Tír Na HiFi

More Jazz than Rock but what the hell it's only music. Double vinyl edition.






BBC :
"Of course since his earliest days with the Soft Machine he's claimed to be more jazzer than avant gardener. With Cuckooland the influences are more evident than ever. Take ''Trickle Down'' with its rising and descending bassline. Like so much on Cuckooland, it swings with aplomb. And it's hardly surprising when you consider input from luminaries such as Gilad Atzmon, Annie Whitehead and, most importantly, Karen Mantler. (The daughter of Carla Bley; she provides vocals, songs and even harmonica on a host of tracks). ''Old Europe'' even takes as its text the legendary Paris jazz scene of the late 50s. Yet you never feel that Robert's wallowing in nostalgia, but painting an impressionistic world where Miles and Juliette Greco still romance each other in monochrome streets."

Listening tonight for the umpteenth time to Judee Sill's Heart Food. Whether taken in isolation or in the context of her tragic life, this remains uncommonly troubling music that haunts you to the very marrow of your being. Before she drew down the shutters on her life, she put all her hopes and dreams and fears into this music and it shows. This music burns with the passionate intensity of a prayer for redemption - simple, direct and so very powerful. This woman never had to raise her voice to break your heart. Sometimes words fail me when I'm faced by such a wall of emotion and tonight I'm especially reminded of one of Peter Hammill's greatest songs, Losing Faith in Words, in which he confronts the ultimate inadequacy of words to really express the depth of your feelings. "Most of the things we say mean most of the time we treat our speech with derision. Flap our hands in body-telegram - I know that gets through so much better than anything said with precision." From the "hope slowly dying" on the "long and lonely road to kingdom come" on the opening song, There's a Rugged Road, to the crushing and inevitable finality of an afterlife without redemption in the terrifying closing song, The Donor, this music - like all of the great music - grows with you and exerts ever more power as the years go by.

One of the most moving albums of last year has to be Susanna Wallumrod's If Grief Could Wait on the ECM label. Like many crossover albums on ECM which straddle different genres, this album resists any attampt to pigeonhole it. Usually filed under Classical as it contains songs by 17th century composer Henry Purcell (as well as more contemporary fare), the accompanying instrumentation consists of baroque harp, viola da gamba and nyckelharpa, so the logical place to post this listening impression would be the Classical forum. The reason why I decided to post this here in the Rock forum is Susanna Wallumrod and her classically untrained voice which really transcends the inherent limitations of genre definition (always a good thing in my opinion). Compared to classically trained singers, her voice commands a much narrower range but the key to the success of this album is a sense of a singer connecting with great songs and attempting to communicate their emotional essence to the listener. In her alter-ego as one half of Susanna Wallumrod and the Magical Orchestra, she has given us some extraordinary cover versions of songs as diverse as Rush's Subdivisions, Thin Lizzy's Jailbreak and Kiss's Crazy Crazy Nights (the latter is exceptional in that it takes the lowest point of Kiss's oeuvre and transforms it utterly into something very affecting). And her covers of sacred songs such as Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah and Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart are special and very personal creations in their utilisation of an intimate space to create something that is instrumentally and vocally minimalist yet emotionally powerful. The new album, If Grief Could Wait, builds on these achievements by varying the repertoire under consideration significantly as well as replacing the electronic textures of her earlier albums with the leaner, more acoustic, textures of the baroque harp, viola da gamba and nyckelharpa which produces, to my mind, a more intimate environment. The contrast between the timbres of her untrained voice and the acoustic instruments is something that apparently delighted producer Manfred Eicher who made it quite clear that he wanted something quite different from another Purcell recital. This was highlighted by the inclusion of Leonard Cohen's Who By Fire and You Know Who I Am and Nick Drake's Which Will as well as a number of Wallumrod's own songs. The result is something quite beautiful in its juxtaposition of popular and classical repertoire as well as the timbral contrast produced by the sound of untrained voice and classical instrumentation coming together in beautiful harmony. Personal highlights include exquisitely rendered versions of two of Purcell's masterpieces, If Grief Has Any Power To Kill and Music for a While, as well as the finest, most powerful cover versions of Drake's Which Will and Cohen's Who By Fire that I have ever heard. Ultimately, this succeeds as an album in the sense of intimacy it evokes, of private sentiments beings uttered and expressed without fear of censure. Or, Henry Purcell might put it, "music for a while shall all your cares beguile".

mcq wrote:One of the most moving albums of last year has to be Susanna Wallumrod's If Grief Could Wait on the ECM label. Like many crossover albums on ECM which straddle different genres, this album resists any attampt to pigeonhole it. Usually filed under Classical as it contains songs by 17th century composer Henry Purcell (as well as more contemporary fare), the accompanying instrumentation consists of baroque harp, viola da gamba and nyckelharpa, so the logical place to post this listening impression would be the Classical forum. The reason why I decided to post this here in the Rock forum is Susanna Wallumrod and her classically untrained voice which really transcends the inherent limitations of genre definition (always a good thing in my opinion). Compared to classically trained singers, her voice commands a much narrower range but the key to the success of this album is a sense of a singer connecting with great songs and attempting to communicate their emotional essence to the listener. In her alter-ego as one half of Susanna Wallumrod and the Magical Orchestra, she has given us some extraordinary cover versions of songs as diverse as Rush's Subdivisions, Thin Lizzy's Jailbreak and Kiss's Crazy Crazy Nights (the latter is exceptional in that it takes the lowest point of Kiss's oeuvre and transforms it utterly into something very affecting). And her covers of sacred songs such as Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah and Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart are special and very personal creations in their utilisation of an intimate space to create something that is instrumentally and vocally minimalist yet emotionally powerful. The new album, If Grief Could Wait, builds on these achievements by varying the repertoire under consideration significantly as well as replacing the electronic textures of her earlier albums with the leaner, more acoustic, textures of the baroque harp, viola da gamba and nyckelharpa which produces, to my mind, a more intimate environment. The contrast between the timbres of her untrained voice and the acoustic instruments is something that apparently delighted producer Manfred Eicher who made it quite clear that he wanted something quite different from another Purcell recital. This was highlighted by the inclusion of Leonard Cohen's Who By Fire and You Know Who I Am and Nick Drake's Which Will as well as a number of Wallumrod's own songs. The result is something quite beautiful in its juxtaposition of popular and classical repertoire as well as the timbral contrast produced by the sound of untrained voice and classical instrumentation coming together in beautiful harmony. Personal highlights include exquisitely rendered versions of two of Purcell's masterpieces, If Grief Has Any Power To Kill and Music for a While, as well as the finest, most powerful cover versions of Drake's Which Will and Cohen's Who By Fire that I have ever heard. Ultimately, this succeeds as an album in the sense of intimacy it evokes, of private sentiments beings uttered and expressed without fear of censure. Or, Henry Purcell might put it, "music for a while shall all your cares beguile".

Manfred Eicher is a treasure.

An unexpected Xmas surprise. Better than I was expecting too.

Paul,

Have you heard this? It's actually the album in full. I think it's wonderful....By the way thanks for your piece on Susanna Wallumrod's "If Grief Could Wait". I can only dream about a vinyl edition!



Aestuarium featuring Jessika Kenney and Evyind Kang


Excerpt from Quietus review:
"Much of this is down to Kenney's remarkable voice. It glides out of the speakers on opener 'Orcus Pellicano' like a quiet brook sliding down a mountainside. It's clear and immediate, yet steeped in history, seeming to stretch towards the listener from across an ocean of time. Kenney sings in Latin, yet her phraseology seems to come from even further back, echoing traditional music from the pre-Roman Celtic civilisations of Ireland and Britain, steeping Aestuarium in a sense of occult paganism, as if Kenney had, prior to recording, uncovered a grimoire of ancient rites and was using them to channel the spirits of her pre-colonial ancestors. Adapting the musical styles of lost civilisations for the modern times is a particularly treacherous exercise.

It's one thing to cover folk tunes that have been handed down from generation to generation, à la Pentangle or Fairport Convention, but to try and recapture music that has mostly been forgotten, whilst all the while making it palatable for modern sensitivities, is another kettle of fish altogether. Just listen to the bile-inducing fluff of Enya or the Titanic soundtrack for particularly bad examples. On first reading about Aestuarium, I was worried it would sound like a dodgy Dark Ages film soundtrack. Instead, it may just be one of the best modern examples of a minimalist tradition that evidently stretches back into the mists of time, but came to a head from the early-60s-onward with the popularity of Indian masters like Pran Nath and Ravi Shankar, and the emergence of modern composers such as LaMonte Young, Marian Zazeela and Charlemagne Palestine; not so much in the actual style (the pieces on Aestuarium tend to be rather short and airy, as opposed to the lengthy deep drones of Young or Nath), but in the way Kenney and Kang stretch into the past and across borders to create arresting “new” drone and vocal music."