Past Programs
Folk - 2008
Old Crow Medicine Show
25/11/2008
On their new CD Tennessee Pusher, Old Crow Medicine Show continue their assertion that old-timey music was the punk of its day, full of rough edges and exuberant energy and stories about those living on the edges of society.
From their start in New York State as neophyte acoustic musicians, Old Crow Medicine Show have worked hard, touring almost constantly, playing in small towns wherever they could find an audience. Doc Watson’s daughter saw them busking and picked up her dad, who was so impressed that he hired them for his prestigious Merlefest. Although the band moved to Nashville and has played at the Grand Ole Opry, they have retained their outsider status, maintaining that music should be played live and from the heart, not as a commodity to be packaged and sold. Their new CD features great drummer Jim Keltner and was produced by Don Was. But for one traditional track, it’s full of tales of outsider hillbillies, with no fewer than 3 tracks about rural drug dealers. Their loose harmonies and gently wailing tones call to mind another group that was born in New York State - ‘The Band’.
Garry Walsh
24/11/2008
While in Co. Cork, Ireland, in September, I discovered Garry Walsh, who plays a repertoire of rare tunes taught to him by his parents and grandfathers on mellifluous flutes and whistles, pitched in keys which don’t usually feature in Ireland’s musical lexicon.
Garry was raised in the country, 15 miles from Manchester, where, because of his isolation, he learned the tunes of his Co. Louth and Cork ancestors from his Dad (a pianist, accordionist, trombonist and jazz fan) and his Mom (a lilter). Garry learned the whistle from his Dad and didn’t take up flute until he was 21. But, although Garry didn’t frequent the session scene, his dad’s strictness and the rich repertoire he inherited stood him in good stead. In Ireland’s rich and generously shared music culture, the tunes Garry learned were so rare that Dublin’s Irish Traditional Music Archive couldn’t find previous notated or recorded examples of them. When Garry was offered a job in Cork, he leapt at the chance and put together a regularly-playing band to bring his family’s ‘secret repertoire’ back to Ireland, the circle complete at last on his debut CD Uncovered.
Two-Faced Friday
21/11/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
CD of the Week - Taj Mahal
17/11/2008
40 years as a significant figure in the diverse worlds of blues, soul, reggae and world music is no mean feat, and rather than just compiling a greatest hits retrospective, Taj Mahal has celebrated this milestone by putting out a brand new album Maestro.
In keeping with recent trends, he has decided to include many tracks which are collaborations, and so has joined up with a very fine list of well-known acts for this record, including Ben Harper, Jack Johnson, Toumani Diabate, Angelique Kidjo, Los Lobos and Ziggy Marley. As you’d expect, the result is a CD which covers everything from hard-edged blues through reggae and soul to West African sounds.
Two-Faced Friday
14/11/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Two-Faced Friday
07/11/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
CD of the Week - Buena Vista Social Club
03/11/2008
More than a decade after the concert, and after the huge success of the Wim Wenders film Buena Vista Social Club, the ground-breaking concert At Carnegie Hall has finally made it onto CD.
From the opening Chan Chan, featuring Compay Segundo, to the closing Silencio, a duet between Ibrahim Ferrer and Omara Portuondo, this CD shines as a tribute to the wonderful musicians young and old who took Cuban music out of years of embargo and into the consciousness of music lovers the world over. The joy of this performance is coloured by the fact that three of its stars, Compay Segundo, Ibrahim Ferrer and Ruben Gonzales, are no longer with us to enjoy the release of this CD.
Osvaldo Montes and Anibal Arias (repeat of 22/10/07)
23/10/2008
With a combined age over 150 years, bandoneon player Osvaldo Montes and guitarist Anibal Arias bring a depth and elegance to 24 tango classics on their CD Tango for the World.
The Buenos Aires based musicians, musical partners since the 1980s, show a deep understanding of and love for traditional tango in this CD that includes compositions by tango greats Gardel, Cobian, Troilo and Villoldo.
Tone Poets II (repeat of 16/10/07)
20/10/2008
In Part II of Tone Poets, the two beautiful instruments that we heard solo last week - an F5 mandolin and a Martin OM-45 guitar - are played in duets.
From the exciting bluegrass of the father/son duo Del and Ronnie McCoury to the jazzy newgrass of David Grisman and Tony Rice, the playing is topnotch and the tone is to die for.
Jeremy Spencer (first aired on 13/2/07)
09/10/2008
When Jeremy Spencer disappeared during a Fleetwood Mac tour in 1971, who would have dreamed that he would resurface with his first blues album in 35 years, recorded with a Norwegian band?
Before Fleetwood Mac were a multi-million selling, bigger than Ben Hur rock band with two female singers, they were a blues band that included two of England’s most authentic electric blues guitarists. But there seemed to be a hex on the band’s guitarists. Peter Green succumbed to drug-induced psychosis, Danny Kirwan gave up playing in public and was homeless for a long time. In the middle of an American Fleetwood Mac tour, Jeremy Spencer went AWOL and the tour was cancelled. While visiting a bookshop, he met a representative from the religious group the Children of God. He joined them immediately, and has been happily living with the controversial group, travelling the world, playing music for the group and making cartoons for their publications. Since leaving Fleetwood Mac, he has received many offers to record, but he finally accepted the offer that was to become his new CD, Precious Little, because he was so impressed with the all-Norwegian band’s love of and ability to play the blues. Spencer’s twin early musical loves, rockabilly and Elmore James, are both represented here and it’s his beautifully nuanced slide guitar work that stands out, whether on resonator guitar or on electric guitar.
http://www.jeremyspencer.com/
Kenge Kenge (first aired on 6/5/08)
08/10/2008
The nearly-all-acoustic traditional instrument-playing Kenyan group Kenge Kenge create a dense, interweaving forest of sound in today’s program.
Founded in the early 1990s as the musicians for the Catering Levy Trust Choir - a government tax body that collects levies on hotels - the group evolved from a choir that sang religious and patriotic songs and hymns, to a band that played Kenya’s electric Benga music on traditional instruments: the orutu (one-stringed fiddle), the nyangile (sound box and gong), the asili (flute), the oporo (ox horn) and percussion. Benga started out as the transposing of traditional Luo rhythms to electric instruments. Kenge Kenge return the music to its roots after absorbing its development as a pop dance style. Unlike the clean sounds that electric Benga bands strive for, Kenge Kenge espouse a friendly distortion like that of the hypnotic Congolese group Konono No. 1. Kenge Kenge derives from a Luo expression which, roughly translated, means ‘a fusion of small, exhilarating instruments’. Amen.
Donal Clancy (first aired on 12/2/07)
07/10/2008
Donal Clancy’s new CD of of Irish guitar instrumentals is called Close to Home because, he says, ‘These are songs I grew up with, songs I can’t truly remember learning.’
Donal is the son of Irish music pioneer Liam Clancy of the Clancy Brothers and is a founding member of the artful County Waterford group Danú. Although he does some multitracking on Close to Home, it’s only Donal and his guitar on this nicely arranged selection of Jigs, Reels, Airs and Hornpipes.
www.donalclancy.com
06/10/2008
There will be no CD of the week this week as we bring you a selection of Daily Planet favourite programs.
Gao Hong (First aired on 2/6/08)
06/10/2008
On Flying Dragon, Chinese-born and trained and USA-based pipa maestro Gao Hong mixes it up very effectively with sitarist Shubhendra Rao, flutist James Newton and shakuhachi player Yoshio Kurahashi in the relisation of her dream of a rainbow coalition of musicians.
Gao was nicknamed ‘the little black kitten’ when she was small because her face was already speckled with soot from the furnace room where she practiced pipa for hours before her fellow musicians woke up. This was when she was with a provincial song and dance troupe in North Central China, which she joined at the age of 12 to help support her family after her father had been blacklisted and sent to the country as part of the Cultural Revolution. It was then that a fortune-teller’s labelling of her as a ‘Flying Dragon’ - one who would be constantly on the move, never settled, first proved itself. At the age of 22, Gao was one of two pipa players to be admitted to China’s premier school of music, the Central Conservatory of music in Beijing. In the mid-90s she moved to the USA, where she has applied her considerable skills on the pipa to expanding its repertoire. On Flying Dragon, she truly reaches out to the disciplines of her collaborators - learning Hindustani scales, instinctively going with James Newton’s free improvisation and subtly teaming with Yoshio’s version of a traditional Japanese folk song.
Francesca Ancarola (First Aired on 7/5/2008)
02/10/2008
Lonquén is Chilean singer/songwriter Francesca Ancarola’s tribute to Victor Jara, the murdered nueva canción singer whose songs became the rallying cry for Chile’s generation who lived under Pinochet’s dictatorship.
Santiago-based Francesca has won a Fulbright Scholarship, completed a master’s in classical voice and opera, studied jazz guitar, cello and piano, and runs a noted vocal workshop. She felt that, since the prohibition of Jara’s songs was lifted in 1989, his legacy has grown even stronger. In his songs she finds the most complete expression of the contrast between his personal biography and the art he strove to achieve. The band mixes jaz sensibilities with traditional, folk ones. The album includes 11 Jara songs, a poem by Pablo Neruda set to music by Francesca, and her own song, the title track, about Longquén, the rural settlement in which the charred, splintered remains of 15 people who ‘disappeared’ in 1973 were found in abandoned limestone ovens in 1978. This discovery resulted in the unravelling of a web of institutional lies cast over Chile by the military dictatorship.
Ingosi Stars (First Broadcast on 14/4/2008)
01/10/2008
The CD Langoni, by father-and-son Kenyan musicians William Ingosi Mwoshi and Jackson Amusala Ingosi, is a record of traditional Luhya music that contains a remarkable story of survival.
When William Ingosi Mwoshi arrived at the SW French World Music Festival ‘Nutis Atypiques’ in July 2003, he was unrecognisable to those who knew him - he had wasted away and was utterly exhausted. Two of the festival volunteers, who were the sons of the director of the local hospital in Langon, immediately hospitalised him to have his advanced intestinal cancer treated. William convalesced and returned in relatively good shape to Kenya in September. In 2006, Denis-Constant Martin travelled to Nairobi and recorded William’s and Jackson’s songs, including one in which William thanks the staff of the hospital that looked after him, pronouncing its locale as ‘Langoni’, hence the title of the CD.
Iron and Wine (First broadcast on 11/12/2007)
30/09/2008
Iron and Wine’s CD The Shepherd’s Dog is full of literate, complex and dystopic songs focusing on the detritus of our modern world.
Sam Beam (who took his stage name from a dietary supplement called Beef, Iron and Wine) sings his songs over the hypnotic backings of musicians from Calexico. The images shimmer and bleed into each other as he guides us through his peculiar, dark and poetic vision of America in the 21st century.
29/09/2008
There will be no CD of the week this week as we bring you a selection of Daily Planet favourite programs.
22/09/2008
There will be no CD of the week this week as we bring you a selection of Daily Planet favourite programs.
15/09/2008
There will be no CD of the week this week as we bring you a selection of Daily Planet favourite programs.
08/09/2008
There will be no CD of the week this week as we bring you a selection of Daily Planet favourite programs.
Two-Faced Friday
05/09/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Joan Baez
03/09/2008
Joan Baez’ new, 24th, studio album, Day After Tomorrow, benefits from the rootsy production by Steve Earle and a nice choice of songs by Steve, Eliza Gilkyson, Tom Waits and Patti Griffin.
Recorded in Nashville, it features an all-acoustic band of great players, Tim O’Brien, Darrell Scott, Viktor Krauss and Kenny Malone. Steve spoke of the need for ‘finding musicians who would bring the requisite virtuosity as well as the appropriate reverence to a record that would celebrate the 50th year of a remarkable career.’ Joan said, ‘It’s been a long time since I’ve had an entire album of songs that speak to the essence of who I am in the same way as the songs that have been the enduring backbone of my repertoire for the past 50 years.’
CD of the Week - Rodney Crowell
01/09/2008
Rodney Crowell’s Sex and Gasoline is an ambitious CD of his songs about women, often told from a female point of view, the final piece of his cycle of songs of social commentary that grew out of his struggle to come to terms with the new millennium.
Houston-born Rodney followed a well-worn path that Texas singer-songwriters made on their way to Nashville, moving there in the early 1970s. He was a key element of Emmylou Harris’ Hot Band in the ’70s and his 1988 CD Diamonds and Dirt generated 5 number-one singles. Since 2001, he’s left the constraints of mainstream country music behind to follow his own vision. Sex and Gasoline epitomises Rodney’s empathetic song writing and Joe Henry’s fine production brings his sensitivity to the fore.
Konsonans Retro (Repeat of 28/5/08)
28/08/2008
Ukrainian musicians Konsonans Retro’s acclaimed debut CD A Podolian Affair brings back to life the Jewish Brass Band music of the area through the collaboration between the musicians of the local Baranovsky family and Berlin-based clarinettist Christian Dawid. They’ve even been called ‘The best Klezmer band in the world.’
Odessa was the only city in which Jews were not governed by a rabbinical council, which meant that they were free to evolve into a secular, civil society which meant tavern-going and music-making. The Ukraine’s large Jewish population influenced the brass band music of that area. The Baranovsky brothers and their cousins play trumpets, accordion, trombone and barabon in the band, having been trained by their elders, Moise and Maria Baranovsky. Vasyl Baranovsky started playing in his father’s orchestra at the age of four, so he remembers many old pieces which are now perhaps only known to him. Christian Dawid, who arranged all the pieces, and London-based drummer Guy Schalom, successfully meld a Western sensibility on to the Baranovskys’ traditionalism.
David Bromberg Quartet
27/08/2008
Newly remastered and now widely available, David Bromberg Quartet’s Live New York City 1982 captures Bromberg and a red hot acoustic band playing and singing a typically eclectic mix of Appalachian music, Blues, Western Swing and Gospel.
David and his band are obviously having a good time at this concert (at a well known concert hall whose name can’t be used in the packaging or advertising). His guitar pushes its limits on a 10-minute fiddle tune medley and the audience is totally simpatico. We’ll also hear tracks from Bromberg’s recent CD Try Me One More Time, his first studio album since 1990.
Two-Faced Friday
22/08/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Lakshmi Shankar
20/08/2008
When Lakshmi Shankar gave up dancing with Uday Shankar’s famed dance troupe because of ill health, it was music’s gain as she applied her dancer’s grace to singing.
Born in Jamshedpur, India, in 1926, Lakshmiji studied Carnatic and Hindustani music in her youth, but intended to be a dancer of Bharat Natyam, the classical dance form rooted stylistically and historically in the temples of south India. In Uday Shankar’s troupe, she met and married Uday’s brother, Raju Shankar, who is also Ravi Shankar’s brother (Lakshmi studied music with Ravi). On Lakshmi’s latest CD, Dancing in the Light, the accompaniment is simple but effective - Pt. Swapan Chaudhuri on tabla and Pt. Ramesh Mishra on Sarangi as she sings a khyal, two thumris (light classical songs) and two of her beloved devotional songs (bhajans) written by Mirabai, the writer of hundreds of songs to her beloved Lord Krishna in the 16th century.
Roberto Aussel plays Atahualpa Yupanqui
18/08/2008
With characteristic subtleness of phrase and use of silence, guitarist Roberto Aussel brings to life the music of fellow Argentinean Atahualpa Yupanqui on the 100th anniversary of this champion of folk music’s birth.
Born in 1954 in La Plata, Roberto began studying classical guitar from the age of 7 and went on to win first prizes at some of the world’s most prestigious competitions. He is known for his gift of being able to highlight a composer’s intention by his delicacy of phrase, across a range of diverse composers. He heard Atahualpa Yupanqui in his childhood and his music especially touched him. In Atahualpa’s music, Roberto heard the whistling of the wind, the silence between the mountains and the understanding of birdsong, his guitar vibrating as it related the suffering of the country folk, and rejoiced when performing a malambo from the Argentine Pampas. La Paloma Enamorada (The Dove in Love) is Roberto’s tribute to the music of a man which has raised such a profound feeling in him for many years.
CD of the Week - Loudon Wainwright III
18/08/2008
Since he was a young man, Loudon Wainwright has been writing songs about getting old, so the 13 songs he revisits on his new CD, Recovery, the last one composed in 1974, have a richness gained from the singer-songwriter’s actual ageing.
Joe Henry and Loudon worked together on his previous release, Strange Weirdos, Music From and Inspired by the film ‘Knocked Up’, and it was Joe who finally got Loudon to respond with more than a shrug to the idea of reworking some of his early catalogue. The new arrangements build subtly on Loudon’s original guitar-only accompaniments and the songs are still great - no one plumbs the emotional life of the self-obsessed as funnily, or as lovingly and insightfully, as Loud-O.
Two-Faced Friday
15/08/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Balla et ses Balladins (Part 2)
14/08/2008
We continue exploring Guinea’s ‘Authenticité’ era with the excellent double CD of one of the country’s premier bands, Balla et ses Balladins. Today we focus on CD 1 (1968-1972) of their album, The Syliphone Years.
Australian Graeme Counsel produced and annotated this fine collection of music. Particularly sweet are Sekou ‘Le Docteur’ Diabaté’s lead guitar and their song Sara ’70 - a longer, groundbreaking piece that well and truly begins to incorporate West African sensibilities into their music.
CD of the Week - Ry Cooder
11/08/2008
Ry Cooder is in fine form on his latest CD, I, Flathead, his humorous and loving vision of California of the ’50s and ’60s, a world of Western Swing lovers, unsuccessful songwriters, carnies and drag racers.
On this, the 3rd of his California trilogy, Cooder’s voice is rich and confident, whether singing or speaking, and his liner notes, in the persona of the record’s nominal author, Kash Buk (and the Klowns), are as surreal and funny as anything out there. The music is spare, held down by three fine drummers, and Cooder’s guitar is on the mark with a big tip of the hat to Hollywood emigrant Merle Travis. The songs are well-written vignettes of the colourful characters who came from elsewhere to make Southern California the land of a million dreams. Ry’s song Steel Guitar Heaven manages to evoke the maverick world of early Californian Western music with nary a steel guitar played. This tribute to this unique time and place is so subtle and real that you can smell the knotty pine panelled country music clubs, the petrol fumes and the California eucalypts.
Two-Faced Friday
08/08/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Orquestra Popular de Cãmara
04/08/2008
On their second CD, Danças, Jogos e Canções (Dances, Games and Songs), Sao Paolo super-group Orquestra Popular de Cãmara expand their vision of a Brazilian national music that encompasses jazz and folk forms.
With fine vocalist Monica Salmaso, her husband Teco Cardoso on flutes and saxophones, Benjamim Taubkin on piano, 3 percussionists and 6 other members, they play into being a new Brazilian sound with this CD designed to highlight the compositions of their founding members.
CD of the Week - Eliza Carthy
04/08/2008
Eliza Carthy’s new CD, Dreams of Breathing Underwater, uses her extensive knowledge of English folk and reconstructs it into an edgy, post-rock collection of her songs which bristle with magical realism.
The daughter of English folk doyens Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson, Eliza’s fiddling is impeccable, as is her sense of how much to sing or write into a song. The production is big, mixing melodeons and fiddles with strings and brass, and the songs have an elusive quality that demands your participation. As Tom Waits has refashioned American music into his crooked frame, Eliza does the same with English music, with more than a touch of English Music Hall mixing strangely with her acerbic vocal delivery.
Two-Faced Friday
01/08/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Garifuna Women's Project
31/07/2008
On Umalali, The Garifuna Women’s Project, Belizean producer Ivan Duran beautifully recorded and arranged the songs of the African-American women of Central America’s Caribbean coast.
As on Ivan’s award-winning production of Andy Palacio and the Garifuna Collective’s Wátina, utmost care has been put into faithfully capturing the essence of this community-based music while tastefully modernising it, mixing the women’s voices with studio-recorded massed percussion and acoustic and electric guitars. Umalali (‘voice’ in the Garifuna language) began in 1997 when Ivan began travelling to Garifunan villages in search of exceptional female voices. After 5 years of preparation, he set up a studio in a small, thatch-roofed hut on stilts on the Caribbean beach in the village of Hopkins, Belize. He then took the tapes to his studio in western Belize and spent 5 years finessing them. The result of this decade-plus labour of love is this beautiful aural document that brings the songs of the daily lives of these women to the attention of the world.
Crooked Still
30/07/2008
Expanded from a quartet to a quintet for their 3rd CD, Still Crooked, Crooked Still continue sing the dark lyrical themes of Appalachia while double bass, cello and violin saw away in the groups’ unique line-up.
After their cellist Rushad Eggleston departed, they replaced him with two members - cellist Tristan Clarridge and young California-born fiddler Brittany Haas, who really adds something to the mix with her deep understanding of the driving rhythms of old-timey fiddling. Aoife O’Donovan’s vocals are more self-assured and the group continues to develop their sound that asks the question, ‘What if the old Appalachian music was played on the dark woods of cellos and double basses?’
Badma Khanda Ensemble
29/07/2008
29-year-old singer Badma Khanda leads an ensemble that plays the music of her parents’ homeland, Buryatia, a mountainous Siberian Republic that’s part of the Russian Federation.
Badma Khanda was born in Inner Mongolia in China, where her grandparents fled from the Soviet regime in the early 1930s. With other refugees, they preserved the traditional Buryat culture. Accompanied by traditional Central Asian instruments, the Morin Khuur (horse-head fiddle), Yatag (half tube zither), Khun Khuur (swan’s head plucked lute), Limbe (transverse flute), Bish Khuur (reed ‘trumpet’), jews’ harps, dulcimer and frame drum, Badma Khanda’s strong voice leads them through a large selection of traditional songs.
Two-Faced Friday
25/07/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
América Contemporânea
24/07/2008
With 10 band members from 7 South American countries, the musicians of América Contemporânea enjoy contributing to and learning each other’s musical styles.
On their CD Um Outro Centro, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru and Venezuela are represented. Not only are the different countries merging their musical styles, but folk, jazz and rock are meeting.
Hanggai
22/07/2008
Beijing group Hanggai’s leader, Ilchi, was fronting a punk band until he heard Mongolian overtone singing and formed a new group to perform the traditional music of Inner Mongolia, his father’s homeland.
He enlisted Han Chinese drummer Chen Kun and guitarist Xu Jingchen, and Hugejiltu and Bagen, Inner Mongolians who were studying music in Beijing. Except for one track that hints at East/West fusion with a Spaghetti Western guitar, the CD is all-acoustic, the morin khuur (two-string horsehair fiddle) and the tobshuur (strummed two-string lute) at its centre. The singing is like Tuvan singing, with its deep overtones, rumbling sounds and whistling harmonics. Robin Haller, who was hosting a weekly show on China Radio International about Chinese folk music and always struggling to find some, ran into Ilchi at a small bar in one of central Beijing’s oldest hutongs and became the album’s producer, setting up a small studio in his home. ‘Hanggai’ is an ancient Mongolian word describing an idealised grassland landscape of mountains, trees, rivers and blue skies.
Kerr Fagan Harbron
21/07/2008
On their new CD, Station House, real life and musical duo English fiddler/singer Nancy Kerr and Australian singer/guitarist James Fagan are joined by concertina-ist/guitarist Robert Harbron for a set of English, Australian and American instrumentals and songs.
Now going by the name Kerr Fagan Harbron, they’re also joined by double bassist Colin Fletcher on 3 tracks of this CD recorded in Robin’s Hood Bay, North Yorkshire, where the band found musical magic as they rehearsed in the kitchen of the former station master’s house where they stayed while recording the album.
Two-Faced Friday
18/07/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Mary McPartlan
14/07/2008
Well-weathered Irish vocalist Mary McPartlan’s second CD, Petticoat Loose, has diverse arrangements and styles with a core of traditional songs from her childhood in Co. Leitrim.
Mary started singing in the early 1970s, but it wasn’t until 2003 when she decided to make music her full time career. Her debut CD, The Holland Handkerchief, was voted Mojo’s #1 Folk Album. Petticoat Loose includes some nicely done covers - Leonard Cohen’s Sisters of Mercy, the traditional Romanian Lumé Lumé and Arlo Guthrie’s Victor Jara, along with new versions of Irish traditional songs that she has developed with poet/playwright Vincent Woods such as the title track - the story of a legendary wild woman of South East Ireland. The arrangements are ambitious and different from each other, featuring a fair swag of string sections.
Two-Faced Friday
11/07/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Eliza Gilkyson
09/07/2008
Sprung from monthly community forums in Austin, Texas, Eliza Gilkyson’s new CD, Beautiful World, has been called ‘cathartic to the point of jubilation’ and ‘political in all the right ways’.
Eliza, the daughter of songwriter Terry Gilkyson (Memories are Made of This, The Bare Necessities and Green Fields) veered into New Age music, working in Europe with Andreas Vollenveider before returning to the US and folk-styled music. The monthly gatherings that inspired the songs on the album were held at various venues with University of Texas professor/activist Robert Jensen and Presbyterian minister Jim Rigby. The first song she wrote, The Great Correction, which grieves over the devastation of the natural world, paved the way for a cycle of tunes about hope for a more beautiful world plus love songs and reflections on personal politics.
Dazibao
08/07/2008
Alma, the debut CD of Belgian two accordion, percussion and oud or flamenco guitar instrumental group Dazibao, shines sunnily as it journeys between North African, Musette and flamenco sounds.
Young accordionist Sophie Cavez, a mainstay of the Belgian and French folk music scenes, wrote most of the pieces on the album. No accordion jokes, please.
Maddy Prior
07/07/2008
On Seven For Old England, Steeleye Span’s singer Maddy Prior finally records, with acoustic backing, the melancholy English lyrical and pastoral ballads she has loved for years.
They are familiar to her from folksong club floor singers and from her fellow touring performers. Researching the album entailed trips to Cecil Sharp House, where she found the source of songs she remembered from her childhood. The backings, by guitarist Benji Kirkpatrick, his father button accordionist John Kirkpatrick, and by multi-instrumentalist Giles Lewin are tastefully spare to suit the songs.
Two-Faced Friday
04/07/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Mic Conway's National Junk Band
01/07/2008
On Mic Conway’s National Junk Band’s new CD, Corporate Chook, mindless consumerism, amoral corporations and ageing hack musicians are all targets for the group’s jug band hilarity.
The playing is great, whether it’s in the jug band, swing or music hall tradition and the songs exhibit the group’s irreverence. Highlights are a portrait of an ageing musical saw player titled (groan!) the Worn Saw Concerto, a cover of John Lennon’s Crippled Inside and Mic’s revision of his live schtick, the race call of the universe into a race call of the conception, birth, life and death of the hapless everyman, Bruce.
Two-Faced Friday
27/06/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Perunika Trio
25/06/2008
Introducing The Perunika Trio is the debut CD from the London-based trio of Bulgarian female singers, Eugenia Georgieva, Victoria Mancheva and Victoria Evstatieva.
The three tertiary educated singers split off into their own group after meeting through the London Bulgarian Choir. With occasional minimal backing, the trio sing a selection of Bulgarian and Macedonian songs with their distinctive drones and harmonies.
Etran Finatawa
24/06/2008
On their new CD, Desert Crossroads, Nigerian nomads Etran Finatawa chronicle their possibly disappearing culture to the backing of deep desert guitars and percussion.
Since the release of their debut CD in 2006, this group of musicians of Tuareg and Wodaabe heritage have been touring the world. When home, they live in Niger’s capital, Niamey. Living in the city isn’t a happy situation for them, but like many other nomads, they have been driven from their lands by modern pressures and desertification. The songs are about coming to terms with these changes and with the fear of losing one’s culture and identity. Despite the gloomy prognosis, the CD’s music is full of life.
Ian Hardie
23/06/2008
On Westringing, Scottish fiddler/composer and former lawyer Ian Hardie has recorded an all-solo CD of his own compositions, influenced by Appalachian fiddle styles, all in altered tunings.
Ian, a founder member of the seminal Scottish band Jock Tamson’s Bairns, has been deeply involved with the Scottish music revival since the 1970s, contributing many of his own compositions in traditional styles. For many years he combined music with practice as a lawyer, but since 2001 he has been exclusively involved in music and in the enjoyment of life in the Scottish Highlands. In 2003 he participated in the Smithsonian Folklife Festival which featured the music of Scotland and Mali and music of the place where they came together - Appalachia. Exposed to Appalachian old-time fiddle music, he became fascinated in the connections to the repertoire of Scotland and Ireland and followed up with five study and playing trips to the Appalachians. Impressed by the plethora of tunings in this tradition, he played all of Westringing’s (subtitled ‘Scotland Meets Appalachia’) pieces in alternate tunings.
Two-Faced Friday
20/06/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Väsen (Originally Broadcast on 12/12/2007)
18/06/2008
Powerful Swedish acoustic group Väsen pay a tongue in cheek tribute to their countryman Carl Linnaeus on their new CD, Linnaeus Väsen.
First they tell us that the great botanist had ‘no ear for music’, then they proceed to imform us that he was probably a fine polska dancer. Basically, they turn Linnaeus’ anniversary into an excuse to source compositions by his contemporaries, relatives and friends. On this album, Väsen expand their nyckelharpa, viola and acoustic guitar lineup by the addition of percussionist André Ferrari.
Painting With Music (Originally Broadcast on 19/7/2006)
17/06/2008
We’re painted into a corner for this Daily Planet thematic about songs and tunes about painters, paintings and the world of visual art.
Two-Faced Friday
13/06/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Bob Carlin and Cheick Hamala Diabate
09/06/2008
On From Mali to America, Bob Carlin and Cheick Hamala Diabate play an assortment of banjos ranging from ancient African to modern American ones in their quest to recapture the banjo’s early, African role in American music.
Cheick plays a variety of ngonis and a gourd banjo, while Bob plays a modern 5-string banjo, minstrel banjo and gourd banjo. Solo Tounkara plays acoustic guitar. Performing pieces from both sides of the Atlantic, this is a long-awaited re-discovery of the banjo’s roots.
TranSylvania
03/06/2008
The soundtrack to Tony Gatlif’s film TranSylvania has some great Gypsy music from Hungary and Romania featuring Hungarian singer Beata Palya and big-voiced Romanian Sandu Ciorba.
Beata’s band members, Gypsy musicians, cymbalum player Lukács Miklós and bassist Csaba Novák figure large in a wide range of lively songs and instrumentals from this music-rich part of the world.
Gao Hong
02/06/2008
On Flying Dragon, Chinese-born and trained and USA-based pipa maestro Gao Hong mixes it up very effectively with sitarist Shubhendra Rao, flutist James Newton and shakuhachi player Yoshio Kurahashi in the relisation of her dream of a rainbow coalition of musicians.
Gao was nicknamed ‘the little black kitten’ when she was small because her face was already speckled with soot from the furnace room where she practiced pipa for hours before her fellow musicians woke up. This was when she was with a provincial song and dance troupe in North Central China, which she joined at the age of 12 to help support her family after her father had been blacklisted and sent to the country as part of the Cultural Revolution. It was then that a fortune-teller’s labelling of her as a ‘Flying Dragon’ - one who would be constantly on the move, never settled, first proved itself. At the age of 22, Gao was one of two pipa players to be admitted to China’s premier school of music, the Central Conservatory of music in Beijing. In the mid-90s she moved to the USA, where she has applied her considerable skills on the pipa to expanding its repertoire. On lying Dragon, she truly reaches out to the disciplines of her collaborators - learning Hindustani scales, instinctively going with James Newton’s free improvisation and subtly teaming with Yoshio’s version of a traditional Japanese folk song.
Two-Faced Friday
30/05/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Konsonans Retro
28/05/2008
Ukrainian musicians Konsonans Retro’s acclaimed debut CD A Podolian Affair brings back to life the Jewish Brass Band music of the area through the collaboration between the musicians of the local Baranovsky family and Berlin-based clarinettist Christian Dawid. They’ve even been called ‘The best Klezmer band in the world.’
Odessa was the only city in which Jews were not governed by a rabbinical council, which meant that they were free to evolve into a secular, civil society which meant tavern-going and music-making. The Ukraine’s large Jewish population influenced the brass band music of that area. The Baranovsky brothers and their cousins play trumpets, accordion, trombone and barabon in the band, having been trained by their elders, Moise and Maria Baranovsky. Vasyl Baranovsky started playing in his father’s orchestra at the age of four, so he remembers many old pieces which are now perhaps only known to him. Christian Dawid, who arranged all the pieces, and London-based drummer Guy Schalom, successfully meld a Western sensibility on to the Baranovskys’ traditionalism.
Abigali Washburn and the Sparrow Quartet
27/05/2008
Instead of living in China working in Sino-American law, a chance event directed Abigail Washburn down a road that led to her forming a group with fellow banjoist Béla Fleck to record a CD that combines Appalachian and Chinese music.
Five years ago, when Abigail found herself on stage in a smoke-filled Beijing club playing her banjo and singing old-time Appalachian mountain music in Chinese to a packed house, she was as surprised as anyone. The woman who had no intention of becoming a performer joined the all-female group Uncle Earl and toured and recorded with them. She then formed a duo with Kentucky born and raised cellist Ben Sollee, later adding banjo genius Béla Fleck and young fiddler Casey Driessen to the group that became The Sparrow Quartet. Béla even produced the debut self-titled CD by Abigail Washburn and The Sparrow Quartet. It’s an unlikely but convincing meld of Appalachian and Chinese music and of the English and Chinese languages.
Marcus Sturrock
26/05/2008
Marcus Sturrock’s CD, Getting it Wronge showcases Marcus’ fertile and lively imagination in writing and playing instrumental pieces for his many instruments, including his custom made, low-tuned 7-string acoustic guitar.
Marcus has done many things including living in an ashram from 14 years of age, giving musical therapy for the profoundly autistic, and being an acrobat and a musician in a circus. The front cover was inspired by a load of lemons that came rolling down a steep driveway in front of his car, stopping at the road’s edge except for one, an obviously suicidal lemon. The original title of the CD was ‘The Vertigo Lemming’, but he got it a little wronge.
Two-Faced Friday
23/05/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Shantel
22/05/2008
With his CD Disko Partizani, DJ Shantel has moved beyond producing electronica to producing a mostly acoustic CD featuring great Balkan musicians, trumpeter Marko Markovic, clarinettist Filip Simeonov and accordionist Francois Castiello.
Shantel was first exposed to this music through his mother and her family, who moved from Bucovina (now divided between Ukraine and Romania) to Germany after the Second World War. A trip to his grandmother’s hometown, Czernovitz, the old capital of Bucovina, where he saw Balkan music performed live, transformed his musical world view so he began DJ-ing Electro-Balkan-themed nights which inspired other DJs to turn away from house, techno or breakbeats to embrace this heady new sound. Disko Partizani has beats and programming, but is less electronica-oriented than Shantel’s previous Bucovina Club recordings. With 27 musicians drawn from numerous European countries, it’s an ambitious and lively project.
Otis Taylor
21/05/2008
On his CD, Recapturing the Banjo, maverick bluesman Otis Taylor and a crew of fellow African-American musicians remind us that the instrument associated with bluegrass today had its origins in West Africa.
Guy Davis, Corey Harris, Alvin Youngblood Hard, Keb’ Mo’, Don Vappie and Otis himself take turns singing and playing the banjo on Otis’ minimalist topical songs and traditional ones ranging from Walk Right In to Hey Joe. The banjo, through the minstrel show and its black and white players in the Appalachians, was the king of American instruments in the 19th century, but it fell out of favour with black musicians in the later 20th century due to its associations with degrading stereotypes of African Americans. With racial stereotyping less prevalent today, Otis has gathered these artists to recapture the heritage of the instrument that began its life in Africa.
Adama Coulibaly
20/05/2008
Baba is a powerful, hypnotic recording of Malian musician Adama Coulibaly, who plays the donso ngoni, the hunter’s harp, and sings with all acoustic accompaniment.
Baba (a term of respect for elderly hunters) is the first release on Salif Keita’s Wanda Records, and Salif, who met Adama at Salif’s father’s funeral at the beginning of this decade, opens the album with a soaring tribute to his young protégé. The Coulibaly clan is a prestigious one in West Africa, producing an emperor in the 18th century and scores of highly respected hunters. Adama comes from a family of crop growers and hunters in a village near Mali’s capital Bamako, and began learning the donso ngoni at the age of 6. His studies with Sibiri Samaké, a musician whose lessons touched on geomancy and medicine, lasted for 20 years, exempting him from work in the fields and from attending school. The songs are, in West African tradition, moral lessons and the band is traditional as well, with Bolon (a bass lute), acoustic guitar, and calabash and karigan (a metal scraper) percussion in addition to Adama’s playing of his donso ngoni, an instrument regarded with great respect for its ability to communicate with the spirit world.
Two-Faced Friday
16/05/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Jeff Lang Guest Presenter
14/05/2008
Today Jeff Lang is our guest presenter so he’ll be choosing the music for The Daily Planet and explaining how it has influenced him and his great new CD, Half Seas Over.
Some of the artists Jeff has put on his eclectic short list are Richard Thompson, Ali Farka Toure and Ry Cooder, Jim Moray, John Fahey, Bill Frisell, Leo Kottke, Bonnie Prince Billy, AC/DC and Hound Dog Taylor.
Truckstop Honeymoon
12/05/2008
On Truckstop Honeymoon’s latest CD, Diamonds in the Asphalt, real-life and musical partners Mike West and Katie Euless use the country genre to ironic, humorous effect with songs that magnify the mundane aspects of life into crises.
There’s Mike’s song The Perfect Pair of Sunglasses which describes his tortured decision over which pair to buy at a truckstop, and there’s Katie’s song, (Me and My) Bad Attitude, which personifies her bad attitude as another character schizophrenically co-habiting her body. Mike’s originally from Australia and ended up in New Orleans via Manchester, but Katie and Mike and their two kids are now refugees from Hurricane Katrina, based in Kansas.
Two-Faced Friday
09/05/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Francesca Ancarola
07/05/2008
Lonquén is Chilean singer/songwriter Francesca Ancarola’s tribute to Victor Jara, the murdered nueva canción singer whose songs became the rallying cry for Chile’s generation who lived under Pinochet’s dictatorship.
Santiago-based Francesca has won a Fulbright Scholarship, completed a master’s in classical voice and opera, studied jazz guitar, cello and piano, and runs a noted vocal workshop. She felt that, since the prohibition of Jara’s songs was lifted in 1989, his legacy has grown even stronger. In his songs she finds the most complete expression of the contrast between his personal biography and the art he strove to achieve. The band mixes jazzy sensibilities with traditional, folk ones. The album includes 11 Jara songs, a poem by Pablo Neruda set to music by Francesca, and her own song, the title track, about Longquén, the rural settlement in which the charred, splintered remains of 15 people who ‘disappeared’ in 1973 were found in abandoned limestone ovens in 1978. This discovery resulted in the unravelling of a web of institutional lies cast over Chile by the military dictatorship.
Kenge Kenge
06/05/2008
The nearly-all-acoustic traditional instrument-playing Kenyan group Kenge Kenge create a dense, interweaving forest of sound in today’s program.
Founded in the early 1990s as the musicians for the Catering Levy Trust Choir - a government tax body that collects levies on hotels - the group evolved from a choir that sang religious and patriotic songs and hymns, to a band that played Kenya’s electric Benga music on traditional instruments: the orutu (one-stringed fiddle), the nyangile (sound box and gong), the asili (flute), the oporo (ox horn) and percussion. Benga started out as the transposing of traditional Luo rhythms to electric instruments. Kenge Kenge return the music to its roots after absorbing its development as a pop dance style. Unlike the clean sounds that electric Benga bands strive for, Kenge Kenge espouse a friendly distortion like that of the hypnotic Congolese group Konono No. 1. Kenge Kenge derives from a Luo expression which, roughly translated, means ‘a fusion of small, exhilarating instruments’. Amen.
Two-Faced Friday
02/05/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Two-Faced Friday
25/04/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Dáimh
22/04/2008
On their CD Crossing Point, Dáimh (Dah-Eve), a combination of musicians from Cape Breton, Ireland, the West Highlands of Scotland and the USA, play and sing a selection of airs, jigs, reels, strathspeys and songs vigorously, seamlessly uniting their traditions.
With various pipes and whistles, banjo, mandolin, guitar, bodhran and fiddle and a high-energy approach, they put out a full sound, whether the music is Irish, Scottish or even Galician.
Bedouin Jerry Can
21/04/2008
Blending Sufi chant and the 5 string lyre called the Simsimiyya with percussion played on jerry cans, ammunition boxes and coffee grinders, Sinai semi-nomads Bedouin Jerry Can make a powerful and clean desert sound on their CD Coffee Time.
The collective of musicians, poets, storytellers and coffee grinders from the Egyptian Sinai desert are from El Arish, an oasis city lying on the Mediterranean coast, and from the Sufis of the nearby settlement of Abo El Hossain. The group’s songs are about the Bedouins’ legendary generosity to guests, their trusty camels, untrusty sheep rustlers, beautiful women and last but not least...coffee.
CD of the Week - Dick Gaughan
21/04/2008
There are no half measures on Dick Gaughan’s new CD, Live at the Trades Club, in which he snarls and rails out against hypocrisy and prejudices of all sorts with only his acoustic guitar and voice to back him up.
The Trades Club in Hebden Bridge, UK, was built in 1924 by the textile and tailoring unions of West Yorkshire and taken over by the Labour Party in the 1970s after the demise of those industries. Since then, it’s developed into a multi-purpose venue presenting various activities and music from around the world. As one of Dick’s favourite places to play, he reserves it for the final night of his annual tour of England and Wales.
Two-Faced Friday
18/04/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Beoga
16/04/2008
With their unlikely lineup of two button accordions, piano and a bodhran, and their flair for an unusual approach to a tune, Beoga walk new ground in Irish traditional music on their CD, A Lovely Madness.
This is their debut CD and we’ve already featured their second album on The Daily Planet, but this one is available in Australia for the first time. In addition to their basic lineup, they use double bassist James Blennerhasset, electric guitarist Mudd Wallace, saxophonist Peter Tomelty and John Fitzpatrick’s violin and string arrangements. Beoga’s members have spent considerable time playing in Irish dance reviews and this has influenced their playing in a positive way, giving their arrangements many little twists and turns and nice dynamic effects. Bodhran player Eamon Murray is exceptional throughout.
Mal Webb
15/04/2008
Indefatigable multi-instrumentalist Mal Webb plays all the instruments and sings all the vocal parts on his new CD, a collection of whimsical, verbose, pun-filled songs called Dodgy.
Mal chose the album title because, he says, ‘Mal means dodgy things in most languages.’ There is a song celebrating the figure Pi, one telling a lovelorn person that they have a ‘Contraceptive Personality’, one bemoaning people with ‘designer dogs’, and another containing the line, ‘Let’s shuffle off this coital maul’.
Ingosi Stars
14/04/2008
The CD Langoni, by father-and-son Kenyan musicians William Ingosi Mwoshi and Jackson Amusala Ingosi, is a record of traditional Luhya music that contains a remarkable story of survival.
When William Ingosi Mwoshi arrived at the SW French World Music Festival ‘Nutis Atypiques’ in July 2003, he was unrecognisable to those who knew him - he had wasted away and was utterly exhausted. Two of the festival volunteers, who were the sons of the director of the local hospital in Langon, immediately hospitalised him to have his advanced intestinal cancer treated. William convalesced and returned in relatively good shape to Kenya in September. In 2006, Denis-Constant Martin travelled to Nairobi and recorded William’s and Jackson’s songs, including one in which William thanks the staff of the hospital that looked after him, pronouncing its locale as ‘Langoni’, hence the title of the CD.
Two-Faced Friday
11/04/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Kate Rusby
08/04/2008
On her new CD, Awkward Annie, Yorkshire folk singer Kate Rusby sumptuously sings a 50/50 mixture of original and traditional songs, with beautiful and varied acoustic backings in an unmistakeably melancholy mood.
Having broken up with her former life partner and producer, multi-instrumentalist John McCusker, she produced the album herself for the first time, with her brother Joe engineering and mixing and helping with the production. Losing her grandmother and a close uncle as the album was being made caused the recording to grind to a halt more than once and perhaps imbues it with a certain sadness. American musician Chris Thile adds a fresh flavour on harmony vocals and mandolin on several tracks, as do two brass bands. Kate’s favourite of her own original songs, The Bitter Boy, is indeed a fine song. And when you think about it, her being called ‘England’s answer to Dolly Parton’ by an English journalist is not as strange as it seems - ‘Not in terms of the wigs and the sequins, but in her quaveringly sincere ability to tell a simple, downhome story in a song and make your heart ache for it.’
Two-Faced Friday
04/04/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Two-Faced Friday
28/03/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Billy Bragg
27/03/2008
On Billy Bragg’s new CD, Mr. Love and Justice, the highly political singer/songwriter, who bridges the commitment and idealism of folk with the bluntness of punk, brings us a set of finely understated songs about love, sacrifice and justice.
It comes 6 years after his last album, England, Half English, but Bragg has been busy writing a treatise about England, collecting his back catalogue and directing a program that brings guitars and lessons to prisoners, among other things. He’s in remarkably fine voice and his group, The Blokes, focus the anger into the sound of commitment in these songs that cover the homeless, threats to freedom, the need to protect free beaches, and the potential evils of advertising. Like his previous album, its title is taken from a novel by Colin MacInnes.
Two-Faced Friday
21/03/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Rachel Unthank and the Winterset
19/03/2008
On The Bairns, Newcastle folk group Rachel Unthank and the Winterset put original arrangements to a selection of mostly traditional songs, sung in strong Geordie accents.
The core of the band is Rachel & Becky Unthank; two sisters born and bred in the North-East, and on the Tyneside tradition of sea songs, border songs and clog dancing. Mum and dad Unthank are both singers and Rachel (29) & Becky (22) have been going to and performing at folk clubs and festivals for as long as they can remember. Belinda O’Hooley, whose day job was playing piano in nursing homes, but had no experience with English traditional music, brings an original slant to the songs.
Sam Baker
17/03/2008
Sam Baker’s brush with death from a guerilla bombing in Peru in 1986 gave him a thankfulness to be alive and a desire to ‘do one great piece of art’ - his debut CD Mercy - which is now joined by the equally beautiful Pretty World.
After the bombing Sam had to relearn guitar upside-down and had great difficulty finding words for things. The latter difficulty influenced his songwriting in that he has to find words - they don’t just come - and when he sings them, it’s in short, truncated phrases that emphasise the individual words, which he’s painstakingly edited to tell his stories in song. Another thing that has transformed him from a self-described ordinary writer is his abiding thankfulness and wonder at being alive and his ability to appreciate the charm of ‘ordinary’ life in his fellow Texans. Continuing with the pedal steel and violin dominated sparse landscapes of his first CD, Pretty World looks compassionately at his fellow humans, gives thanks for the ordinary things of life, and in one song, revisits the day that changed his life.
Two-Faced Friday
14/03/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Christy Moore (Repeat of 27/2/2006)
10/03/2008
Christy Moore says that ‘A song is a song no matter who’s written it. If I sing a song to you and it lasts four minutes, for those four minutes, that song belongs to you and me - the singer and the listener.’ His new CD, Burning Times, recorded at Moving Hearts’, multi-instrumentalist Declan Sinnott’s studio, is a return to form for Christy as he puts his unique touch to great songs by Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Richard Thompson and other lesser known writers.
Two-Faced Friday
07/03/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Music Deli Presents Live Recordings From the Port Fairy Folk Festival
06/03/2008
On the eve of the 2008 Festival, we bring you Music Deli Presents: Live Recordings from the Port Fairy Folk Festival.
Produced by Radio National Music Deli’s Paul Petran, it includes excellent performances by Fiona Boyes and the Fortune Tellers, Niamh Parsons and Graham Dunne, Habib Koite and Bamada, and Eric Bibb and Dave Bronze.
Son de la Frontera
05/03/2008
On Cal, Son de la Frontera continue their explorations of the music of Diego del Gastor, with Raúl Rodríguez’ Cuban très guitar adding a new musical colour.
The group also interpret pieces by Diego’s brother Antonio Amaya Flores and some of his contemporaries - Montoya, Sabicas and Niño Ricardo.
Mike Seeger
04/03/2008
Today we feature Early Southern Guitar Sounds, the new CD by Mike Seeger whose folk musicianship Bob Dylan explains was his reason for giving up being a folk singer: ‘In order to be as good as that, you’d just have to be him, and nobody else ...I saw that it could take me the rest of my life to make practical use of that knowledge and Mike (Seeger) didn’t have to do that (Hewasjustrightthere). He was too good and you can’t be ‘too good’, not in this world, anyway.’ (Chronicles, pg. 71).
Folk music’s loss was music’s gain, but Mike has continued playing and researching folk music in the 5 decades since Dylan changed tack. On his new CD, multi-instrumentalist and stylist Mike concentrates on a range of Southern USA guitar styles played on a diverse collection of fine instruments. With Mike playing cowboy, Appalachian, blues, slide and archaic African-American styles, we get an enthusiastic and well-researched overview of a rich field - the work of a lifetime distilled into one album - not surprising given his pedigree - son of folklorists, brother of Peggy Seeger and half-brother to Pete Seeger.
John Spiers and Jon Boden (Repeat of 5/6/06)
03/03/2008
John Spiers and Jon Boden, winners of the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards ‘Best Duo’ for two out of the last 3 years, latest CD is simply called Songs.
On it, the powerful fiddle/melodeon/singing duo play a range of songs dating from the 17th Century to a version of a Tom Waits song that recasts it as a Victorian parlour ballad. Unafraid to play Morris dance pieces and other ‘less fashionable’ English musical styles with great verve, Spiers says ‘I’m a bit uncomfortable with the idea of anybody being a saviour of English music because I don’t think it needs salvation.’
Two-Faced Friday
29/02/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Genticorum
28/02/2008
On Malins Plaisirs (Devilish Pleasures), Montreal traditional trio Genticorum brings a fresh and vital feeling to traditional Québecois music.
All three members explored jazz and other styles before becoming passionate about traditional music. Alexandre de Grosbois-Garand was a funk-latin-jazz composer/arranger and bass player before he started studying wooden flute in 1997. Yann Falquet got a Bachelor’s degree in Jazz before developing a personal guitar style for music inspired by Breton, Scandinavian, Irish and North American styles. Pascal Gemme got degrees in big band arrangements, classical and jazz guitar before taking up the fiddle, inspired by the playing of his grandfather. As a result the trio bring a new, powerful, polished and light-hearted flavour to their all acoustic tunes and well-harmonised songs.
Genticorum tour Australia from 29 February to 30 March: http://www.newsouthfolk.com.au/#genti
Merle Haggard
27/02/2008
Merle Haggard has done excellent tribute albums to Jimmie Rodgers, Bob Wills and Lefty Frizell, but The Bluegrass Sessions is the first time Merle has recorded his rich voice and insightful songs with a Bluegrass band.
Not surprisingly it sounds great, with inspired playing from mandolinist Marty Stuart and dobro man Rob Ickes, and beautiful harmonising from Alison Krauss. Hag revisits some of his own classic songs bluegrass style and offers up some new ones that, as usual, show a new side to this still-evolving giant of a singer-songwriter.
Two-Faced Friday
22/02/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Two-Faced Friday
15/02/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
The SteelDrivers
13/02/2008
When Chris Stapleton sings songs he wrote with Mike Henderson in his raw, soul-drenched voice with an all-acoustic, no-overdubbing group, it’s apparent that the SteelDriver’s self-titled debut CD has carved out a new direction in Bluegrass.
For Mike Henderson, the group brings together the two sides of his musical personality - the bluegrass mandolinist and the hard-rocking blues slide guitarist. Mike and Chris had been writing songs together for a while and Mike, in the mood to play some bluegrass, thought, ‘Here are some songs we could do.’ They recruited excellent fiddler/vocalist Tammy Rogers, banjo man Richard Bailey and bassist Mike Fleming, to put together a repertoire for a once a week gig in Nashville - but the chemistry indicated that they had the potential to do much more than that. They cut their CD in one big room, doing no overdubs, but simply starting a tune over if a mistake was made. It’s an album of strong original songs, great playing and the outside-the-mould, silk to sandpaper tones of Chris’ soulful vocals.
Two-Faced Friday
08/02/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Two-Faced Friday
01/02/2008
Listening back over the last week, and forward to what’s on The Daily Planet next week.
Osvaldo Montes and Anibal Arias (repeat of 22/10/07)
24/01/2008
With a combined age over 150 years, bandoneon player Osvaldo Montes and guitarist Anibal Arias bring a depth and elegance to 24 tango classics on their CD Tango for the World.
The Buenos Aires based musicians, musical partners since the 1980s, show a deep understanding of and love for traditional tango in this CD that includes compositions by tango greats Gardel, Cobian, Troilo and Villoldo.
Best of 2007
21/01/2008
During Summer Season, we'll enjoy some of the best of the Daily Planets of 2007 but we won't have a CD of the week.
Tone Poets II (repeat of 16/10/07)
14/01/2008
In Part II of Tone Poets, the two beautiful instruments that we heard solo last week - an F5 mandolin and a Martin OM-45 guitar - are played in duets.
From the exciting bluegrass of the father/son duo Del and Ronnie McCoury to the jazzy newgrass of David Grisman and Tony Rice, the playing is topnotch and the tone is to die for.
Best of 2007
14/01/2008
During Summer Season, we'll enjoy some of the best of the Daily Planets of 2007 but we won't have a CD of the week.
Best of 2007
07/01/2008
During Summer Season, we'll enjoy some of the best of the Daily Planets of 2007 but we won't have a CD of the week.
