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Posts from the ‘Folk music’ Category

Sep 17

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Woody Guthrie in Soho

At a few minutes after eight o’clock last night, in an upstairs theatre on a Soho alley, you’d have had a job persuading me that Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” is not the greatest song produced by the 20th century. Its performance came towards the end of Woody Sez, a stage show devoted to the life and work of the great poet-troubadour of America’s working class.

David M. Lutken, a Texan actor-musician who once studied in London, devised the four-person show (with its director, Nick Corley) and was playing the part of Guthrie, his lean frame and likeable delivery making him a good fit. “Deportee”, which Guthrie wrote in 1948 after reading a newspaper report about the crash in California of a plane in which 28 migrant farm workers were being deported back to Mexico, was sung as a duet with Raquel Chavez, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more affecting version.

But it wasn’t alone as a highlight of the evening. With Lutken delivering Guthrie’s story as a between-songs first-person narrative, we were also treated to rousing versions of “Pastures of Plenty”, “Ain’t Got No Home”, “This Train Is Bound for Glory”, “Jolly Banker”, “Vigilante Man” and several others, with “This Land Is Your Land” delivered as a closing singalong.

Chavez, Nyssa Grant and David Finch took occasional lead vocals and sang harmonies while switching between a variety of instruments: duelling fiddles, mandolin, dulcimer, autoharp, string bass, penny whistle, spoons, harmonica, Jew’s harp, banjo, six- and 12-string guitars and a dobro. Their deftness and enthusiasm, and some clever stage movement, ensured that the 80-minute show never dragged.

“Deportee” may have moistened the eyes, but elsewhere there was a lot of humour and fun. It was good to be reminded of a key source of inspiration for Bob Dylan, Ry Cooder, Bruce Springsteen, Rhiannon Giddens and many more, and also of the need for resistance in times when the greed and cruelty of the vigilantes and the jolly bankers threaten the common good.

* There are further performances of Woody Sez tonight, tomorrow and Saturday (17-19 September) at Underbelly Boulevard Soho, 6 Walker’s Court, London W1F 0BT: underbellyboulevard.com

Sep 9

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Where the time went

Sandy Denny was shy, impulsive, proverbially clumsy, liked a drink a bit too well, and was loved despite her frailties and peccadilloes by all who came under the spell of her voice and her songs. She died in 1978, aged 31, after a fall at home, the promise of a songwriter capable of coming up with “Who Knows Where the Time Goes” at the age of 18 sadly unfulfilled and her solo career destined to remain the subject of regretful conjecture. For all that, she remains a great figure of British music, as successive generations continue to discover.

Although Mick Houghton’s I’ve Always Kept a Unicorn, published in 2015, is likely to remain the standard biography, a new book titled Sandy Denny: A People’s History is a most valuable addition to the record. Compiled and edited by her daughter, Georgia Rose Lucas, who was nine months old when Sandy died, it consists of oral and sometimes written testimony from dozens and dozens of those who encountered the singer at every level of engagement, from fellow members of the Strawbs, Fairport Convention and Fotheringay, studio engineers and producers to old boyfriends, college mates, students’ union social secretaries and fans who worshipped from a distance.

Of the latter class, there’s the tale told by a man called Steffan Wennerlund, who saw in a British music paper a notice saying that Fairport would be playing a garden fete at Cropredy to raise funds for the village hall roof in the summer of 1977 and jumped on a flight from Sweden. As he made his way down a path, he saw Sandy getting out of a car with her husband, Trevor Lucas. She was wearing a long white dress. He wanted to say something as she passed, but found himself tongue-tied. She didn’t perform, which disappointed him. But there was a lasting compensation: “A beautiful picture I have in my memory of Sandy coming towards me on the path, in the evening light, in her white dress.”

There is a witness to her final public performance, at Byfield village hall a couple of weeks before she died. One of an audience of about 30 people, Lou Hart heard a solo set that closed with “Who Knows Where the Times Goes”.

Dave Cousins remembers the lines he wrote in a song about her: “Every time I hear your name, my eyes moist up with years / As every word you ever sang comes ringing down the years.” Joe Boyd, not surprisingly, has a shrewd analysis: “Sandy was a very confident musician but lacked confidence as a person. She was insecure about her looks and worried that she couldn’t keep Trevor by her side without giving him power and responsibility over her career, first in Fotheringay and then as producer.”

Linda Thompson has a lovely story about spending a day with Sandy at Muriel’s, the notorious Soho drinking club. Richard Thompson remembers how Sandy always got him to change her guitar strings — “as if this was a masonic ritual beyond her powers of understanding.” Dave Pegg points out that life touring with the Fairports wasn’t easy for her: “We never made it big enough to get the limo treatment and had to stay in basic hotels. She put on a brave face and became one of the chaps most of the time.”

Simon Nicol remembers “sleeping with her”. But to get more on that episode you’ll have to read this very worthwhile book, which is also pleasingly full of photographs, posters, tickets and cuttings — the memorabilia of a tragically short but extraordinary life.

* Sandy Denny: A People’s History by Georgia Rose Lucas is published by Spenwood Books: http://www.spenwoodbooks.com

May 18

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Paul Simon at the Palladium

A couple of years ago I went to a huge show of Paul Cézanne’s paintings at Tate Modern, full of anticipation. I left feeling disappointed. Too many bowls of apples, too many Montagnes Sainte-Victoire. It was indigestible. One of each would have had more impact. The disappointment was nothing to do with Cézanne or his obsessions. For the consumer, sometimes less is more.

That was my consolation last night, leaving Paul Simon’s concert at the London Palladium at the interval, which occurred after the presentation of the complete Seven Psalms song cycle, 33 minutes long, which I wrote about when the album was released in 2023. The early departure — missing an hour and a half of what he promised would be “a bunch of hits” — was caused by the intense discomfort of sitting in the front row of the Grand Circle, the Palladium’s uppermost level. The view was wonderful; the effect of being jammed into the seat excruciating. In a sold-out house, no alternative accommodation was available.

It was, however, possible to ignore the pain for the duration of Seven Psalms, which began with the sound of cloud chamber bowls ushering in “The Lord”, whose acoustic guitar strum might, 60 years ago, have turned into a “Mrs Robinson” or a “Cecilia”. I won’t repeat what I had to say three years ago, but I will note that the pleasure was redoubled by seeing it performed live, with a wonderful band recruited for his Quiet Celebration tour: Mark Stewart and Gyan Riley on guitars, Bakithi Kumalo on bass guitar, Andy Snitzer on reeds and keyboard, Mark Rossi on piano and percussion (including cloud chamber bowls), Jamey Haddad on percussion, Matt Chamberlin on drums, Nancy Stagnita on flute, Caleb Burhans on viola and Eugene Friesen on cello.

Of course Simon’s voice is limited now in range and power, but Seven Psalms was written by a man on the verge of his ninth decade and is suffused with an awareness of mortality. Like his grey suit and black T-shirt and shoes, it was entirely age-appropriate. So that was absolutely fine — and his duets with his wife, Edie Brickell, on “The Sacred Harp” and the closing “Wait” were extraordinarily tender and touching.

I’d bought the tickets after reading an excellent review of the Glasgow show by Mark Beaumont in The Times (other fine pieces followed from Ludovic Hunter-Tilney in the FT and Kitty Empire in the Observer). Of course I had to resort to the grey market of Viagogo, which meant they were expensive. So it was hard to leave early, knowing that I’d miss a set including “Mother and Child Reunion” and “The Late Great Johnny Ace”. But I’d seen his younger self doing the hits many years ago and, anyway, the deep resonance of Seven Psalms was more than enough to absorb and contemplate on the journey home.

Apr 26

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Keeping it tight

Tiny Sun: Jonathan Goldsmith, Martina Sorbara, Don Rooke (photo: Greg Pacek)

Brevity, a friend of mine once remarked, can contain most things. Two of my favourite pieces of music are “Stay” by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs and “Desireless” by Don Cherry, which clocked in at 1 minute 36 seconds and 1 minute 22 seconds respectively on their appearances in 1960 and 1973 but lack nothing in richness and enduring fascination. Now comes a Canadian trio calling itself Tiny Sun with an album which consists of 18 pieces, none of them lasting more than two minutes.

I’m aware of Tiny Sun because their guitarist, Don Rooke, is a musician whose career I’ve followed with interest and admiration for many years through his work with Mary Margaret O’Hara and the Henrys. The other members of the line-up, all Toronto-based, are the film and TV composer Jonathan Goldsmith, who plays keyboards, guitar and bass here, and the singer Martina Sorbara, better known as Dragonette for her electropop work.

By contrast with the scale of these miniatures, the gestation of the album was protracted. Tiny Sun began when Rooke sent Sorbara one of several “postcard-sized” pieces of instrumental music he had recorded with Goldsmith and invited her to complete it. That was in 2014, and the pieces have been accumulating ever since.

There are echoes of folk music here, and country music, blended into something always familiar but never classifiable. Sorbara is a wonderfully flexible and expressive singer; the range of material reveals her fine technique and highlights her subtle switches of emotional register. At times I was reminded of the underrated Karla Bonoff. She makes me wonder what there must be in the water of Ontario to produce her as well as MMO’H and Tamara Lindeman. Rooke’s gentle mastery of various guitars — including his beloved Weissenborn lap steel — is employed with his usual economy and immaculate feeling for the moment. Goldsmith supplies transparent textures and warm colours that give each piece its own distinctive atmosphere, holding the shards of emotion that comprise Sorbara’s lyrics in elegant suspension.

Needless to say, nothing outstays its welcome. The conciseness adds point to the soulfulness of “Imagined Love”, the bright bluegrass of “Don’t Fault the Stars for Falling”, the rubato flow of “Fledgling Land”, the unexpected junkyard grunge of “Hieroglyphics”, the delicate balladry of “Silly Way the World Got Spun”, the diaphanous waltz of “Float on the Sea”, and the wry reverie of “Nobody Won’t”. Less is more, it’s sometimes said, and here’s proof.

* Tiny Sun’s album is on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/33kB8m7192adroRg69n4bA They play their debut concert, with guest musicians, at Koerner Hall in Toronto on May 14.

Nov 14

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Young but daily growing

“It was difficult to tell what song he wrote and what song he didn’t write, because sometimes I noticed that he said he wrote a song and he didn’t, and other times I thought he didn’t write a song and he did.“

Those words have been in my head while listening to the eight CDs and 139 tracks of Through the Open Window, the 18th volume of Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series, which arrived a couple of weeks ago. A quote from his boyhood friend John Bucklen, it’s a perceptive early observation about Dylan’s approach to making music: a process of listening, absorbing, blending, modifying and recombining in which borrowed and created materials become one and become new. For him, that’s been a permanent process since he first tuned in to the radio and heard Little Richard.

This new set covers his early years. It begins in 1956 with a 15-year-old schoolboy in Minnesota, taping songs with his pals, and ends in 1963, when he’s standing on the stage at Carnegie Hall, in front of a full house, a 22-year-old at the apogee of his first incarnation, feeling the warm glow of real fame.

I don’t know whether or not it’s the “best” volume of the series to date, but it certainly fills me with a powerful set of emotions. While listening to it, I sent an old friend a message saying that it made me realise how lucky I’d been to live my life alongside his. I’m six years younger than Dylan, so I was 16 when I first heard Freewheelin’ in 1963; for members of my generation who discovered him early, he’s been a unique kind of companion, and still is. Through the Open Window does a good job of showing how that came about.

Over about eight hours, we see continuous progression, evolution, growth. We hear Dylan honing his art as an interpreter of the hellhound-haunted blues (a clenched “Baby Please Don’t Go”, “Fixin’ to Die”, “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean”), hooking his young boho audiences with protest ballads based on specific stories (the incendiary “Emmett Till”, the rousing “Davey Moore”, the plodding “Donald White”), playing harmonica with blues elders Victoria Spivey and Big Joe Williams on Spivey’s album Three Kings and a Queen, practising singing in an older person’s voice and inhabiting traditional material with an astonishing level of empathy (“Young But Daily Growing”, “House Carpenter”, “Moonshiner”, the transcendent 1962 Gaslight version of “Barbara Allen”), and carefully building his own legend (“Bob Dylan’s Blues”, “Bob Dylan’s Dream”, “Bob Dylan’s New York Rag”).

You hear how the droning blues jams — and perhaps the influence of John Lee Hooker, with whom he shared the bill at his first significant New York booking, at Gerdes Folk City in April 1961 — inform a certain strand of songs he soon began to write: “The Ballad of Hollis Brown”, “North Country Blues”, “Masters of War”. Songs about bleak, blasted landscapes, both external and internal. When I listened to those songs in 1963-64, I’m sure that somewhere in my mind I was making a connection with what John Coltrane was doing at the same time. Not a literal connection; something beyond that, to do with stretching structures to fit the times we were living in. A year later, and just beyond the time-frame of this set, that strand of songwriting would lead Dylan to the unsurpassable achievement of “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”.

All this comes through loud and clear on a set thoughtfully assembled by the writer Sean Wilentz (who contributes an impeccable essay to the accompanying hardback book) and the veteran producer Steve Berkowitz, particularly in the performances recorded in friends’ homes and small clubs. We hear Dylan trying things out: using humour to beguile his listeners, sometimes telling tall stories to embellish his myth but also unafraid to acknowledge his sources. Introducing “Tomorrow Is a Long Time” — still a work in progress — into a tape recorder at the home of his friend Dave Whitaker in Minneapolis in August 1962, he seems to drop his guard: “My girlfriend, she’s in Europe right now, she’s sailed on a boat over there and she’ll be back September 1st, but till she’s back I never go home and it gets kind of bad sometimes. Sometimes ir gets bad, most times it’s doesn’t. But I wrote this specially thinking about that.”

Suze Rotolo, the “girlfriend” in question, is a presence in many of these songs. She was also an unheard presence in the tender version of “Handsome Molly” recorded at Riverside Church on the Saturday afternoon in July 1961, which is when they first met (“He comes from Gallup, New Mexico,” the MC tell us). The accompanying book contains some lovely outtakes from Don Hunstein’s Freewheelin’ cover shoot in the snow on Jones Street to go with the outtakes from the recording sessions; an astounding “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie” seems to be setting him off on the path that led a dozen years later to “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”.

A few of the selections are notable more for their historical interest than their musical value, which is fine. They’d include the very first track, a snatch of Shirley and Lee’s “Let the Good Times Roll” recorded with Bob on piano and his friends Larry Keegan and Howard Rutman joining him on vocals in a St Paul music shop in 1956; the surviving fragment of “The Ballad of the Gliding Swan” from his first visit to London in early 1963, engaged to appear in the TV play Madhouse on Castle Street for the BBC; and the versions of “Only a Pawn in Their Game” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” performed at the SNCC voter registration rally in Greenwood, Mississippi in the summer of 1963.

The live recordings include extended extracts from his most significant early New York concerts, including the poorly attended Carnegie Chapter Hall on November 4, 1961 and the sold-out Town Hall show on April 12, 1963. It all leads — and I firmly recommend listening to the set in sequence — to two CDs devoted to the complete Carnegie Hall concert of October 26, 1963, in which the dimensions of his talent are fully revealed.

He comes to the concert while putting the finishing touches to his third album, The Times They Are A-Changin’, which won’t be released for another three months. So the audience is unfamiliar with some of these songs. He hits them straight off with the title song, then “Hollis Brown”, “Boots of Spanish Leather”, “North Country Blues”. There are great new songs that won’t be officially released: “Lay Down Your Weary Tune”, “Seven Curses”, “Percy’s Song”, “Walls of Red Wing”. When he talks, he’s charming and confident and tells some funny stories and in this formal setting he achieves the kind of audience rapport he’d worked hard to establish at the Gaslight or Gerdes, drawing sympathetic laughter when he has trouble with his microphone and mid-song applause when, in “Davey Moore”, he sings about boxing being banned by the new Cuban government (temporarily, as it turned out).

And he finishes with this sequence: “With God on Our Side”, “Only a Pawn in Their Game”, “Masters of War” (that one being from Freewheelin’, of course), “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” and “When the Ship Comes In”. Just imagine hearing four of those songs for the first time in that climactic five-song fusillade of rage and revelation. The controlled intensity of his delivery comes through as powerfully as it must have done that night. It’s electrifying, even at more than 60 years’ distance.

Here are some lines he wrote as part of a long poem for the sleeve of Peter, Paul and Mary’s album In the Wind, the one that included “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”, “Quit Your Lowdown Ways” and “Blowin’ in the Wind”, released in 1963:

Snow was piled up the stairs an onto the street that first winter when I laid around New York City / It was a different street then — / It was a different village — / Nobody had nothin / There was nothin t get / Instead a being drawn for money you were drawn / for other people —

It is ‘f these times I think about now — / I think back t one a them nites when the doors was locked / an maybe thirty or forty people sat as close t the stage as they could / It was another nite past one o clock an that meant that the tourists on the street couldn’t get in — / At these hours there was no tellin what was bound t happen — / Never never could the greatest prophesizor guess it — / There was not such a thing as an audience — / There was not such a thing as performers — / Everybody did somethin / An had somethin to say about somethin —

Most of all him. And it’s all here.

Sep 25

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Danny Thompson 1939-2025

The first time I saw Danny Thompson, he was playing with Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated at the Dungeon Club in Nottingham. This would have been the spring of 1965. I must have liked his playing a lot because I got him to autograph a paperback copy of Nat Hentoff’s The Jazz Life that I happened to be carrying that night.

A couple of years later I saw him with the Pentangle, a band that to my ears never equalled the sum of its parts. It was his long-standing partnership with John Martyn that brought out his best, whether racing alongside the effects-driven guitar on “I’d Rather Be the Devil” or adding a darkly poetic arco line to “Spencer the Rover”.

Danny, whose death at the age of 86 was announced this week, was a member of a generation of great double bassists who emerged in and around the British jazz scene in the ’60s. If you wanted to line them up in some kind of taxonomy of interests and instincts across a spectrum of the music with which they were associated, starting with folk and proceeding to contemporary classical, it would probably go something like this: Danny, Ron Matthewson, Dave Green, Jeff Clyne, Harry Miller, Dave Holland, Chris Laurence, Barry Guy. Obviously that’s not everyone.

Danny was the Charlie Haden of British bassists, his playing warm and deep-toned, as rooted in folk modes as Haden was in bluegrass music, but just as capable of dealing with the most advanced and abstract forms.

Maybe the best way to celebrate his life is to listen to Whatever, the album he recorded for Joe Boyd’s Hannibal label in 1987. It finds him with a trio completed by two relatively unsung heroes of the scene, the wonderful Tony Roberts on assorted reeds, flutes and whistles and the terrific guitarist Bernie Holland.

I remember giving it an enthusiastic review in The Times, commending its highly evolved fusion of folk materials and jazz techniques. It’s a little bit like a British version of Jimmy Giuffre’s Train and the River trio, unafraid of the bucolic and the open-hearted.

Most of the pieces are credited as joint compositions but some are arrangements of traditional pieces, such as “Swedish Dance”, which opens with a bass solo rich in disciplined emotion before moving into an ensemble workout on a light-footed tune whose complex rhythms are made to sound as charming as a children’s song. The stately melody of “Lovely Joan” is delivered by Roberts on a set of Northumbrian pipes — mellower than their Scottish or Irish equivalents — before he switches to soprano saxophone for an intricate conversation with Holland’s nimble acoustic picking and Thompson’s firmly grounded bass. Of the originals, “Minor Escapade” adds elements of the classic John Coltrane Quartet to this trio’s distinctive approach.

Not having played it for some years, I’d forgotten what a truly exhilarating album it is. Now it’ll be at the top of the pile for some time to come, adding the sparkle and freshness of its understated virtuosity to the room. RIP, Danny.

* The photo of Danny Thompson is from the cover of Whatever and was taken by Nick White.

Jun 18

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‘The Ballad of Wallis Island’

It’s a phenomenon you don’t hear a lot about because it’s slightly embarrassing, but many top artists play ludicrously well-paid private gigs for rich people. In the business such shows are known, with a suitable lack of poetry, as “corporates”. The Ballad of Wallis Island is about one such engagement, in which a slightly barmy middle-aged widower uses his lottery-jackpot winnings to persuades a British folk-pop duo, long acrimoniously sundered, to reunite for a single gig at his home on a small Welsh island, at which the audience will consist of him alone.

Tim Key plays the widower with gentle charm. He wrote the story and the screenplay with Tom Basden, who plays the male half of the duo with a barely suppressed resentment at his treatment by the music business. His erstwhile partner is played by Carey Mulligan, who manages to be both beatific and beady-eyed and turns up from Portland, Oregon, where she makes chutney, with her American husband, played by Akemnji Ndifornyen (who doesn’t say much but, close to the end, has the film’s most striking speech).

I saw it the other night and came out of the cinema having been charmed to bits by the whole thing but particularly struck by a scene in which the spectre of the duo’s former romantic engagement is evoked, summoning a sudden irruption of old artistic jealousies and resentments, all unresolved. It reminded me of so many music business stories. And the songs we hear, written by Basden, are very precisely not-quite-good-enough, making you understand how, in a different era, the duo could have enjoyed a brief, perhaps almost accidental popularity without managing to turn it into anything more substantial.

Apparently the film, directed by James Griffiths, cost just over a million and a half dollars to make. There should be many more like it: modest in scope and scale, formally unadventurous but intellligent, witty and well made, and aimed at no particular niche. Go and see it; you won’t be wasting your time.

* The Ballad of Wallis Island came out at the end of May and is still in cinemas. The photo shows Carey Mulligan and Tom Basden.

Apr 5

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Stories old and new

“That was a young man’s song,” Paul Brady said as the applause began to fade at the Bush Hall last night. He’d just sung “Nothing But the Same Old Story”, written at the start of the 1980s to inhabit the world of a narrator who’d arrived in London from Ireland as a teenager looking for work and confronted by hostility in the time of the Troubles: “Living under suspicion / Putting up with the hatred and fear in their eyes…” It’s a song of resistance, one to drink and dance and cry to, and although only a few weeks from turning 78, Brady invested it with all its original innocence and rage.

This was the second of his two nights in Shepherd’s Bush, and he talked a little about how, arriving from Ireland as a member of a folk quartet called the Johnstons in 1969, they’d settled into a flat close by. He spoke fondly of how he’d learned from traditional musicians at pub sessions in west and north London.

I hadn’t seen him live since a gig at the Half Moon in Putney in 1981, when I was blown away by the material from his second solo album, Hard Station. Since then he’s had great success as a songwriter, his work recorded by Bonnie Raitt, Tina Turner and others. But today you can put him on stage alone with a guitar, a mandolin and a keyboard, and it’s the same old storyteller, now with a bit more of a growl but with wit and warmth and enough edge to lift you from your seat.

Sometimes, as in the gorgeous “Wheel of Heartbreak” and “The Long Goodbye”, he seemed like the most accomplished of adult rockers. During “Mother and Son” and “Follow On” (“a dark song that ended up in a butter commercial”) I started thinking that maybe what he was was a modern chansonnier, in the mould of Léo Ferré or Julien Clerc. And then there were the traditional songs that harked back to his time with the Johnstons and Planxty: the brilliant mandolin work on “The Jolly Soldier”, the sheer historical weight beneath the lilt of “Arthur McBride”.

The shows were arranged to greet the release of Paul Brady: The Archive, a four-CD, 63-track set of demos, one-off collaborations (with Dolores O’Riordan, Cara Dillon and Carole King, for example), interesting alternative versions of most of his best-known songs, and other fascinating bits and pieces, copiously illustrated with tickets, posters, photos and newspaper cuttings.

Curiously, the first two CDs begin with two songs that he didn’t write, both from the 1960s, which express polar opposites of the spirit of the time. One is the lovely hippie anthem “Get Together”, written by the American musician best known as Dino Valenti and containing a line I’ve never wanted to get out of my head: “We are but a moment’s sunlight / Fading in the grass.” Brady recorded it in 1999 for a set of songs associated with Greenwich Village in the ’60s, and his is a beautiful version, which he reprised last night. The other is “Gimme Shelter”, a song of a very different complexion: his treatment, recorded in 2009 with Bob Thiele Jr’s Forest Rangers for a TV series, Sons of Anarchy, loses nothing by comparison with the Stones’ original.

Those are among the many treasures in the box set. I’m still absorbing it, but I can say that the version of “Paddy’s Lamentation” for voice, piano, tin whistle and military drums, recorded in Dublin in 1980 for a long-vanished compilation album, might alone be worth the 50 quid.

Brady came back for an encore last night and of course it was “The Lakes of Pontchartrain”, the song he recorded in 1978 on his first solo album, Welcome Here Kind Stranger, and which he later taught to Bob Dylan. It’s a traditional song, but it’s his really, and The Archive has a fine version in Gaelic, translated by Prionnsias O’Maonaigh: “Bruach Loch Pontchartrain”.

Last night he sang it in English and gestured to us to sing the last two lines of the final verse with him, acappella: “So fare thee well my bonny o’ girl l’ll never see no more / But I’ll ne’er forget your kindness and the cottage by the shore…” Every heart melted, all over again.

* Paul Brady: The Archive is released by The Last Music Company: http://www.lastmusic.co.uk

Jan 17

4 Comments

The Bob look

In her 2008 memoir, A Freewheelin’ Time, Suze Rotolo described how Bob Dylan, her boyfriend between 1961 and 1964, developed his look. Apparently it was Dave Van Ronk, a slightly older Greenwich Village folkie, who urged the 21-year-old Dylan to start paying attention to his image.

In Rotolo’s words: “Such things might have been talked about in jest, but in truth they were taken quite seriously. Much time was spent in front of the mirror trying on one wrinkled article of clothing after another, until it all came together to look as if Bob had just gotten up and thrown something on. Image meant everything. Folk music was taking hold of a generation and it was important to get it right, including the look — be authentic, be cool, and have something to say.”

The result was the transfixing sight of Dylan and Rotolo wrapped around each other on the cover of Freewheelin’ in 1963. If you were, say, 16 years old at the time, Don Hunstein’s shot of the couple on Jones Street in Greenwich Village opened up a whole world, and his suede jacket, denim shirt, jeans and boots seemed to offer an easy way in. If you could get hold of them, that is. And now, just six decades later, the Financial Times is telling you how. What you see above is a guide, published in its HTSI (How to Spent It) magazine, showing you to how to look like Bob Dylan.

It’s pegged to the release of A Complete Unknown, James Mangold’s film of Dylan’s life between 1961 and 1965, and it made me laugh quite a lot, for several reasons. The polka-dot shirt they recommend is black and white, which is how it looked in the monochrome photos from the soundcheck at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965; the real thing was green and white — and it was actually a blouse rather than a shirt (the film gets that right). And have you ever seen Dylan in white loafers, never mind 700-quid ones by Manolo Blahnik? The black leather blazer they recommend retails at £4,270. Mine cost a fiver in 1964 from the harmonica player in our band, who was skint at the time and needed rent money. I wish I still had it.

But it’s not just a matter of looking like Bob Dylan. You can try to sound like him, too. The rock critic of The Times went off to the vocal coach who did such good work with Timothée Chalamet in order to try and achieve that distinctive nasal whine. Again it sent me back to 1964 and sitting in my bedroom, strumming an acoustic guitar acquired very cheaply from a girl called Celia and bellowing the words of “The Times They Are A-Changin'” loud enough for my blameless parents to hear: “Come mothers and fathers throughout the land / And don’t criticise what you can’t understand / Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command…”

That was in real time. So was the £5 leather jacket. It was all part of growing up and finding out who you were, and it seems weird now to watch people turn it into a novelty, however good the cause.

As it happens, I enjoyed A Complete Unknown a lot, with only a very few reservations. When Chalamet-as-Dylan sings “The Times They Are A-Changin'” to a festival crowd, Mangold orchestrates the audience’s response in a way that precisely evokes how it felt to experience that song in 1964, with all the emotion of realising that it spoke for you. It was a relief to come out of the screening with the knowledge that I wouldn’t have to be explaining to younger people that it really wasn’t like that at all. Mostly, it was.

Oct 21

5 Comments

Other sounds 4: ‘Za Górami’

Ladino is a language spoken by Sephardic Jews, with its origins in medieval Spanish, Hebrew and Aramaic. In her wonderful book Ornament of the World, subtitled “How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain”, María Rosa Menocal describes it and its equally Romance language-based Muslim equivalent, Aljamiado, as not just “languages of exile and persecution” but as “quixotically defiant memory palaces”.

Five traditional Ladino songs are included in Za Górami, a new album by Alice Zawadzki, Fred Thomas and Misha Mullov-Abbado, providing a kind of structure for the 11-track sequence featuring Zawadski’s voice, violin and viola, Mullov-Abbado’s double bass and Thomas’s piano, drums and vielle (a fiddle favoured by French troubadours between the 11th and 13th centuries). The remainder of the programme consists of songs taken from a variety of sources.

Here’s what the three London-based musicians say, in a jointly authored sleeve note: “Collected on our travels and taughgt to us by our friends, these are songs we have learnt and loved together. Though our musical and cultural backgrounds encompass Europe, Russia and South America, we were all three born in England. This happenstance was the product of love, war, exile, the arbitrariness of borders and the yearning for a new life.” All those themes, they say, are woven through the songs.

Za Górami is Polish for “behind the mountains”. Other songs come from Argentina (Gustavo Santaolalla’s “Suéltate Las Cintas”), Venezuela (Simón Diaz’s “Tonada De Luna Llena”) and medieval France (“Je Suis Trop Jeunette”). “Gentle Lady” is Fred Thomas’s setting of a text by James Joyce: “Gentle lady, do not sing / Sad songs about the end of love / Lay aside sadness and sing / How love that passes is enough.”

Recorded in Lugano and produced by Manfred Eicher, the music could be said to be a perfect manifesto for the ECM philosophy: the creation of a frontierless chamber music based on the instincts and practices of jazz but entirely porous in its acceptance of other cultures and idioms.

The Ladino lyrics are interesting for their closeness to more familiar languages: “Arvoles lloran por lluvias / Y montañas por aire / Ansi lloran los mis ojos / Por tí querido amante” translates as “The trees weep for rain / And the mountains for air / So weep my eyes / For you, my love.” That’s the closing track, a restrained lament consisting of three haiku-like verses that concludes: “I turn and ask — what will become of me? / I will die in foreign lands.” These are lieder for a modern world in which echoes of the past are inescapable.

If, as it happens, nothing here sounds much like jazz, it couldn’t exist without jazz, either. The clarity and subtle shadings of Zawadzki’s soprano, the handsomely shaped bass sound and calm phrasing of Mullov-Abbado, and Thomas’s reflective piano and subtle percussion work together to create a pan-national music in which elegance, economy and ardour are held in perfect balance. In its quiet way, this is one of the year’s outstanding albums.

* Za Górami is out now on the ECM label: the trio will perform at Kings Place on November 23 as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival. The photo of Mullov-Abbado, Zawadzki and Thomas is by Monika Jakubowska.

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