Folk Renaissance: 6 Bands Lau Recommend

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Folk super-group Lau are one of the best live bands around, melding influences outside of straight folk music to create something fresh and exotic. Here, we asked the band to recommend some of the best new folk acts to hit the scene as part of the recent renaissance in folk music.

Band One (Aidan O’Rourke) | Catriona McKay

Harpist Catriona McKay is a huge musical force in Scotland. She has strong musical partnerships with Shetland fiddler Chris Stout and electro-acoustic maestro Alistair MacDonald and in her most recent project Floe, she has utilized these duos alongside a more recent collaboration with Swedish Nyckleharpa player Olov Johansson.

Catriona’s technical ability and progressive approach to music gives her a unique style which has both grace and power. She writes a very strong melody and is equally at home with improvisational music. Her solo album ‘Starfish’ is a landmark harp recording and her duo album with Chris Stout is a great example of the beauty and versatility of the harp and fiddle and demonstrates the intricate intimacy of the duet.

I had the joy of working with and writing for Catriona on my ‘An Tobar’ album. It was the fist time I had ever written for harp and she was wonderfully versatile with my music.

Check out Catriona’s album with Alistair MacDonald and the soon to be released recording with Olov Johansson.

www.web.mac.com/catrionamckay/Site/catriona.html

Band Two (Aidan) | Ross Ainslie and Jarlath Henderson

Ross Ainslie and Jarlath Henderson are maverick pipers and whistle players. Ross from Perthshire plays border and highland bagpipes and Jarlath from Dungannon plays Uillean pipes. They released their debut album ‘Partners in Crime’ on Vertical records last year and is a great example of their tight, wild and at times improvised piping. To do them justice you need to see them live. It’s a great show usually with Ali Hutton (also a fantastic piper) on guitar and Duncan Lyall on bass. But anything could happen with these boys and occasionally a large-scale ensemble will appear alongside him.

Lau had the joy of touring around Scotland with Ross, Jarlath and Ali last spring. Great fun and great tunes. We arranged an encore together and the six piece sounded amazing. Check out the boys over the summer at various festivals and there’s a possibility of us resurrecting the six piece at Sidmouth festival on 31st July.

www.myspace.com/rossandjarlath

Band Three (Martin Green) | Abigail Washburn and The Sparrow Quartet

Any band with two banjos that create a subtle and ever-changing sea of sound get my vote. Lau were at Vancouver Folk Festival last summer, gigging finished for the day I went to try and buy beer (so difficult in Canada) and went out to watch some culture. As the sun set over the sea (ahh) The Sparrow Quartet arrived on the main stage. Abigail Washburn sings and plays clawhammer banjo, and is the focus of the show, Bela Fleck, the most famous of the four, plays three-finger style banjo, Casey Driessen plays 5-string fiddle, and Ben Soley plays Cello. It was properly amazing, so good I hot-footed to the CD tent (unheard of behaviour in a professional musician) and bought the album.

Washburn has an unusual voice of great beauty and can sing really high, and in Chinese. The songs are backed by sophisticated mutant string quartet, who act as one multi-headed musical beast behind her, keeping in check their obvious hard-core chops in favour of the greater good.

We spent the next week driving thought the Rockies to Calgary listening to the album, recording fantastic too, fitted lovely with some huge mountain ranges. On arrival at Calgary Folk Festival, I am delighted to see the SQ on the bill here also. Off I go to see them again, again a late on slot on the main stage, even better than the week before.

Have a listen: www.abigailwashburn.com

Band Four (Martin Green) | Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh

Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh comes across as a great bloke, his music is far sighted, he makes instruments, his online presence is positive about music being made by others, all good stuff. I’ve never seen him in the flesh, but fellow Lauster Kris Drever says he comes across very well. Ó Raghallaigh (O’Reilly) makes at least two distinctly different types of recorded music, some pretty hardcore Irish trad. and some trad instrument based bedroom 4-track style musical exploration. I encountered him through the latter, on his self produced (down to the cover-art) CD “Where The One-Eyed Man”. He uses a hardanger fiddle (a scandanavian fiddle, with sympathetic strings) as the basis of some quite tripped-out unusual and interesting music with great depth. The understated experimentalism is refreshing, and whilst undoubtedly of Irish origin it’s like no music I have heard. Kris met him in Cork and bought 3 copies of the CD, one for all members Lau.

Caoimhín now lives in County Clare where he makes Irish pipes in the old way, having nipped over to London for a wee jaunt and picked up some pretty serious hand skills. You can see him in action here:

Making pipes and playing them, and playing the fiddle and being cool. His trad adventures include a duo with Mick O’Brien amongst others. CD info here, I’d buy at least one.

Band Five (Kris Drever) | Tim O’Brien

Tim O’Brien’s ‘Chameleon’ is the album of last year for me, his skills as a musician are kind of impossible to quantify, realistically to be as good on one instrument as he is would be an ambitious target for most people. Sadly for all us mere mortals Tim is a master fiddler, mandolinist, guitarist, banjoist, singer and he’s actually invented a whole new way of playing the bozouki. I fully expect there are others which i have not yet seen him play, damn it all.

On top of this it transpires that he’s one of Americas’ great songwriters, he has a mastery of language and gravitas, melody, harmony, performance and a healthy dose of humour. The album contains songs about heartbreak, politics, fruit vendors, entreaties to dance in your underpants and there’s even one at the end of the album about the fact it’s the end of the album.

The recorded performances are themselves remarkable, it is quite common for the purposes of recording to take the instrumentation separately from the vocals but not on chameleon. Tim’s performances are entirely real and almost impossibly good, each one consists of him singing into one mic and playing counterpoint to his vocal on one of the many instruments he’s mastered into another. If you’re a player, listening to this record could get you down a bit and unfortunately he’s also a very nice man.

Bugger.

Band Six (Kris Drever) | Levon Helm

Levon Helm for the tiny minority of you who don’t know, was the drummer in The Band and also the majestic singing voice on some of their greatest hits, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” is probably the most famous of them. Dirt farmer is a mixture of old time melodies with the lovely high and lonesome sounding harmonies, a lovely understated guitarist (about whom i know shamefully little), and the man himself. Every time the drums come in its like the roar of a massive engine starting. Some people have a sense of time that’s peculiarly theirs, John Doyle, Roy Dodds etc and Levon Helm is arguably the most idiosyncratic of the lot. His bass drum is everywhere on this record but never ever out of place, it’s extremely rare to be able to recognise someones playing from the simple things but somehow you always can. Beautiful.

His daughter Amy provides most of the vocal support throughout and she too has the good cheeky delivery and the humility to be a welcome presence on this very intimate and stupendously groovy record.

Lau release their new album Arc Light on 30th March through Navigator Records. A free Mp3 from the album ‘The Burrian’ can be downloaded here.