Now, I don’t know about you, but if someone holding some tiny cymbals invited me into a room on the promise of hearing some devotional chanting to an oud-led raga accompanied by tablas, I’d probably also expect to find shaved heads, free dahl, and an awful lot of orange.
If you liked the Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis, with its Dave Van Ronk-esque hero in Greenwich Village in 1961, you'll enjoy the new exhibition Folk City: New York and the Folk Music Revival, a celebration of NYC as the centre of folk music from its beginnings in the Thirties and Forties to its heyday in the Fifties and Sixties. It's at the Museum of the City of New York, far uptown at 103rd Street in east Harlem, a block or two from Duffy's Hill, the steepest in New York and the scene of many cable-car accidents in the 19th century.
Lautari Vol 67: Live 2014 features Michael Zak on clarinet, flute and shawn, with bassist Marcin Pospieszalski, fiddle player Maciej Filipczuk and the prepared piano and accordion of Jacek Halas.
That instrument list gives you an idea of the musical territory you’re travelling through. Just as Jabusz Prusinowski Kompania, of which Zak is a member, specialises in antique Polish styles, so Lautari set about blowing wind, striking keys and drawing bows across a musical landscape of angular and contemporary arrangements of deeply rural tunes and dances.
The first thing that strikes you at 3am is the light, that strange disembodied glow of Norway’s midsummer midnight sun casting its rays over a landscape soaked in fantasy proportions – sheer glacial drops of greenstone, sweet-water fjords cutting deep into the land, the forests of spruce and pine desending from steep mountainous peaks to the meadow grasses of the valley below.
On paper, Richard Thompson's career seems every bit as exotic as one of his songs. At the age of 18 he helped found folk-rock pioneers, Fairport Convention. Later, in the Seventies, he and wife Linda recorded several successful records together before retreating to a Sufi Muslim commune. Then, after returning to music, Thompson relocated to LA, where he worked on a unique combination of British folk and virtuoso rock guitar that would make him, amongst connoisseurs, one of music's most acclaimed performers.
The first thing that hits you is the voice. Simultaneously full and fragile; assured, but with a distinctive, backnote graze that runs along it like barbs on a feather shaft, it sounds, at times, as if it’s ghosting itself. As well as lending textural gravitas to pretty much anything Meg Baird chooses to sing, it’s the perfect instrument for this collection of self-penned songs that appear, on first listen, to be haunted by the past.
Various Artists: Dust on the Nettles – A Journey Through the British Underground Folk Scene 1967–72
The songs of Richard Thompson have always been tinged with a hint of bitterness and anger, passions that are tempered by guitar paying of near-miraculous fluency. His new album, produced with brilliance and tact by Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, is no exception. The standards are as high as ever, and the self-penned material, with the exception of “Guitar Heroes”, a somewhat tedious homage to masters of the instrument, is characterized by Thompson’s usual mix of poetry and irony.
For many, Mark Knopfler will forever evoke a golden age of Eighties' soft rock. His headband might have been easy to mock but his blistering, finger-picking was undeniably thrilling. Latterly, though, Knopfler has travelled a less commercial path. Still, while his folk tendencies may not be everybody’s cup of tea, there's certainly more to Knopfler than just melancholy ballads. For much of last night he treated the O2 to tantalising glimpses of his former, more rocking, self.
It takes a particular combination of talent, guts, perseverance and sheer bloody-mindedness for an artist to take the creative decisions that Thea Gilmore has across her approaching 20-year career and get away with it – thankfully, all qualities that the Oxford-born songwriter has in spades.