Music
Chris Wood, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh
Rob Adams
FIVE STARS
Heaven knows what Chris Wood was hearing onstage. He certainly wasn’t happy. Yet what was reaching these ears was as close as it gets to a perfect union of voice and guitar, lyrics and melody, compassion, irony, realism, wit, and humanity.
Wood has long been the master of furthering the folksong tradition. He knows what came before, through his own research and through watching Martin Carthy closely, and he’s developed a writing style that puts now everyday objects, including mobile phones and ipods, into the narrative as naturally as swords and grey mares feature in ballads.
This ability to find poetry in the commonplace and to document a news story as modern day broadsheet is matched by a sure melodic sensibility and the wonderful warmth of his singing as well as the roundedness and unshowy invention of his musicianship. His telling of the last day in John Charles de Menezes’ life is a brilliant marriage of reportage and empathy carried on a marching guitar accompaniment whose pace somehow emphasises the inevitability, utter waste and harrowing misjudgement of what’s unfolding as police marksmen home in on an innocent young man.
Elsewhere in a repertoire that can spring from an invitation to watch minor league football, the erosion of pensions and watching children go off to college and here drew on Ronnie Lane, Sydney Carter and the great Anon, Wood more than once emerged as Kent’s answer to Antonio Carlos Jobim. It’s too late for Stan Getz to appropriate Wood’s new song with the “so much to defend” refrain but there must be a jazz singer or two who can spin gold from this and other masterpieces.
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