the future of boundary-breaking British folk, Bert Jansch was as influential as it was remarkable.Jansch did not stand still after April 1965. His follow-up album It Don't Bother Me was released in Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Now, I don’t know about you, but if someone holding some tiny cymbals invited me into a room on the promise of hearing some devotional chanting to an oud-led raga accompanied by tablas, I’d probably also expect to find shaved heads, free dahl, and an awful lot of orange.In fact, far from the world of the Hare Krishna percussive parade, Trappist Afterland hail from Melbourne and tread the same musical topography as The Incredible String Band, Sandy Bull and, more recently, Six Organs of Admittance. On this, their latest album, they have found a home on small independent Sunstone, whose output Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
If you liked the Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis, with its Dave Van Ronk-esque hero in Greenwich Village in 1961, you'll enjoy the new exhibition Folk City: New York and the Folk Music Revival, a celebration of NYC as the centre of folk music from its beginnings in the Thirties and Forties to its heyday in the Fifties and Sixties. It's at the Museum of the City of New York, far uptown at 103rd Street in east Harlem, a block or two from Duffy's Hill, the steepest in New York and the scene of many cable-car accidents in the 19th century. The kind of thing Peter, Paul and Mary might have Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Lautari Vol 67: Live 2014 features Michael Zak on clarinet, flute and shawn, with bassist Marcin Pospieszalski, fiddle player Maciej Filipczuk and the prepared piano and accordion of Jacek Halas.That instrument list gives you an idea of the musical territory you’re travelling through. Just as Jabusz Prusinowski Kompania, of which Zak is a member, specialises in antique Polish styles, so Lautari set about blowing wind, striking keys and drawing bows across a musical landscape of angular and contemporary arrangements of deeply rural tunes and dances.Sonically, they shape-shift from antique Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The first thing that strikes you at 3am is the light, that strange disembodied glow of Norway’s midsummer midnight sun casting its rays over a landscape soaked in fantasy proportions – sheer glacial drops of greenstone, sweet-water fjords cutting deep into the land, the forests of spruce and pine desending from steep mountainous peaks to the meadow grasses of the valley below.My route to Førde and its 28th annual festival of world and folk music started on a speedy cruiser, leaving on the dot at 8am from Bergen for the island of Krakhella. From there, a postal boat wove its hem through Read more ...
Russ Coffey
On paper, Richard Thompson's career seems every bit as exotic as one of his songs: At the age of 18 he helped found folk-rock pioneers, Fairport Convention. Later, in the Seventies, he and wife Linda recorded several successful records together before retreating to a Sufi Muslim commune.After returning to music, Thompson relocated to LA, where his unique combination of British folk and virtuoso rock guitar made him a connoisseurs' choice. In recent years Thompson has curated South Bank’s Meltdown festival, been awarded an OBE, and had a Grammy-nominated record. Yet he remains the Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The first thing that hits you is the voice. Simultaneously full and fragile; assured, but with a distinctive, backnote graze that runs along it like barbs on a feather shaft, it sounds, at times, as if it’s ghosting itself. As well as lending textural gravitas to pretty much anything Meg Baird chooses to sing, it’s the perfect instrument for this collection of self-penned songs that appear, on first listen, to be haunted by the past.Indeed, as we begin, you could be forgiven for thinking that “Counterfeiters” and “I Don’t Mind” were in fact the opening of a new album by Baird's former band, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Dust on the Nettles – A Journey Through the British Underground Folk Scene 1967–72It’s one of the most significant musical rediscoveries of recent years and, on its own, makes Dust on the Nettles indispensible. “The Seagulls Scream” by Christine Quayle is track 10 on the first disc of this box set of psychedelically inclined British folk or folk-inspired music. Quayle intones desolately of “a human in bed [who] is singing his prayers in his head, his mind is dead.” Eleswhere in the disconsolate lyric, a child asks his mother for love but “beneath his skin, his body is Read more ...
mark.kidel
The songs of Richard Thompson have always been tinged with a hint of bitterness and anger, passions that are tempered by guitar paying of near-miraculous fluency. His new album, produced with brilliance and tact by Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, is no exception. The standards are as high as ever, and the self-penned material, with the exception of “Guitar Heroes”, a somewhat tedious homage to masters of the instrument, is characterized by Thompson’s usual mix of poetry and irony.As with much of Thompson’s previous work, he ranges from the tropes of folk-rock – jaunty yet slightly melancholy tunes Read more ...
Russ Coffey
For many, Mark Knopfler will forever evoke a golden age of Eighties' soft rock. His headband might have been easy to mock but his blistering, finger-picking was undeniably thrilling. Latterly, though, Knopfler has travelled a less commercial path. Still, while his folk tendencies may not be everybody’s cup of tea, there's certainly more to Knopfler than just melancholy ballads. For much of last night he treated the O2 to tantalising glimpses of his former, more rocking, self.Knopfler came on looking lean and casual in a floral shirt and jeans. His hair was close cut (he still looks Read more ...