Reviews

Photo: David Owen/Jim Moray Jim Moray

Ah, the difficult third album – which follows the tricky first album and the troubled second. So what’s it to be this time, Jim? Exploding turnips, heavy metal triangles and dancing beagles? Few inspire the sort of anticipation aroused by a new Jim Moray record – the genuine excitement about what he might come up with next tempered by a realistic fear that it might well be unspeakably awful – but with no idea what to expect of this one, Low Culture still comes as a shock.

There’s hardly any electronica for a start or his trademark piano arrangements. But this is mature, measured, thoughtful, provocative, subtle, consistently appealing, in parts very traditional, daringly spartan in places, frequently beautiful, unexpectedly accessible and, most surprising of all, restrained. A lot of guff was said about his first two albums. Sweet England was never the genre-busting unblemished classic it was hailed and Jim Moray wasn’t as rubbish as it was deemed in the inevitable backlash. Low Culture is probably more successful artistically (and I suspect commercially too) than either. He’s singing a lot better for a start, his voice exposed in the stripped-down arrangements, but delivering the tales of Leaving Australia, The Rufford Park Poachers and Fanny Blair with unflinching honesty. And, as he hinted on his take-no-prisoners version of Drive My Car on the remake of the Beatles’ Rubber Soul album, he’s a convincing rock ’n’ roll singer – a hidden talent that comes into play during an inspired, unexpected tangent as Moray tackles a track likely to introduce him to a whole new market, a cover of XTC’s All You Pretty Girls, with its irresistible chorus rammed down your throat by some of folk’s finest, including Roy Bailey, Jim Causley, Nancy Kerr and Tim Van Eyken.

Another unlikely guest is rapper Bubbz, who turns up to add a short, sharp new perspective to the great incest ballad Lucy Wan. Comparisons will be made with Benjamin Zephaniah’s contribution to Tam Lyn on The Imagined Village, but this somehow seems more modest, organic and natural, if anything both Bubbz and Moray underplaying their hands. Also unexpected is, so soon after her own version was decorated with a BBC award nomination, a cover of Bella Hardy’s Three Black Feathers. Festooning it with a romantic string arrangement, he does a solid job, underlining the fact that when she purportedly knocked the song out during her GCSE maths exam, Bella wrote an instant classic.

What this album also proves is Moray’s rich strengths as an arranger/producer. Various guests are dotted around the album – notably Nick Cooke on melodeon and Mawkin’s James Delarre on violin – but he still plays the lion’s share of the instruments himself and puts it all together with an instinctive vision that makes it all fit together perfectly as a whole, flavoured with particular guile by the recurring presence of English bagpipes and hurdy-gurdy. To all intents and purposes I’ll Go List For A Sailor is a bog standard folk-rock arrangement in the Fairport tradition but it sounds timeless and the sound he achieves on Valentine creates an atmospheric resonance of which Daniel Lanois would be proud. In addition to everything else, he’s surely destined for a brilliant career as a studio producer/ album guru.

www.jimmoray.co.uk

Photo: Judith Burrows Les Espoirs De Coronthie

Guinea, 50 years on from Sekou Touré’s big idea of ‘authenticité’, is still doing well in its aftermath – musically, that is. With the country’s economy completely fucked, to say the least, it does inevitably have its western wannabe dreamers doing escapist rap and reggae with an imminent sell-by-date, but local roots are again the freshest.

Les Espoirs De Coronthie are just what the name on the box translates as, the hopes of one of Conakry’s poorest neighbourhoods. With the streets and compounds as their rehearsal rooms, and denied the possibility of ‘modern’ electric instruments – not even the amplifiers that allowed compatriots Ba Cissoko to go the ‘Hendrix of the kora’ route – they use traditional instruments like kora, balafon, bolon, djembe, gongoma (thumb piano), calabash percussion and the occasional ngoni alongside acoustic guitar. Lyrically updating the social commentary aspect of the griot’s role to deal with the realities of the there-and-now, coupling that with youthful energy, this album fizzes with creativity and punch while never straying far from the timeless traditional forms. The UK equivalent, were there one, would be considered a high-powered folk revival band of the first order, amassing a big youthful fan following. In Guinea it’s not a revival, it’s a straight line through, and they’ve already reputedly sold 70,000 albums across West Africa. Tinkhinyi, recorded in Bamako’s well-reputed Studio Bogolan and in Paris, now gets proper European release in a classy digipak and to these ears is one of the most exciting sets out of West Africa in recent times.

www.lesespoirsdecoronthie.com

Amadou Sodia is charmingly older-fashioned, but none the worse for that. Indeed, for people who missed out on the late ‘80s, early ‘90s era of big production jobs on the top griot singers, I’m sure he’d still sound invigoratingly fresh. Sodia, previously known as Ahmadou Doumbouya (as such he provided vocals on two tracks of the Stern’s album by Ousmane Kouyate), is a classic big-voiced Manding-style singing man backed up with typically gorgeous Guinean female harmony vocals and an epic mixture of traditional and modern instruments. This Ibrahim Sylla production is dripping with top talent including Kante Manfila (guitar), Djeli Moussa Diawara (kora), Kerfala Kante & Sekouba Bambino (vocals) and Etienne Mbappe (bass), to name-drop just a few. Pretty much dominated by ‘real’ instruments – keyboards and drum machines are used sparingly and appropriately in the mix when they appear – there are lovely touches like the cello on the title track that lift it way above the ordinary. The cover, rather appropriately summing up the elements within, shows a comfortably large man in a posh suit cradling a traditional bolon bass harp. In a field which had got a tad predictable and off the radar lately, this one seems to be a genuine classic.

Available in the UK via Stern’s: www.sternsmusic.com

The Crooked Jades

‘Americana’ seems to be pretty much off the boil and resting, worn as a flag of convenience by too many chancers and exhausted by fringe rockers whose connection to the roots was as thin as their originality. The Crooked Jades are something else though.

Grounded in tradition, old-time string band music and mountain blues but with open horizons that take them, subtly, to other parts of the planet, they have a haunting spookiness, an organic pulse, and most importantly a clear vision – putting them in a very small field alongside the wondrous likes of Last Forever. Instrumentally they’re truly inspiring, getting original textures out of conventional stringband instruments and mixing them with (in this context) oddities like bass ukulele, harmonium, mbira, cello and Vietnamese jaw harp and bau zither. Vocally, they have that lonesome white blues sound which has its ancestry in Dock Boggs and the Carters but again they take it somewhere else, especially when Canada’s Leah Abramson – who also does the bass and soprano ukes – takes the lead. What is it with Canadian women singers, from the McGarrigles then to the Ghost Bees now, which has such an effect on the goose pimples and neck hairs?

It’s an ensemble of great individual strengths – other core members are leader, multi-instrumentalist and writer Jeff Kazor, bassist Charlie Rose, banjo/slide guitarist Rose Sinclair (once of the fine Heartbeats Rhythm Quartet) and fiddler Sophie Vitells (who’s a klezmer player too), and on the CD there’s some effective extra banjo from Seth Folsom – but if they have one secret weapon it’s Leah Abramson. On a consistently startling and addictive album, the two tracks which just manage to pop their heads above the towering rest are her Call It Something Else and Sleep In The River, the latter adapted from that legendary Chemirocha paean to singing brakeman Jimmie Rodgers imagined as demi-god, half man and half antelope, recorded by Hugh Tracey from two girls of Kenya’s Kipsigi tribe back in the 1950s. Floating mysteriously two thirds through the album, it somehow encapsulates the Crooked Jades’ otherness.

www.crookedjades.com

Photo: Philip Ryalls Ivo Papasov

Bulgarian clarinet master Ivo Papasov was the first Balkan Gypsy musician to win a wide international following with his two Joe Boyd-produced Hannibal albums at the start of the ‘90s. Those fine albums – Balkanology and Orpheus Rising – attracted much acclaim and introduced a music of great power: complex, polyrhythmic instrumentals borrowing from jazz yet rooted in the folk music of Bulgaria and Turkey. Back then Ivo appeared a huge figure – well, he is a large man – who would win over international audiences. Instead, Hannibal ran into problems and Ivo vanished for more than a decade. When researching my book Princes Amongst Men in Bulgaria, I asked after Ivo and while he was remembered fondly, the musicians I talked to had no idea of his whereabouts and suggested he was long retired. Imagine my surprise when he won a BBC World Music Award in 2005 and then appeared at Womad, and delivered a vicious, loud performance at the Islington Academy as part of Balkan Fever: this most primal of musicians remained a heavyweight! I interviewed Ivo for fRoots (see fR281) and it seems he had retired (to a degree) – Bulgaria’s transition to democracy saw a radical shift in Roma music-making with chalga (an electronic style that draws heavily upon Turkish and Serbian pop), which had rendered the King of the Weddings redundant. Like many an old-school Gypsy musician he was nostalgic for communism: not so much the political regime but the untainted music making then popular in Bulgaria.

Ivo began to be recorded again – for a tiny Austrian label he issued Sunrise, an album that had its moments yet saw him indulging a taste for jazz fusion and synthesisers. His former saxophonist Yuri Yunakov, now long resident in New York, managed to get him out for a US tour and their album Together Again captured a potent jam session. But it is with Dance Of The Falcon that he really returns and I doubt I’m alone in thinking it is the finest album of his career.

Opening with the title track – this percussive, eerie tune is amongst the finest things I’ve heard all year – the eight tracks are all instrumental and beautifully played. I mention ‘all instrumental’ as Ivo’s wife, Maria Karafizieva, provided exceptional vocals on his Hannibal albums and was in powerful form at his Womad and Islington appearances. I hope her absence is only due to Ivo wishing to focus on his ensemble’s instrumental skills.

On a couple of tunes Ivo again delights in displaying his ability at mixing soft jazz textures with Balkan flavours. Nothing wrong with that but he’s always more powerful when concentrating on Thracian textures. And concentrate he does: Ivo and band are a remarkable unit, capable of building a vast soundscape, percussive rhythms and popping bass anchoring saxophone, accordeon and clarinet as they build and weave, telling stories of a Bulgaria we still know so little about. A remarkable album and one that – as with his Hannibal releases – should win a wide audience. Much respect to London’s World Village label for not only taking this project on but directing Ivo to produce such dense, fiery music.

www.ivopapasov.com; www.worldvillagemusic.com; distributed in the UK by Harmonia Mundi: http://uk.hmboutique.com

Soha: d’Ici Et d’Ailleurs (Virgin France 50999 5031812 4)
Young, attractive-looking French woman of North African origins singing in a variety of pop and mildly tropical styles on a well-produced, but strangely empty set. Underwhelming. www.myspace.com/sohamusic

Roland Van Campenhout: Never Enough (EMI Belgium 50999 5216402 6)
Very odd album from veteran Belgian artist: imagine a vocal mix of Captain Beefheart, Tom Waits and early Lou Reed singing strange lyrics about lust and the seamier side of life, plus a Corso poem, all to exquisite, sparse, mainly acoustic backing. Bizarre? Yes. Compelling? To a degree. Successful in its intention? Yes. Will definitely appeal to the ‘neofolk/antifolk’ crowd. www.rolandvancampenhout.be

Perunika Trio: Introducing… (World Music Network INTRO109CD)
Very impressive debut from three young London-based Bulgarian women, singing in a whole range of regional a cappella styles. Sometimes sweet, but sometimes surprisingly spiky and well worth investigating. www.worldmusic.net

Watcha Clan: Diaspora Hi-Fi (Piranha CD-PIR2230)
Israeli singer and multicultural cohorts peddling the currently fashionable Med-Balkan-Middle-Eastern-electro mix, resulting in a couple of decent dancefloor friendly tunes and rather a lot of irritating filler. www.piranhashop.de

Catriona McKay: Starfish (Glimster Records GLIMCD02)
Debut solo album of original compositions from innovative harpist and member of Chris Stout Quintet. Joined by fiddle, guitar, double bass and a string section, these adventurous pieces draw on jazz and classical influences, as well as Scottish and world traditions. www.catrionamckay.co.uk