Now it’s her turn to take centre stage
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Rhiannon Giddens’ solo debut is like a scenic boat ride along a river of song.
Source: Supplied
THIS week’s album reviews from The Courier-Mail (ratings out of five stars):
ROOTS
RHIANNON GIDDENS
Tomorrow is My Turn (Warner)
****
Giddens first came to attention in The Carolina Chocolate Drops, a string band that drew on bluegrass and old-time jug band music for its sound and repertoire, which included standards and originals. But the quality of Giddens’ voice, classically trained but equally adept at soul and blues, made a solo career inevitable.
She met producer T Bone Burnett at a New York concert celebrating the folk music that was the subject of the film Inside Llewyn Davis.
She was also the standout performer on last year’s Burnett-produced Lost on the River: the New Basement Tapes, songs written around previously unheard Bob Dylan lyrics from the ’60s.
Burnett sees her as part of a line of singers, including Odetta, Mahalia Jackson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Nina Simone. You can hear why with Tomorrow is My Turn, also produced by Burnett, a record that builds on the foundations of traditional song without being simply revivalist.
Giddens brings those traditions into the present day, ranging across material popularised by everyone from Peggy Seeger to Simone.
The title tune is by Charles Aznavour, although Giddens became aware of it from a video of a 1968 Simone live performance. It is delivered as a jazz ballad with violin and viola parts and a regal vocal performance. Giddens wraps herself around the Parisian-flavoured melody with lines such as: “It’s too late to regret/What is gone will be no more/Tomorrow is my turn.’’
The album is a like a scenic boat ride along a river of song. The album, fittingly, opens with the boat emerging from a mist. That’s the guitar-and-mandolin blues Last Kind Words, written by Geeshie Wiley, a long-lost blues singer who recorded a handful of songs in 1930 and 1931, along with her friend Elvie Thomas. Their incredible story was unravelled by John Jeremiah Sullivan in an essay, The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie, in New York Times Magazine last year.
Last Kind Words is the kind of song that Ry Cooder could have included on his early albums.
Tomorrow Is My Turn does the same job today as Cooder’s work did then: convincing a new audience that this music is not just a scratchy-voiced ghost from a distant past but still alive and vital, still open to interpretation and still somehow contemporary.
The lines between country and soul music have often crossed over and that’s what Giddens does with Dolly Parton’s Don’t Let It Trouble Your Mind and Patsy Cline’s She’s Got You, the latter given the kind of treatment (horns, female backing singers) that might have graced a ‘60s hit on Stax. The meeting place between spirituals and blues is equally important, with Giddens’s vocal power unleashed on Odetta’s Waterboy.
Giddens adds a funky rhythm to a saucy, upbeat rewrite of Black is the Color, while another traditional tune, O Love is Teasin’, is given an arrangement not unlike those Steeleye Span applied to trad material, with electric guitar and fiddle.
The album closes with an original tune, Angel City, the kind of sweet folk lament that could have been written yesterday or 100 years ago. By this time, no one will be in any doubt that a major talent has arrived.
You’ll be hearing much more from Rhiannon Giddens.
Noel Mengel
FOLK
THE GOODWILLS
The Last Waterhole (Independent)
****
Bob and Laurel Wilson open their latest Goodwills album with a ballad about swaggies and billabongs but it’s a long way from Waltzing Matilda. The sun-blasted traveller of The Last Waterhole is stumbling through a Condamine plains stripped bare by the great tsunami of 2043 and littered with shipwrecks and flotsam. It’s another striking scenario from the imagination of Bob and the highlight of an album full of surprises. The folk duo, based in the Sunshine Coast hinterland, mix up traditional folk with a brassy ragtime track (Buddy’s gone to Conondale) and some slinky rock (Dead Man’s Shirt), complete with chugging licks and growling Hammond organ. Bob’s reedy tenor is wonderful supported by Laurel’s multi-octave vocals. Bob loves lists with Ore Train Blues referencing a dozen or so railroad songs. The satirical Paul Who? has clever references to McCartney, Newman, Anka, Keating, Hogan, et al, and a parting jab at a Pauline we all know. This is engaging stuff delivered with warmth and wit. Highly recommended.
David Costello
CLASSICAL
SVIATOSLAV RICHTER
Complete Decca, Philips and DG Recordings (Decca)
****1/2
Legendary Ukraine pianist Sviatoslav Richter (1913-1997) described his Brahms Piano Quartet opus 26 recording with Mikhail Kopelman (violin), Dmitri Shebalin (viola) and Valentin Berlinsky (cello) as one of the “few successful records” he had made. So it seemed a good entry to this 51-CD treasure trove of Richter’s solo piano, chamber music, concertos and Lieder recordings. It features the music of J.S. Bach, sonatas by Joseph Haydn and Mozart and romantics such as Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, Debussy and Prokofiev. Whether releasing torrents of thunderous sound, or ripples of finest filigree, Richter’s precise timing and intense clarity make each piece distinctive. In Bach’s English Suite in D minor, he lets the music breathe slowly, eloquently, but a heavy-handed Stravinsky Piano-Rag-Music lacks humour.
In generous partnerships with pianist Benjamin Britten, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Richter the individual artist shines.
Patricia Kelly
INDIE ROCK
BRITISH INDIA
Nothing Touches Me (Liberation/Mushroom)
***1/2
British India are aptly named, given the Melbourne quartet’s influences in British classic and indie rock. There are shades of Blur, Keane or James, with our own Augie March thrown in for good measure. Turning it up to British India’s 11th year, Nothing Touches Me is a guitar and piano-driven set that cements their melodic pop-rock credentials. The album starts out with tunes that are musically and emotionally delicate, with Declan Melia’s fragile vocals adding to the effect. But by the title track they’ve exploded into full screeching-guitar mode. Stop-start strumming drives upbeat ballad Angela, while the ballroom majesty of Jay Walker is moving: “I feel like my heart is gonna explode.” On Lifeguard he sings: “My name coming out of your mouth/It’s so strange to hear it again.” There may be little to distinguish British India from other songsmiths of their ilk, but that doesn’t make them any less worthy of a listen. And Nothing Touches Me sits comfortably within their body of work.
John O’Brien
Coming Up For Air by Emma Bosworth
ROCK
EMMA BOSWORTH
Coming Up For Air (Independent)
***1/2
As Emma Carton she was a busy contributor to the Brisbane indie band scene but as Emma Bosworth she explores in a melodic indie pop vein with some soul flavours for extra impact. Opener Penny, nominated for best blues and rock song at this year’s Queensland Music Awards, is an R & B groove with keys from Halfway’s Luke Peacock and bluesy guitar from Chris Harvey. That style comes through again on Running, with its traces of pre-Beatles pop. My Town is sweetly sun-dappled pop, befitting a song where old friends catch up to reminisce about the old place But what’s most exciting is that Bosworth is developing a strong voice of her own, neither defiantly retro nor gleamingly modern, on songs like the aching slow-burners like Brightside, Ruby and the striking title tune. It opens with guitar feedback calling like a ship’s horn through the fog, before Bosworth sings “I’m done denying, I’m done with crying, Sick of talking to myself, Feels like I’m coming up for air’’. It’s also a song that defies easy categorisation, always a good thing in my book.
Noel Mengel
COUNTRY
TROY CASSAR-DALEY
Freedom Ride (Liberation)
****
In a 20-year career Cassar-Daley has walked the line between mainstream and old-school country, earning the respect of top-shelf co-writers writers like Don Walker, Paul Kelly and Col Buchanan. But Freedom Ride appeals as the strongest album of his career. It was recorded in Nashville with a crack band – that doesn’t hurt – but with a set of tunes like this he could have recorded it on the back veranda and it still would have been good. Country can lay on the sentimentality with a trowel but TCD gets the balance right here, whether singing about small-town racism (Since You Left This Town), Charlie Perkins’s historic 1965 freedom ride (the title tune, co-written by Kelly) or a family hand-me-down (This Old Hat). There possibly have been thousands of country songs written about trains but Something About Trains is a classic of the genre. Equally powerful is Tennessee Rain, another collaboration with Kelly. Cassar-Daley had throat surgery before this recording but his voice, perhaps a little more lived-in and grittier, has never sounded better.
Noel Mengel
CUBAN
BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB
Lost and Found (World Circuit)
****1/2
These are no mere cold leftovers from the BVSC recording sessions. These studio and live cuts are rare and precious gems from the vault, making up an album that is just as good as World Circuit’s original 1997 Buena Vista Social Club release. We were treated to a magical performance by surviving participants in Brisbane last week and here’s the icing on the cake. It includes Compay Segundo’s Macusa, recorded at the same 1996 sessions in Havana’s Egrem Studios which produced the original album. The track features Segundo and Eliades Ochoa on vocals, the pairing heard on the first album’s most famous track, Chan Chan. Ochoa features on vocal and guitar on Quireme Mucho and Pedacito De Papei, recorded after everyone else had left for the day. Omara Portuondo takes the lead on the marvellous Lagrimas Negras, while a sprinkling of live tracks feature the late Ibrahim Ferrer and Ruben Gonzalez. Check out Bodas De Oro, an example of all that is great about the traditional music of Cuba, with its blasting brass and an extraordinary piano solo, presumably from Gonzalez.
Noel Mengel
