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Live From Old York: Tom Lewis, Bryan Ferry, Blockheads, Brass Monkey & 4square

Live From Old York: Tom Lewis, Bryan Ferry, Blockheads, Brass Monkey & 4square
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Tom Lewis
The Black Swan
November 7, 2013

It was easy to identify Tom Lewis whilst he was sitting amongst the audience at the Black Swan Folk Club, checking out the floor singers at the evening's beginning. This was a man sporting an anchor earring and an anchor amulet, with his hair intricately woven at the back of his head in a manner which might easily support an extra, imaginary, anchor. Lewis is a veteran interpreter and sometime author of sea shanties, even though his 23 years of nautical experience were on a submarine rather than a sailing ship. It's been 14 years since his last visit to this York club-in-a-pub, but his valid excuse is that he and his wife Lyn have been living in British Columbia for the last three decades. Only this year have they moved back to Bournemouth, England, to care for Lyn's nonagenarian mother. Lewis was born in Belfast, but grew up in Gloucester. This is apparently his 70th year, but he looks around two decades younger.

It's not so often that we have the chance to drink in an evening of sea shanties. This rare musical guzzle turned out to be a revelatory experience. Despite a recent upsurge of interest within the mainstream firmament with the Rogue's Gallery Hal Willner project, these shanties remain curiously individual beasts. Straight away, the performance turned into a communal event, as many of the club members were familiar with the words of the old traditional material, and even with much of the original Lewis songbook. The two sets were divided between solo singing and numbers with Lewis accompanying himself on either ukulele or button accordion. These might be basic means, but his rousing interpretations, bolstered by the vigorous audience participation, resulted in a fulsome roar as these twinkle-eyed tales were spun—sometimes melancholic, oft-times rollicking.

He sang "Bully In The Alley," which deals with steering compensation for an insecure mast, meaning a drunken sailor, looking for his ship. This was followed by his own "Landlocked Sailor" and then "Northwest Passage," by the Canadian singer Stan Rogers. Lewis noted that when Rogers died, right at the start of his Canadian sojourn, this was given prominence on the six-o-clock news, unlike the underground media-whispering that would have greeted a similar loss in the UK. His merry version was delivered a cappella, with frothing pint in hand. "All At Sea" was written and dedicated to those who haven't been, many of these permanently grounded types revealing themselves to Lewis in the deepest dry heartlands of the USA. Another song dealt with rock'n'roll and its place as an influence on the sea shanty scene, at least in its composer's eyes. "New York Girls" took polka to salacious heights—"You love us for our money," he sang as he sharply clipped his uke.

Lewis possesses an odd similarity to Jonathan Richman, if we can imagine the latter turning his hand to tales of the ocean. Lewis can certainly compete with the rock'n'rollin' Modern Lover in terms of charismatic emanations. His rich voice is perfectly suited to an authoritative spinning of yarns, his storytelling between the songs being equally expressive. Even with his own minimal accompaniment, Lewis creates an age-old canvas of salty spraying, barnacle weathering and, er, submarine claustrophobia.

Bryan Ferry
Barbican
November 14, 2013

This was an epic show, with hardly a lax moment. The Bryan Ferry Orchestra took to the stage first, delivering reinterpretations of old Roxy Music and solo works, as found on the recent album, The Jazz Age (BMG, 2013). Ferry himself wasn't at the keyboards, that position taken by the project's arranger Colin Good. The idea was to deliver Ferry's songs as if they'd been penned during the 1920s, performed after the fashion of Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson or King Oliver.

Sometimes the tunes emerged in a barely recognizable state, and at others they sounded oddly mutated, as with "Avalon," which ended up sounding preferable to its original incarnation. The Orchestra also skewed towards latter-day songbird Lana Del Ray, as re-invented for The Great Gatsby (Water Tower Music, 2013). One thing that wasn't apparent in advance was the impressive way that the band metamorphosed gradually into Ferry's core combo for the evening.

The man himself strolled on casually, soon joined by his two female backing singers. Horns (including a bass saxophone), banjo and upright bass were then downed in favor of electric axes, and soon, the younger, rockier players took their places, with the Orchestra suddenly turning into a soulful, funky, boogie-ing horn section. Trumpeter Enrico Tomasso was reincarnated four or more decades later along the line, and reedman Iain Dixon moved across the stage to become a kind of composite Andy Mackay and Brian Eno character, blowing highly emotive lead saxophone and occasionally either playing keyboards or robustly twisting his bank of analogue synthesizer knobs.

Ferry's melancholically quavering voice remains one of the best, and most distinctive, in British rock music, and his sheer joy in presenting this retrospective of his four decade success story was immediately apparent. He never ceased moving to the music, continually flexing his insectoid limbs, shimmying around the stage, and making gesticulating pictures out of his couplets. He only sat at the keys once, playing electric piano, but his dynamic harmonica playing was dotted liberally throughout both sets.

Frequent guitar solos were taken by the visually reserved but sonically gushing guitarist Oliver Thompson, whose chemical vibration with the equally stripling drummer Cherisse Osei was crucial to the energy of the band. Thompson's solos sometimes impersonated Brian Eno's synthesizer sound, and Osei's behemoth fills lashed the band up to their highest endeavors, somewhat reminiscent of Cindy Blackman in her thundering subtlety. A few nights on the road had clearly started the process of loosening the gang up into confidence, something that can only happen when the players are so well melded that they begin to operate by instinct.

Powerful though the first set was, the full gunning was reserved for the second half of the evening. This soon set off that special energy-ricochet between crowd and musicians, eased by the succession of signature songs, including "Love Is The Drug" and "Let's Stick Together," with "Street Life" and "Do The Strand" eminent for their godlike stomping, then "Editions Of You" and "A Song For Europe" allowing Ferry and his players to shine in the most brilliantly dazzling light.

Ferry had the courage to make earlier diversions, even though his cover versions are an established part of the old repertoire: John Lennon's "Jealous Guy," Bob Dylan's "Knockin' On Heaven's Door," a strangely, but successfully tipped-in Charlie Parker's "Au Privave," then Shirley Goodman's "Shame, Shame, Shame," Sam & Dave's "Hold On, I'm Coming" and the traditional Irish folk song "Carrickfergus," with "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" providing yet another radical time-shift. Rather than being a fidgety number-shuffle, these multiple style-aspects were all fed through the able mittens of the band, adapting a oneness of sound, in a pan-generational orgy of sonic dicing.

The Blockheads
Fibbers
November 15, 2013

Here's another gig where it's likely that the audience were intimately familiar with most of the songs played. Although front man Ian Dury died in the year 2000, his Blockheads have continued to keep the old music alive with a virtually complete line-up from their original late-1970s heyday. Even though singer, narrator, poet and raconteur Derek "The Draw" Hussey now takes on the heavy Dury responsibility, most of the repertoire is still dominated by the old classic material rather than any more recent compositions. Both friend and minder of Dury back in the day, Hussey adopts a jokily hectoring Cockney stance, but appears to be influenced almost as much by Viv Stanshall, the extremely eccentric voice of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.

Still in the Blockheads are Chaz Jankel (guitar/keyboards), John Turnbull (guitar), Mickey Gallagher (keyboards) and Norman Watt-Roy (bass). Gilad Atzmon took the saxophonic position, revealing a strong streak of funky soulfulness from this erstwhile bandleader on the mainline jazz scene. The set list was emphatically in the greatest hits league, opening with "Sex & Drugs & Rock'n'Roll," then rapidly trouncing through "Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick," "What A Waste," "Wake Up And Make Love With Me," "Sweet Gene Vincent," and "Clever Trevor," with "Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part 3" sounding particularly robust. That's some impressive catalogue! Jankel and Turnbull traded guitar solos, or went for some more extended highlight spots, impressive when jousting and also when showcased alone.

Atzmon came on like a warty Michael Brecker, dirtying up the rhythm'n'blues licks, turning jazz funk a sickly shade of green. Hussey was sometimes a touch overbearing in his audience exhortations, but generally possessed a wily wit, flecked with naughty innuendo. Watt-Roy never ceased in his expressive funk contortions, constantly stretching his next bass line from an endless length of tight rubber. This might have been a nostalgia show, but these songs still retain their cheeky vigor over three decades down the line.

Brass Monkey
The University Of York
November 20, 2013

These veteran folksters have been celebrating their 30th anniversary, not least with a live album release. Their gigs, however, are curiously sporadic, so their appearance offered a rare opportunity to catch this distinctive mixture of folk song expanded by brass blowing. The singers are a pair of England's most venerated interpreters of ancient song, Martin Carthy and John Kirkpatrick. They carved up the vocal duties fairly equally, the former mostly accompanying himself on guitar, but sometimes on mandolin, the latter playing accordion, melodeon and concertina.

The three horn players stuck mostly to the twinned trumpets (Shane Brennan, Paul Archibald) and trombone (Roger Williams) ratio, but there were occasional hoistings of the euphonium and switchings to flügelhorns. The "secret weapon," as Kirkpatrick called him, is Martin Brinsford, who percusses in the stationary marching-band fashion, as well as blowing a variety of chromatic harmonicas, sometimes at the same time as wielding a hand drum. The whole spread facilitated a courtly prance that often ended up romping in the mud of the village square. Song subjects were recurringly sexual, usually mixed in with religion or criminality. All the ripest ingredients for bawdy old English song, with sometime shades of Shetland, or even France.

It was a tricky balance between discerning all the words in these strongly narrative ditties and being caught up by the merry horn pomp, but Carthy and Kirkpatrick are experts at pitching their voices loudly and clearly, rising above the fruity spread of squeezebox, harmonica and horns. These elements fermented together to create a much deeper brew than might be expected, allowing the ears of the audience to fill in strange imaginary harmonies. Kirkpatrick made most of the witty comments, and the art of spinning the tales behind the songs provoked as much merriment as the material itself. The music had a light skip, but the sentiments were repeatedly melancholic, pessimistic or even bordering on the smuttily blasphemous.

These were ripe old times to be pilfered, with some of the songs dating back four or five centuries. The comparatively more recent works were often collected from what was believed to be the sole and final interpreter who recalled that particular tune. Kirkpatrick added a few of his own future (and even present) classics, adding to the folkish gene-swirl. The two sets sped by quite quickly, bowing down to strict concert hall time, as opposed to beery folk club languishing, but this had the effect of compressing all the fun into a bumper two hour whirl, reflecting very closely the contents of the recent live album.

4square
The Black Swan
November 21, 2013

A typical folk club audience may well be lingering in the autumn or even winter of their lives, but there are no shortage of ascendant bands populated by players in their twenties. This mirrors a situation that is often the case in jazz music, where its exponents are often much younger than most of the usual audience. Speaking of jazz, there is a new breed of folk combo that's influenced by styles outside of the old norm, with the syncopated flow of the music being paramount amongst these outer elements. From Manchester, 4square were in the midst of a zig-zagging tour schedule, stopping off in the cozy and almost sold-out space of The Black Swan.

It's Jim Molyneux's piano that lends much of the jazzy character, his rippling vamps filling most of the tunes with momentum and verve. Percussionist Dan Day was mostly using an instrument that looked like a hybrid of a conga and a cajón, with the latter's trademark rattle emanating from just under the skin. He otherwise employed a snare and a foot-cowbell quite sparingly. The hardcore folk sound was mostly provided by the remaining pair of players, Nicola Lyons and James Meadows. Lyons played fleet fiddle, with a few tunes executed whilst simultaneously clogging. Meadows swapped between an equally incredible banjo virtuosity, and a guitar that looked like a smaller breed of National steel.

The melodies were steeped in the old traditions, but the finished compositions were sleek with fusion hyperactivity, convoluted arrangements that kept increasing the sweetness of head-dancing pleasure centers. One small problem was the blandness infesting most of their vocal numbers, but these songs were thankfully in the minority. The instrumental pieces burned with a fire that was soon extinguished with a wet rag once those poppy ballads came into play. Nevertheless, the overall momentum of the vocal-less tunes easily won out in the end.

Photo Credit
Sam Urquhart

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