Trusting in the Rising Light
Roads
Our Evening Walk
The Cards
Just West of Monmouth
Night Comes Quick in LA
Alive Today
These Hands
Swan
Your Kisses
Falling Snow
The Islands of the Inner Firth
Robin Williamson (vocals, Celtic Harp, Guitar, Hardanger Fiddle, Whistles)
Mat Maneri (viola)
Ches Smith (Vibraphone, Drums, Gongs, Percussion)
Recorded January 2014, Rockfield Studios, Monmouth
ECM 378 0287
[51:09]
Scottish singer and instrumentalist Robin Williamson, co-founder of The Incredible String Band, here joins American violist Mat Maneri and jazz
percussionist Ches Smith for a 51-minute release for ECM.
The title track establishes the underlying concept: folk-based poetic music-making, with sometimes over-written lyrics (all by Williamson and all helpfully
printed in the booklet) from an integrated trio dominated by the occasionally fragile Williamson vocals but with a strong sense of colour and place. The
literary focus is on the natural landscape, and Williamson’s curlicues vest the title track with a religious spirit of ascension. He’s a good guitarist but
an inventive Celtic harpist, and it’s this instrument he plays on Roads – a track that reminds me somewhat of Johnny Cash’s discs made with Rick
Rubin. Our Evening Walk, a beautifully spare and contained song, is motored by a powerful drone on viola with Williamson playing some decorative
fiddle over it. His vocal range, a strained falsetto coiling and twisting down to a more guttural bass, is at its most marked in The Cards. The
song is based on an Irish harp melody, but Williamson makes something very personal of it even though I’m aware that his voice will be a divisive matter.
Given that there are only three players and that sometimes, as on The Cards, Williamson just plays solo, it is good to break things up. The
oriental percussion that haunts Just West of Monmouth, with its parlando from Williamson, is not without wit, though also not without also its
absurdist Jazz Poetry reminiscences – all joss sticks and Allen Ginsberg. Such is also the case, perhaps, in Night Comes Quick in LA – spoken
texts over a shifting athletic drum pattern. We get a more popular sound in These Hands of Mine swinging with just a touch of Paolo Conte about
it.
Sometimes Williamson’s aesthetic becomes just too wispy and fey for my tastes, vaporous vocal curlicues trying to vest the lyrics with a weight they might
not otherwise possess. But when he evokes Eastern shimmering sonorities he becomes calmer and in many ways more evocative – try Falling Snow for a
Celtic-Japanese hybrid but be careful as the track ordering has gone awry. This is track 10 not 11. Track 11 is Your Kisses, which has a slightly
Arabic soft Rock vibe. Wrong-footing dissonances and a generous helping of sheer pretentiousness attend the final track, The Islands of the Inner Firth.
So, what do we have? Not Jazz, that’s for sure. Folkloric music, but not just Celtic folk music; folk music cross-fertilized with Eastern and Middle
Eastern tinges. Personal lyrics, all by Williamson, dealing with love, longing, and the beauties and harshnesses of the natural world. It’s a curio, to be
frank.
Jonathan Woolf.
CD Reviews
ECM 378 0287
