Reviews

Wizz Jones

Wizz Jones really is extraordinary. Along with Davey Graham he was one of the pioneering English acoustic guitar wizards of the 1960s, influencing that whole Jansch/ Renbourn/ Carthy generation and beyond (yes, people like Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Keith Richards and Rod Stewart too, by all accounts). By the end of that decade he’d crystallised his unmistakeable style – fingerpicking powered by a sturdy, bouncing Big Bill Broonzy thumb or a driving flatpicking inspired at the knees of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott & Derroll Adams in the late 1950s. And the remarkable thing is that he’s still playing with as much fire these days at the age of 72, his youthful voice on this album almost unchanged from four or five decades ago. If he’d made this album at any point in the last 40-plus years it would have sounded just as good. I can’t think of anybody else remotely like him.

Recorded live at a private gathering in Huldenberg, Brussels in 2006 (actually the audio from a video made of the evening, though the sparkling, intimate sound quality wouldn’t tell you that), this is almost the perfect introduction for newcomers to the legendary him, but will be treasured by long-term fans too. Those there on the night were clearly having an appreciative ball – at one point there’s the unmistakeable sound of a Dave Evans heckle!

As the album title hints, it’s got a focus on his Anglicised blues (Broonzy’s Hey Hey and Blind Lemon’s Shuckin’ Sugar, Mississippi John Hurt’s Got The Blues Can’t Be Satisfied, Blind Willie Johnson’s Keep Your Lamp Trimmed & Burning, Blind Boy Fuller’s Corinne – as heard on this issue’s fRoots 38 album). But it also has a good sampling of his characterful reworkings of songs by others like Ewan MacColl, his ‘personal songwriter’ Alan Tunbridge (National Seven, See How The Time Is Flying and the criminally ignored Massacre At Beziers which ought to be much more widely taken up) and just one of his own, the moving Burma Star about his dad. Wizz writes rarely, but when he does they’re invariably killers.

Why Wizz Jones isn’t an international folk hero and recipient of all the Lifetime Achievement Awards going is almost impossible to fathom, other than because of his modest self-effacing nature. Word from the powers that be at Radio 2 is that he won’t ever get one because he isn’t a household name. Well, play the arse off this record and make him one then – on this form, there’s no excuse at all. Let’s hear it for old four-eyes!
• www.sunbeamrecords.com | Buy from Amazon.co.uk

The wish-fulfilment doomsayers are out there pronouncing the imminent death of the physical record again. Clearly nobody has told Dust-To-Digital, who carry the ‘if you’re going to do something, do it properly’ philosophy to mind-boggling extremes. And clearly nobody has told their delighted customers either, since the label is able to keep putting ‘em out in ever-increasing glory.

If there’s been a more deserving winner of our Critics’ Poll ‘Best Packaged Album’ category, then I can’t think of it. Opika Pende comes in a 15 x 20cm red cloth-bound slipcase, and in it you’ll find a sturdy double gatefold casing for the four CDs, and a beau­ti­fully printed 112-page paperback book on art paper. The latter is full of historic photos, vintage artwork and phono-memorabilia, plus in-depth notes on every single one of the 100 tracks included. If you’ve ever come across the remarkable Excavated Shellac web site, you’ll know what to expect in terms of fascinating commentary by co-compiler Jonathan Ward. Frankly, if you’re the slightest bit interested in roots music from around the world, you’d want a copy on sight, regardless, before you even heard the music. But then you’re into icing: most of the 78s have never been re-issued before, the quality of transfers to digital is superb, and the music itself – recorded from 1909 right up until the 1960s – is fabulous. There are so many gems that it’s pointless even to begin listing them, and chances are that the names of the artists won’t mean anything to you anyway: I could write an essay listing numerous discoveries and highlights but the book does that for you. Unreservedly recommended.
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Unknown musician, traces obliterated…

So if you thought that one was an irresistible artefact, wait until you see …I Listen To The Wind That Obliterates My Traces: Music In Vernacular Photographs 1880 – 1955. This one’s a 184-page 17 x 22cm hardback book with a CD in each cover and, apart from a literary essay by compiler/ collector Steve Roden, it is indeed full of vintage, vernacular photographs of musicians and record playing devices from “tintypes, ambrotypes, cabinet cards, real photo postcards, albumen prints, and turn-of-the-century snapshots”, all so beautifully reproduced in their rich sepias on heavy matt art paper that they make you gasp. Here’s a one-armed one-man-band; here’s a trio playing an orchestra of tuned wine glasses; here’s a man with a stack of canary cages in front of a recording horn; here are black guitarists, white fiddlers, old time bands, accordeonists, a harp guitarist, an impossibly wasp-waisted lady with a parlour guitar. It’s so full of atmosphere, it pulls you back a century just like that, into a daze of old-time steampunk vaudeville and rural weirdness. And then you put the CDs on and again, they couldn’t be better: 51 tracks of old vernacular American music (1925 – 1955) from more beautifully transferred 78s – early country, traditional songs, blues, gospel, Hawaiian; mostly commercial recordings (though very few familiar) but also some unidentified amateur ones and all interspersed with spooky sound effects recordings – weather, geese, walking on ice, night noises. You play the several hours of sound and you’re still turning the tactile pages, mesmerised. MP3s and PDFs can’t do this…
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Against those two, Baby How Can It Be (subtitled Songs Of Love, Lust And Contempt From The 1920s And 1930s) is relatively cheapskate, comprising as it does a mere quadruple gatefold digipak with a 12-page booklet containing great graphics but hardly any notes. Of course, by any other label’s standards it’s a luxury product, but whereas the previous pair are high-end works of art, this one’s ‘merely’ just about entertainment, corralling 66 vintage vaudeville, jazz, blues and old time band performances into three CD-themed zones. Lots of more familiar names are to be found here – Bo Carter, Fletcher Henderson, Dan Sullivan’s Shamrock Band, Henry Thomas, Uncle Dave Macon, Frank Stokes, Ukulele Ike, Cab Calloway, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lowe Stokes and Fiddlin’ John Carson to mention just a few – you get my drift. The Lust CD peaks – or troughs, depending on your viewpoint and relationship to Mary Whitehouse! – with Harry Roy & His Bat Club Boys’ tongue-in-entendre My Girl’s Pussy. Which is, of course, about a cat…

None of these is cheap, nor should they be. This is stuff to treasure for life, to have and to hold. Only physical records and books can do this and long may Dust-To-Digital do them this well.
• www.dust-digital.com | UK distribution by Cargo | Buy from Amazon.co.uk

La Chiva Gantiva

A grand musical tour of Euro roots globe­trotters, all with a pleasing edge. First stop: Belgium. La Chiva Gantiva hail from Brussels and are made up of a trio of Colombians, plus French, Walloon, Flemish and Vietnamese musicians. A right old cultural melting pot then, but their core sound is Colombian, their open-minded, raw sensibility Belgian (think of Think of One and Jaune Toujours). Producer Richard Blair (the Brit behind the equally Colombia-centric Sidestepper project from a decade or so back) has fashioned their wayward combination of rock, funk, jazz and South American rhythms into a coherent whole, marked out by stabs of brass, Filipe Decker’s choppy guitar lines and the rapid-fire declamatory vocals of Rafael Espinel. Well worth a listen and quite probably even better live – hear a track on this issue’s fRoots 38 album.
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Next we move on to Italy, the central region of Romagna to be precise, home to the 15-piece Banda Olifante, who take the Italian brass tradition and kick it all over the planet, on this their second album (have to say I missed the first). Jazz, Caribbean, Mexican, klezmer, Middle Eastern and West African sounds are all featured at some point. Klezmatics’ saxman Matt Darriau pops up on a couple of tracks. Malian Mamadou Diabate’s kora ripples through Le Chemin Du Griot and the massed brass tone things down accordingly. Elsewhere, brassy butt is most definitely kicked. Very much on the jazzy end of the Italian brass band spectrum, with a strong emphasis on social concerns, but the abundance of gutsy playing and catchy melodies mean it never gets close to sounding po-faced or noodlesome.
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And finally to France. Chet Nuneta are a quartet of female singers and a token bloke on percussion, who take songs from all kinds of vocal traditions and go entertainingly nuts with them. At first, listening to this album was a bit like one of those banquets where the tasty courses keep on coming but you get too full to appreciate them after a while. It was as though they’d thrown open an atlas, stuck a pin in the page at random and sung from whichever tradition they’d happened to land on: China, Bulgaria, the Arab world, Congo, Armenia… then conjured up touches of reggae, blues, folk or Indian influences, with just a little percussion, some muted piano or the pluck of a lone stringed instrument. However on subsequent listens I experienced no audio indigestion. Sometimes the vocals get a little too wild for their own good, although that’s sort of the point I suppose and this is a highly entertaining collection of full-throated harmony singing and creative invention. Again, hear a track on fRoots 38.
• www.lechantdumonde.com | Buy from Amazon.co.uk

Correct me if I am wrong, but this century, prior to The Unbroken Surface of Snow (2011), the sum total of Andrew Cronshaw’s recorded output would seem to be On The Shoulders Of The Great Bear (2000) and Ochre (2004) and appearing as part of that Tanz&FolkFest Rudolstadt’s Magic Zither project on TFF Rudolstadt 2004 (2004). The speed at which he knocks out albums is reminiscent of the Aesopian hare-free, carefree, unhurried tortoise.

On four of The Unbroken Surface Of Snow’s five pieces, Tigran Aleksanyan joins him playing duduk. Brought to wider attention in the west by Armenian maestro Djivan Gasparyan, this double-reeded woodwind’s mournfulness has popped up in Avatar, Blood Diamond, Gladiator, Hotel Rwanda, The Passion Of The Christ and Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End. For the Hollywood sausage machine duduk is just another spot colour or sonic effect which, overused, can come perilously close to stalking no-brainer cliché territory. Cronshaw and Aleksanyan skilfully avoid the pitfalls to paint duduk frescos of startling variety and wit.

The album’s opening tracks, Käärme and Fujaruk, are duos and the album’s only studio recordings. Käärme, an exceptional calling-card, is a colloquy between Cronshaw’s zither, drone, kantele, whistle, reed pipe and ba-wu and Aleksanyan’s duduk. They rein out its slow-release movements to maximum minimalist effect, as they do on the live Im Hogutz, the 12-minute concluding track. Fujaruk is a far shorter exchange between Cronshaw’s fujara (long shepherd’s pipe) and duduk. Cronshaw’s live solo revisiting of the dreamy and elegant Mhàiri Mhìn Mheall-Shùileach (pronounced ‘VA-ri, veen, VYELL-hoolach’, he helps), also known as Gentle Dark-eyed Mary, is everything that this head holds to be Cronshawian. It is his equivalent of Hamza El Din’s Escalay (Water Wheel), a consummate piece of instrumental story-telling in steady growth.

The fifth track is The Unbroken Surface Of Snow itself. It acts as the album’s centrepiece, too. At almost 35 minutes, it is an epic journey creating the effect of suspending time with him on zither, Ian Blake on soprano sax and bass clarinet, and Aleksanyan on duduk. Sanna Kurki-Suonia adds a Karelian Finnish vocal section to complete this otherwise instrumental album. Music of snowflake-like singularity.
• www.cloudvalley.com | Buy from Amazon.co.uk

Various: Rangapang: Pre-revolutionary Iranian Pop (VampiSoul VAMPICD138)
As kitsch as knitted hotpants – actually there are some of those in the package – this has pretty much no roots relevance though it reflects geography in the way it looks in several directions, straddling a strange tinny geo-pop borderline between ‘swinging London’, early disco and proto-Bollywood. You can guess why zealous Ayatollahs wanted none of it. A work of impressive dedication: 2 CDs, in depth packaging, period photos to scorch your eyeballs. You may want one on sight but you’ll probably not play it a lot unless an Iranian exile of a certain age.

Various : South African Women With A Voice/ South African Women With A Voice Chapter 2 (Skip 9066-2 / 9078-2).
Gruesome middle-of-the road sub-jazz/soul, often with drum machines, by South African ‘divas’. They must have tried hard to find such unrepresentative supper-club naffity by the likes of the Mahotella Queens and a desperately off-key Miriam Makeba track. www.skiprecords.com

Various Artists : The Blues (Charly/Vee Jay SNAX629CD)
The seminal city blues LP that was in every UK early adopter’s collection in the ‘60s, expanded to two CDs with more related and locally-influential tracks from the likes of Jimmy Reed, John Lee Hooker, Elmore James, Billy Boy Arnold etc. Nice hardback package keeps the period theme too. www.snappermusic.co.uk

Kepa Junkera & Melonious Quartet : Fandango: Provença Sessions (Hirire HR002).
Kepa’s trikitixa melodeon with the two mandolins, mandola and mandocello of the Quartet – Patrick Vaillant, Thomas Bienabe, Patrick Osowiecki and Jean-Louis Ruf – in new arrangements of 14 of his tunes. Ingenious, skilfully smart playing, but best taken track by track; as an album it blurs into a mass of intricacy. UK distributor www.discovery-records.com