Quercus
Nightfall
ECM
IT IS all about storytelling on this second album from the English folksinger June Tabor and her jazz-reared colleagues in Quercus, saxophonist Iain Ballamy and pianist Huw Warren.
Whether the material comes from the collecting of a Somerset folklorist, the pens of Bob Dylan, Robert Burns and Stephen Sondheim or the imaginations of Ballamy and Warren, the threesome focus on the narrative, creating by turns dark, charming and pastoral worlds for voice and instruments to inhabit.
Burns and Sondheim bookend the collection, with Auld Lang Syne ushering in a new album as it would a new year, if with more care and economy, and Somewhere similarly being given a hushed, sober and wary reading.
In between there is more to love, including a trilogy of quite different companions – jazz standard You Don’t Know What Love Is, traditional ballad The Manchester Angel and Dylan’s Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright – that align perfectly as Warren and Ballamy shadow, support and coax Tabor with a gospel inflection here and a creative melodic phrase there.
Saxophone-piano duets Christchurch and Emmeline underline Warren and Ballamy’s faultless judgement, before their dance-like bird song appropriation alongside Tabor turns The Cuckoo into a folk-jazz masterpiece.
Rob Adams
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