It's a little hard to compliment KT Tunstall without seeming a little snitty. Her music is familiar, it's grown-up, it's Radio 2, it's full of lashings of Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty, The Pretenders, Springsteen, Nashville, Laurel Canyon.
2017 was a year in which Paul Weller reminded us all why he’s a force to be reckoned with. An impressive foray into the world of soundtracks (the score to Johnny Harris’s Jawbone) was followed by A Kind Revolution, which was, for the most part, a very impressive collection. This year sees yet another album from an artist who is clearly mining a rich seam of form.
It's Britten outside-in time for English National Opera. Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, which played host earlier this year to an only partially convincing production of his 1950s masterpiece The Turn of the Screw, would have been the perfect choice for the prelapsarian American forests of his pre-Grimes operetta/musical Paul Bunyan.
Paul Simon is currently traversing the globe on his Farewell Tour. His new album clearly accompanies that. It’s a thoughtful look backwards wherein Simon has plucked numbers from his catalogue he feels deserve another go-round, recording them with guest artists, often from the world of jazz (notably Wynton Marsalis). It is, by its nature, somewhat self-indulgent, for there are none of his most famous songs here. These are numbers he wants to bring out of the shadows; that he reckons are worth further attention. On occasion, he’s absolutely right.
The album opens with "One Man’s Ceiling is Another Man’s Floor", originally a chugging rock’n’roll frolic on 1973’s There Goes Rhymin’ Simon. It has become a faintly Christmassy piano jazz shuffle that recalls Cab Calloway. It’s not unpleasant, not better, just different. The singer is famed for the pithy wit of his songwriting and, at the album’s best, he grabs the listener by the mind and heartstrings. A good case in point is “Darling Lorraine” from 2000’s You’re the One (from which four of this 10-song set are drawn). The poignancy was arguably submerged on the original’s twangy “adult contemporary” arrangement but here, in more pared-back form, the song is affecting.
Elsewhere New York chamber sextet yMusic get involved on "Can’t Run But" and "Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War". The latter is a particularly literary song and the delicate orchestrations forefront the ache at its heart. Something about it recalls Al Stewart.
I suppose your preference regarding these versions and their originals depends on your relationship with Paul Simon. I possess none of his records and his existence generally passes me by. Music journalists should occasionally make such matters clear with artists who have long, storied careers. It tempers the relevance of what they have to say. From where I’m standing, then, In The Blue Light is an album that, in some places, has a delicate beauty, but in others, overeggs the pudding towards sentimentalism.
There seems no limit to the sheer creativity that fizzes from Iván Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra. For their second night at the Proms, packed out this time, the theme was the meeting of classical and Gypsy musical traditions.
Birth and death are nowhere more entwined than in folk music, and the seventh album by Radio 2 Young Folk Award-winner Jackie Oates poignantly honours both her father and her daughter, his unexpected death just five days before the birth of Rosie. Inevitably, her life went into free-fall, “intense emotion at the joy and sadness that had struck me all at once”.
It’s been a decade since we last heard from Tom Baxter when he released his second album Skybound, which itself was four years after his debut Feather & Stone. That album included “Almost There”, a song somewhat implausibly covered by Shirley Bassey; Baxter accompanied her when she sang it at the Roundhouse’s Electric Proms.
Twinned with the legendary Newport Folk Festival, founded on Rhode Island in 1959 as a counterpart to the celebrated jazz festival, the Cambridge Folk Festival this year celebrated its 54th birthday under blue skies. The sun shone relentlessly throughout its four days, which meant that performers squinted out at a sea of semi-clad and often tattooed bodies, many sheltering under beaded parasols.
A sight every music fan should see and hear once is The Proclaimers playing Scotland. Around 18 years ago I saw them play a giant marquee at the T In The Park Festival. It was like a rally, a roaring wall of joyful fanaticism (on which note, their autumn 2018 tour there sold out 30,000 tickets in 20 minutes!). If it was a rally, though, it was a righteous, tending-to-socialism one for The Proclaimers have a strand of activism in their blood. On their latest album, this is writ large.
It might have begun with The Beatles espousal of Bob Dylan in 1964. There was also The Animals whose first two singles, issued the same year, repurposed tracks from Bob Dylan’s 1962 debut album. Before The Byrds hit big with their version of his “Mr.