Singing the Body Eclectic
Introduction
Back to Africa:
Folk fidelity:
Cuban vacation:
Political vibrations:
Reels and Jigs:
Passing the torch:
- - - - - - - -
Sound Salvation
- - - - - - - -
Table Talk
|
BY HANS EISENBEIS - - - - - - - - - June Tabor, "Aleyn" (Green Linnet Records) Part of the attraction to folk- and world-music insiders is the unplundered catalog and vast historical canon of their artists, the kind of secret handshakes and name-dropping of true believers through which subcultures survive and thrive. For better or worse, that same cliquishness can drive away newcomers. This is partly to do with the fact that so few musicians are willing or able to cut across the bins at the CD store and get themselves cataloged as folk, world, pop or rock all at the same time. June Tabor is a fine example of a world-music bodhisattva, a smoky-voiced hybrid of Leonard Cohen and Claudia Schmidt who can appeal to everyone from top-40 neophytes to pedantic folk obscurantists with equal ease. This is a natural result of her connections to and collaborations with acknowledged pop stars like Richard Thompson and Elvis Costello. On "Aleyn," she opens with Thompson's haunting classic "The Great Valerio," closes with a Caribbean slave shanty ("Shallow Brown") and manages in between to touch on contemporary English folk polemic (Ralph McTell's "Bentley and Craig"), Yiddish lament ("Di Nacht") and pan-Anglican minstrelsy. Her cabaret folk doesn't shy away from taking everyone from the Pogues, the Velvet Underground and the entire 17th century under her strapless arm and putting them through the paces with sax, electric piano and a string quartet. Still, the ultimate appeal of Tabor (and the reason she has such a diverse following) is her rich baritone voice, such a rarity and relief in these intractably baby-voiced times.
Muzsikás with Márta Sebestyén, My old grampa, a Wisconsin dairy farmer, loved to say, "A broken clock is right twice a day." It was his way of saying there's sometimes hidden value in the unchanging, the obsolete and the woefully unhip. When it comes to ultra-purist folk forms, this sentiment leads to a temptation to encourage "living museums" of music "the way it has been played for centuries" The only thing wrong with such an approach is that it makes traditional music forms more easily dismissed as irrelevant. The premiere Hungarian folk troup Muzsikás proves that fidelity to folk ways -- and a resistance to update and contemporize -- can be a subtle and subversive thing in itself. Indeed, the string quartet emerged at a time when the Iron Curtain stifled artistic freedom -- anything arising from populist interest stirred suspicion in Soviet authorities. But to shut down traditional art forms would have been to invite disaster. So the new urban folk movement was born, the Soviets backed off and Muzsikás has been playing ever since. The real beauty of this group, along with singer Márta Sebestyén (who was most recently the featured vocalist who plays an unseen but pivotal role in the movie "The English Patient") is its incredible competence. "Morning Star" showcases five undisputed virtuosi; that their medium is uncorrupted Transylvanian folk in no way diminishes the fact that they are among the globe's finest musicians in any genre. Indeed, it goes a long way toward explaining why it is presently considered one of the most vital, relevant groups around. Muzsikás with Márta Sebestyén Tour Schedule:
Hans Eisenbeis is editor of Requestline and a regular contributor to Salon. - - - - - - - - HEAR IT:
NEXT: Cuban vacation
|
SALON | ARCHIVES | CONTACT US | TREATS | SEARCH | TABLE TALK
DAILY |
BLUE GLOW
|
BOOKS
|
COLUMNISTS |
COMICS |
FEATURE |
MEDIA CIRCUS
MOTHERS WHO THINK |
MUSIC
|
NEWSREAL
WEEKLY |
21ST |
ENTERTAINMENT |
WANDERLUST
![[June Tabor]](src/03world2.gif)
HUNGARY'S MUSZIKÁS AND GREAT BRITAIN'S BARITONE BODHISATTVA, JUNE TABOR
