Monday, May 8, 2017

Quercus - Nightfall (ECM 2017)



Quercus’s self-titled ECM debut won the album-of-the-year award of the German Record Critics in 2013, was widely praised  by the  international press, and especially celebrated in Britain where June Tabor has long reigned as “the dark voiced queen of English folk music” (to quote The Times). Folk and jazz and chamber music become one in Quercus’s world, where recontextualizing of material is part of the process, prompting listeners to pay heightened attention even to familiar songs. Nightfall opens with the most famous of farewells in “Auld Lang Syne”, and gently breathes new life into it, leading us into a programme that includes Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice”, the jazz standard “You Don’t Know What Love Is” and the West Side Story ballad “Somewhere”, as well as original compositions by Huw Warren and Iain Ballamy and songs from British folk tradition, in stark and moving new arrangements.


1 Auld Lang Syne  05:46
2 Once I Loved You Dear (The Irish Girl)  05:43
3 On Berrow Sands  06:32
4 Christchurch  04:47
5 You Don't Know What Love Is  05:03
6 The Manchester Angel  06:44
7 Don't Think Twice It's Alright  07:22
8 Emmeline  04:00
9 The Shepherd and His Dog  07:21
10 The Cuckoo  06:38
11 Somewhere  05:32

June Tabor, voice
Iain Ballamy, tenor & soprano saxophones
Huw Warren, piano