Brooks Williams and Aaron Catlow
Greens and Blues 
(Red Guitar Blue Music)
★★★★

AFTER doing a debut tour two years ago, Brooks Williams and Aaron Catlow are joined on their third album by double bassist Jon Short (John Martyn Project). Alongside Catlow on fiddle and Williams on guitar the result is a roller coaster of songs encompassing elements of folk, Blues and Americana.

Starting with Rock Me, a blues gospel song written nearly a century ago by Rev. Thomas Dorsey, this is followed by their own composition Anniesland, a tribute to the late Rab Noakes. There are then covers of songs by well-known figures in roots music such as Gillian Welch’s Red Clay Halo and Molly Tuttle’s Dooley’s Farm.

But their own compositions also light up the album with the exuberant energy of Wild, Wild and the uplifting sound of Jump That Train.

Ending with a Shirley Collins song Sweet Greens and Blues this is a unique album bringing together different genres.
SJ

Kris Davis Trio
Run The Gauntlet 
(Pyroclastic Records)
★★★★★

CANADIAN Kris Davis’s new album is a tribute to seven women pianists who have “profoundly shaped my journey as a pianist.” Geri Allen, Carla Bley, Marilyn Crispell, Angelica Sanchez, Sylvie Courvoisier and Renee Rosnes: all jazzwomen of “grace and strength” who turned the tide of musical bigotry and exclusion.

Featuring bassist Robert Hurst and drummer Johnathan Blake, her album salutes the soundscape of these women’s long struggle and huge achievement in music, played by a woman who becomes another sister of creative brilliance.

Davis’s phrases, as in Heavy Footed or Beauty Beneath the Rubble, seem to suggest a climbing from disregard, a long road of recognition where there’s no turning back.

It’s a record which stays with you, by a pianist and her empathetic trio-mates who know that a life in music isn’t easy. An epochal album, for sure.
CS

PP Arnold,
The First Lady of Immediate 
(Charly / Immediate)
★★★

THE artist formerly known as Patricia Ann Cole began her performing career as a member of Ike and Tina Turner’s vocal backing group The Ikettes before relocating to London in the mid-sixties, where she signed to Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate organisation, enjoying singles success with classic ditties such as Angel of the Morning and the youthful Cat Stevens’s The First Cut Is The Deepest. 

This splendid vinyl reissue from the good people at Charly focuses attention on Arnold’s 1968 debut set for Immediate. 

With a string of illustrious producers led by Steve Marriott, Ronnie Lane and Mick Jagger overseeing proceedings as the Los Angeles born vocalist powerfully emotes her way through stand-out tracks such as (If You Think You’re) Groovy, Born To Be Together and The Time Has Come to name but a few.
KB

Rum Ragged
Gone Jiggin’ 
(LHM Records)
★★★★

RUM RAGGED are a four-piece band from Newfoundland who have recently been touring British folk festivals and this album pays worthy tribute to their island's folk heritage with its Scottish and Irish influences.

The Road to Lushes Bight (Island Stock) starts the album with a stomping song about workers on the East Coast becoming disillusioned with urban life. This is followed by a traditional song Paddy Hyde recounting a fisherman's misfortunes.

There are rousing versions of traditional ballads like The Dewy Dells of Yarrow and The Green Shores of Fogo and the Irish influence on Newfoundland folk music is further demonstrated in Riley and Kelly and the Ghost whilst the Scottish influence is there in the set of tunes Joe Young's/Red Rock Brook/Earl of Hyndford.

Ending with the care free optimism of The Apple Tree this album is a tribute to all aspects of life.
SJ

David Virelles
Carta
(Intakt Records)
★★★★★

THE voices of his birth city, Santiago de Cuba, are deep in the heartsong of David Virelles, and they ring from his piano all through his album Carta, alongside New York confreres, bassist Ben Street and drummer Eric McPherson.

All the compositions are his and they radiate a Caribbean soulfulness. Confidencial is slow and ruminative with McPherson’s percussive comradeship close and instinctive, while NY Chepinson reflects those great pianists who made New York their home. Monk and Bud Powell’s life struggles are reborn from Virelles’s every note.

The album’s title tune begins with what sounds like rattling shells, before Virelles’s keys and Street’s delving bass create faraway sounds of intensity and love.

Virelles’s pianism is an amalgam of islands and cities, Cuba and the Apple in a stylistic fusion created by a rare imaginative artistry of sound. Carta is a letter of union, beyond division and hostility.
CS

Mark Harrison Band
Fools & Clowns
(Highway Records)
★★★★

MARK HARRISON’S perennially perceptive musings on the vagaries of life and the human condition have won the hearts of a whole host of discerning music lovers in recent years, and Fools & Clowns marks the latest addition to the impressive body of work that he’s assembled during this period. 

It’s arguably his finest offering to date too, as Mark and his regular cohorts serve up some of the most quietly compelling blues and roots music fare that you could ever wish to hear, with splendid tracks such as The Great Stink, House Rent Party and Road Ahead Closed capturing the essence of this supremely well-informed character’s distinctive approach to music-making. 

Try to lend it an ear if you possibly can and if the opportunity presents itself you’d also be well advised to explore the rest of Mr Harrison’s equally life enhancing back catalogue too.
KB

Linda Moylan
The Fool 
(Talking Elephant)
★★★★

THIS third album by Linda Moylan consists mainly of self-penned and co-written songs reflecting her London-Irish heritage and experiences of growing up in a pre-gentrified east London.

Opening with the single from the album Irish Love Song there is a kitchen-sink realism to the songs with Venus in the Dirt telling of a couple leading a hand to mouth existence with comfort items rescued from the skip.

Ancient Truth refers to the loneliness of the itinerant worker living in shabby lodgings and the album ends with a cover of Eric Bogle’s timeless anti-war song The Green Fields of France. This fits in well with her own songs about people ground down by a world which doesn’t care but the album also pays tribute to the resilience of working-class experience.

With a voice reminiscent of Emmylou Harris, we can hope to hear more from her.
SJ

Catriona Bourne
Triquetra
(Youth Music Records)
★★★★

CATRIONA BOURNE is a young Scottish harpist and flautist who delves into jazz, folk and classical traditions to produce a musical fusion that is truly compelling to the ears.

With quartet-mates guitarist Francis Tulip, drummerJoe Bainbridge and bassist James Owston she transforms traditional symbols of Scottish folklore to contemporary jazz lyricism. Listen to the serene lamentation of Coronach and the moving solo sounds of Bourne and Tulip.

Sligachan Bridge evokes the “faerie world” of the Skye crossing with a picked-out sound of magical restraint and intensity, while in the introduction to Rowan her flute echoes with a soulful sadness. Lannigan is her reimagining of a folk tune from her childhood.

Her sleeve notes tell of the inspiration of prime jazz artistes like JJ Johnson and Roy Hargrove, yet she and her co-musicians take their spirit to the heart of Scotland to create a haunting Gaelic blues-sound: beautiful!
CS

Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger & The Trinity
Jools & Brian 
(Charly)
★★★

READERS of more mature years may well recall Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger & The Trinity’s classic revamp of Dylan’s This Wheel’s On Fire, a swirling slice of late-sixties psychedelia which soared into the higher reaches of the UK charts in 1968 and has lost little of its impact with the passage of time. 

The contents of this vinyl anthology pack much less of a commercial punch however, as it brings together a fine assortment of group creations alongside vocalist Driscoll’s three Parlophone singles and Hammond organ ace Auger’s three Columbia 45s in a stylish celebration of the musical qualities which made their musical output such required listening during the era of “Swinging London.”

Their affectionate covers of Booker T Jones’s Green Onions and the Lovin’ Spoonful’s I Didn’t Want To Have To Do It are twin highlights.