Salut! Folk

Andrew Curry writes: The end of the year is always a good time to catch up on music that you might have missed during the year, and to help with that, we’re going to run a quick series here between now and the end of the year having a quick look at the nine records that were shortlisted for the inaugural Folk Albums of the Year Awards this year. The Awards were run by Sound Roots and the podcaster Folk on Foot. 

We’ve randomised the nine artists and records into three groups of three, in the hope that there will be something for everyone in each of the three posts. In Part 1, Shimli, by the Welsh act cynefin; Turnstone, by the Gigspanner Big Band; and Curlew’s Cry. The format will be the same for each record: a short introduction to the performer, followed by an equally short introduction to the record, and, youtube depending, a video of one of the tracks from the record.

Since Matthew Bannister has interviewed all of these artists as part of the Awards programme, we’ll also include a link to the Folk on Foot segment about each artist.

Shimli, by cynefin

Cynefin is a Welsh word that is approximately untranslatable into English, and also includes some linguistic traps for the unwary English speaker. The ‘C’ is a hard ‘c’, and the ‘f’ pronounces as a ‘v’ in English, so phonetically the name of the band is ‘Kuh-nev-in’. It’s approximately untranslatable because Welsh has a much stronger sense of place than English does.

At its simplest, it means ‘habitat’, but it goes deeper, and “evokes the profound nature of the relationship between the individual and the land”, carrying with it a sense of “rootedness”—temporal, physical, cultural or spiritual.

As a musical project, cynefin is the brainchild of Owen Shiers, who describes himself on the website as a “Welsh folk singer, researcher, grain grower and cultural historian”, and the reason I have spent time on the definition of the word is that Shiers didn’t choose it at random. He sees the music as being part of a wider project—maybe even a political project—to preserve and make visible the threatened linguistic and musical culture of Ceredgion in west Wales, where he lives. Shimli is his second record. As he says on his website:

[T]he album takes its title from the now obsolete West Walian practice of all night musical and poetic vigils which used to take place in mills and workshops… [T]he album explores the intersection between music, poetry, food and the natural world.

It is, he says, “a stake in the ground for the diverse and the disappearing in our age of homogenisation and mass amnesia.”

So, of course, all of these tracks are in Welsh, and as far as I can tell represent stories and music from the Welsh tradition, many drawing on Welsh poems and stories. I should also says that these are all lovely, rich, songs; Shiers has a good voice and good guitar technique, and arrangements and production are well-judged. There’s a good introduction to Shimli at KLOFmag, which also recommends the physical copy of the CD, which comes with a detailed and well-designed bilingual booklet that, it says, feels “like an historical artefact”.

And here’s the link to the Folk on Foot interview with Owen Shiers/ cynefin:

https://overcast.fm/+AAOAK2Wz55M

Turnstone, by the Gigspanner Big Band

The Gigspanner Big Band is maybe not that big by the standards of a jazz big band, since it includes six musicians: Peter Knight on violin, Roger Flack on guitar, Sacha Trochet on drums, Hannah Martin on violin, banjo and guitar, Philip Henry on dobro and harmonica, and Jon Spiers on melodeon.

That said, this line up manages to produce a big enough sound.

The band (as plain old Gigspanner) started out as a three-piece—Knight, Flack, and Trochet—but expanded to the big version after Martin and Henry, who also play as the duo ‘Edgelarks’ joined, along with Jon Spiers.

One of the things I like about them is that they’re an intergenerational band. Peter Knight is in his ‘70s now, and played with Steeleye Span in the 1970s and later; Hannah Martin and Philip Henry are definitely among the younger generation, and Jon Spiers is somewhere in between. Hannah’s mother is a folk fan, and she took Hannah to see Steeleye Span when she was younger, and watching Peter Knight play was one of the reasons she took up the violin. It’s a nice story, certainly, but it also seems to be true.

One of the features of Gigspanner’s sets is that they improvise around the songs, and in some ways, I’m surprised that more folk bands don’t do this, given the vast shared repertoire. (It’s also a feature of The Haar’s playing, and one of my New Year’s resolutions is to get around to writing about The Haar.) Turnstone is a terrific record, full of lively takes on the folk repertoire.

Here’s their version of the traditional song Sovay.

And here’s the link to the Folk on Foot interview:

https://overcast.fm/+AAOAK0mFfS4

Curlew’s Cry, by Barry Kerr

Barry Kerr is an Irish multi-instrumentalist, composer and visual artist who now lives in Connemara, and his musical career started early. He’s had a distinguished career already, as both a performer and a writer, with a string of albums behind him, and he won the Liam O’Flynn Award in 2020. But maybe to my embarrassment I was unaware of any of this until Curlew’s Cry was listed for this year’s Folk Albums of the Year Award, which I guess is one of the benefits of these kinds of awards.

Because Curlew’s Cry is a strong record, and indeed John Reed in a review at FATEA called it “one of the finest folk albums I’ve heard this century”.

It contains a mix of Kerr’s compositions and some traditional songs in new arrangements. Of the traditional songs, there is a fine version of The Snow It Melts The Soonest, most associated with Dick Gaughan and Pentangle, and an arrangement of the old Irish song You Rambling Boys of Pleasure.

The title song, Curlew’s Cry, which opens with recordings of curlews, underpinned by an insistent rasping percussive effect, is another in the recent wave of songs about our disappearing natural life (I’m thinking partly here of Martin Simpson’s Skydancers). The arrangements are good throughout, and he has been well-served by his producer, the guitarist Gerry O’Beirne, who also plays guitars, ukelele and keyboards. On several songs Kerr is joined by women singers to good effect. I’ve pulled one of these out from Youtube, Three Thousand Rivers Deep, co-written by Cathy Jordan of Dervish, who also joins on vocals.

The Folk on Foot interview with Barry Kerr is here:

https://overcast.fm/+AAOAK2mWhxk

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