Acoustic+ - live in Frome

It has been a couple of months since the last Acoustic+, with the customary summer hiatus following the Frome Festival Food Feast. It returned to the Cheese and Grain yesterday evening with aplomb, despite the fact that the venue is part way through a comprehensive £500k re-configuring to bring it up to the standards required of a regional venue and one of the four acts being forced to cancel at the very last moment due to a temporarily voiceless vocalist! The good news is that at the eleventh hour a quality replacement was scrambled and The Black Feathers have now been rescheduled for Acoustic+ on 22 November.
The evening started with Frome-based duo Seasons.

Bertie Harrison-Broninski on Irish bouzouki and Fin Scholefield on guitar.

Their original songs were very interesting and far from wholly traditional - so their chosen bookmark as alt-folk is very much warranted - but the choice of cover versions was no less remarkable.

The bouzouki is an instrument that has expanded its territory vastly in the last century or so; it made its way to Greece from Asia Minor as late as the start of the 20th century, Celtic-influenced folk by the late 1960s and is now in common use in Scandinavia too.
I seems that I need to 'look sharp' when it comes to the act that stood in in place of The Black Feathers and not least because Sloe Jam is appearing on Frome FM this evening (from 9pm BST/UTC+1).

Francis Hayden on guitar.

Sloe Jam is no flash in the pan - that should be obvious - so here is what I thought about Sloe Jam in 2009 and you really do need the album.
The third act to play was Albatross Archive. Once a four-piece, latterly a three-piece, and as it happened yesterday (because their saxophone player was in San Francisco presenting a research paper on Post Modernism) just a duo for the very first time. It was astonishing and not least because most others would have given up long ago. Then there was a faulty lead and then Coleridge smiled (possibly and posthumously). 

Everything went well thereafter.

   
To close was the band Three Corners fronted at least to a great extent by the organisers of Acoustic+. That said, this was Three Corners in full band mode and I'm not actually sure that I managed to get everyone in a single picture.

This is as good as I got.

    

You could take a completely different perspective of course.