The holiday season is just about upon us again, so why not give the gift of music? Some of these releases are a tad older, but they are new to me.
Iona Fyfe is a perfect name for a lass from Aberdeenshire. I caught her show at Northampton’s Parlor Room in early October and enjoyed it immensely. Her newest release is titled Away From My Window (2018). It came home with me along with an EP East which she did with the Iona Fyfe Band. A “solo album seldom means a one-person recording project these days; the band’s fiddler, Charlie Grey, and piper/whistle player Ross Miller are on both recordings. Fyfe now lives in Glasgow, but she is the “Pride of Aberdeen,” which happens to be a track off her band album. For a lively treatment of a Child murder ballad listen to “Earl Richmond.” (That’s Child as in Francis James Child (1825-96), a ballad collector.) Fyfe’s solo record is also quite fine. “Guise of Tough” is a bothy ballad about a place with an unusual name in which her voice simulates a fiddle tune. (A bothy is a farm building and these songs were sung by laborers.) There’s a lovely version of “Glenlogie,” another Child ballad, which is sung akin to another old song, “Annachie Gordon.” It’s often the case that Aberdeenshire songs have slightly different tunes from other parts of Scotland, another reminder that “folk” songs were often regional in nature. Fyfe stays within tradition most of the time–like “Banks of Inverurie”–but she occasionally writes. The solo album has a stunner, “Banks of the Tigris,” which she wrote as a teen during the war in Syria. If some of her words sound unfamiliar, it’s not just her accent; Fyfe spearheaded an effort to have “Scots,” an English variant recognized as an official language. Yep–Scotland now has three “official” tongues: English, Scots, and Gaelic.
Let’s stay in Scotland (please!). There’s some moaning on Facebook. That’s not news, but this one is about an album titled Looking For the Thread, which is clearly marked as album by Mary Chapin Carpenter, Julie Fowlis, and Karine Polwart. Some people who apparently never learned that “and” is a conjunction have whined they didn’t know it wasn’t a Mary Chapin Carpenter album; a few have complained about the “Celtic crap” on the recording. News Flash, oh ye of such narrow taste and ethnocentric attitudes: That “Celtic crap” has long been an interest of MCC–she began as a folk singer–and she is friends with Fowlis and Polwart, the first one of the finest Gaelic singers on the planet and the latter a singer who is as famous in Scotland as MCC is in America. Note the title. The three join forces both to do their own thing and find commonality. The album opens with Fowlis taking to lead on “Gràdh Geal Mo Chridhe.” There’s no hope for anyone who can’t hear the stunning beauty of this song. Mary follows with the wonderful “A Heart That Never Closes.” Note that it too has a gentle feel. So too does Polwart’s “Rebecca,” a tribute to a tree with that name carved upon it. MCC wrote the title track and it says volumes about the spirit of this project. You pick up their synchronicity in the studio on “Hold Everything,” their first UK single. You can almost feel Carpenter breathing away from the limelight on this treasure house of gentle songs. Enjoy MCC but don’t overlook gems like Fowlis’ “Silver in the Blue.” The ”thread?” Three friends making music, nature, and MCC’s closing track, “Send Love.” Added bonus: I’ve not heard harmonies this beautiful since Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris, and Gillian Welch in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou.”
Skye Consort is a terrific quartet that I caught live in Holyoke. I was intrigued when I saw that Emma Björling was its lead vocalist. As her surname suggests, she’s Swedish and I knew of her from work with Scandinavian bands. The other three members of Skye Consort live in Montreal, though Alex Kehler was playing fiddle and nyckelharpa that night and he was actually born in the U.S. though he has been in Canada for quite some time now. In an unusual arrangement, Skye Consort also employs Simon Alexandre who takes Kehler’s place when Kehler is busy playing dances or when Alexandre isn’t gigging with La Traverse, the Ximenez String Quartet, or Ochestre Philharmonique de Québec. Skye Consort bill their style as “trans-Atlantic chamber folk.” I’m suspicious of such labels, but this one is apt. Cellist Amanda Keesmaat and bouzouki/banjo/singer artist Seán Dagher round out the quartet. Their latest album Ode & Ballade is a bit of everything. First a word on the nyckelharpa, which might be unfamiliar. It looks a bit like a hurdy gurdy without the crank, but is actually a keyed violin with a unique sound. You’ll hear traditional music from Sweden, the Shetlands, England, Denmark, France, Québec, and Scotland–sometimes several of them in the same set. You can be excused for thinking “She’s the Swedish” is from Björling’s home country; it’s actually Scottish, melded with a Québecois tune. Just to confuse you more, “En annan polska” should not be confused with a Polish polka, though both are dance tunes. A polka (which is actually Czech originally) is in 2/4 time but a polska is associated with Scandinavia and is in ¾ time and tends to be slower than a waltz. I loved Keesmaat’s switches between percussive and straight cello. Got all that? The best way to figure it out is to listen. Note how “Jungfrun” is like a pastiche of pastoral and classical compositions. Check out this live clip of the Quebec/Irish “Foxhunter’s Jig” set to get a sense of how voices and instruments blend. For a French flavor there is “Les Triste Noces,” complete with a bit of foot percussion. Highly recommended.
When I was a young whelp deep in my rock n’ roll phase of life, I saw a concert at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, that changed my life. On the bill were two musical partners from England, Tony Barrand and John Roberts. It was a holiday concert with Christmas carols as I never heard them before. Call it the beginning of a love affair with folk music that is now more than 50 years old. I got to know both Tony and John, with John the funnier and most approachable of the two. The duo was perhaps best known for their holiday mummers show Nowell Sing We Clear, but John also loved sea songs, recitations, and music hall material, the more offbeat the better. Tony passed away in 2022 and John in February of this year at age 80. One of his final recordings was A Shellback Songster (2024), so named because of a song by Ewan MacColl for a BBC film about sailing. John composed songs and tunes but he was most comfortable with traditional material and songs that sounded as if they were sprung from the mists of time. Shellback Songster is a baker’s dozen of trads and songs from people such as MacColl, Gordon Bok, Cyril Tawney, and Rudyard Kipling. This is sea music stripped to its basics, John’s distinct voice backed by concertina, banjo, or button accordion. It's hard to find John singing most of them, so forgive me if I offer a few with Tony and John that are solo of the record. One is “The Flying Dutchman,” the famed ghost ship. (John’s is the low voice.) He sand many Kipling songs. Here’s “Oak and Ash and Thorn.” (The record has Kipling’s poem “The Last Chantey.”) You can hear how John involved an audience. There’s also one called “Derelict” that you might know better as “Yo, Ho, Ho (And a Bottle of Rum).” Sorry I don’t have more to post, but if you’ve ever been to a sea songs festival, you’ve probably seen John and heard most of them.
You can purchase some of John Roberts’ material from his friend Debra Cowan, who is a mainstay on the folk circuit. Women and the Sea is her look at the seafaring life from the distaff side of things. Her website https://debracowan.com/category/product/ has two of John’s solo records and one that he and Debra did together. It also contains Cowan’s most recent EP, Greening the Dark. Cowan has a strong voice and sings what she likes. In that regard, Greening the Dark is a single traditional and five covers. The trad selection is “Hills of Greenmore,” which she plucked from a Steeleye Span album for a treatment that sounds Irish with a semi-nautical flair. My favorite covers are of Richard Thompson’s “The Old Changing Way” and Lester Simpson’s “Polly on the Shore.” The latter is a tough song, but has a sort of comeuppance ending. The EP is produced by Dave Mattacks, a legend in the music community since his early days with Fairport Convention.
Another musical highlight of 2025 was seeing the quartet Windborne at the Iron Horse. I mentioned Nowell Sing We Clear (NSWC) in the previous review; Windborne is heir to their throne, right down to the fact that one of the members is Lauren Breuning, the daughter of NSWC’s Fred Beuning. Brattleboro, Vermont, has been a folk music breeding ground ever since Margaret MacArthur (1935-2006) located to nearby Marlboro in 1951. Tony Barrand and John Roberts moved there in the early 1970s to teach at Marlboro College. Windborne’s Will and Lynn Rowan graduated from Marlboro and later taught there in a music program they started. The fourth member, Jeremy Carter-Gordon, also cut his musical teeth in southern Vermont. Windborne sing quite a few songs from NSWC’s Christmas mummer’s material. You can hear NSWC holiday standbys such as “The Boar’s Head Carol,” “The Cherry Tree Carol,” “The Darby Ram” and others on their To Warm the Winter Hearth album (2024). As for the rest of the year, they borrow from John and Tony’s old repertoire, but overall they are much more political and diverse. For example, Windborne’s Midwinter Meeting contains offerings from Basque country, Bulgaria, Corsica, the nation of Georgia, Québec, and the U.S. Appalachians. They are big supporters of unions and also include labor songs in their shows. As music scholars you learn a lot from their stage chat and Winter Hearth CDs come with a 44-page perfect-bound booklet. Windborne voices and harmonies are powerful instruments in their own right hence they usually sing a capella unless it’s some sort of special show. The two recordings have a total of 32 songs, so here are just a few to tantalize you.
Check their Website to see when they are playing somewhere near you. https://www.windbornesingers.com/concerts/
Sabodisho (Georgian)
Bentatik Nattor (Basque)
Boar’s Head Carol (England)
Come and I Will Sing You (English variant of 12 Days of Christmas; Lynn clogging):
Song of Hard Times (USA, from a forthcoming album):
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