The Black Feathers - live and on video.

Watching the video below seems to me weird in an undefinable way. I find the juxtaposition of images from live performance and recorded video slightly curious but I don't really understand why that should be so.
This is The Black Feathers playing live at the Cheese and Grain last Friday evening and I took the picture.

This the official video for the same song, recorded in Nashville TN just a few weeks back.

Live and Local - The Green Room, Frome

I mentioned this new monthly event here four weeks ago. I was impressed then but this instalment only served to underline that. It featured four acts this time, all excellent, and was a fundraiser for local charity Positive Action on Cancer Frome. It was good to see some familiar faces on stage and in the audience and also to see two acts that I had never seen live before.
The event was largely put together and compèred by Griff Daniels and his friends (known as 'The Valleys', apparently) and they opened with a set to get the ball rolling. Here they are:

Next to play was Lauren Castle. She released her début EP 'Vintage Dress' in June 2014. She accompanies herself on either acoustic guitar or keys and at least I was already familiar with the EP.

Wildwood Kin are a trio from Exeter comprising Beth Key, Emillie Key and Meghann Loney. Their original songs, and they played several that are very recently written, are interesting in a number of ways and not least for the use of cajón on many; it is often quite dominant - and I can't decide which best sums my thoughts up - military marching band or tribal - but either way it works and so do the vocal harmonies. 

They are recording their début EP in Brighton this coming week. The release is end of 2014 (I suspect that is really rather optimistic) or early 2015. Any which way it is certainly one that I shall be waiting for with bated breath.

The Black Feathers topped the bill tonight and I stand by everything that I wrote after I saw them live, just six months ago but seems like an age, also in The Cheese and Grain.

I shall write more about all of this in due time but I'm off to North Dorset Folk Festival all day Saturday. 

Live & local in central-south England

Well here things are; after RSD (of which more later) and an inconvenient computer failure what better is there than the thought that unlike RSD live music is a year-round occurrence in these parts?
None of it gets better than Acoustic+ in Frome. Yesterday was the 98th edition and probably one of the finest that I have had the delight to attend. The first artist to play has been around since the start of Acoustic+ about a decade ago and is currently on a 'World Tour' - indeed he was in Trowbridge last week and will be in Bristol this coming one! He is also an active promoter of live music hereabouts as well as a fine singer-songwriter. In the past he has often played accompanied...

Yesterday he played solo and with plenty of the usual patter between songs...  Leander Morales.

The act I was most looking forward to seeing was Gloucestershire duo The Black Feathers. Due to Play at Acoustic+ in late 2013 they had to pull out at the last minute as Sian Chandler had lost her voice. A month or two after that they played Nunney Acoustic Café, but I was elsewhere that day. I was determined to see The Black Feathers this time and not least because, in the intervening months, their star has very much been in the ascendant including, if I remember correctly, a mention on Mike Harding's independent folk and roots show. Having finally seen them play live I can certainly see why that is. I bought the 2013 CD EP 'Strangers We Meet'.

On it they have discreet and subtle backing, including Anna Jenkins (of 'The Red Clay Halo') on violin and viola, but yesterday they were just performing as a duo.

They mentioned that this was probably the amongst the largest venues that they have played. Once their début album arrives I doubt that this will remain true for long. A certain kind of festival awaits The Black Feathers with breath bated and, believe me, it is the kind of festival at which I may be in attendance.

The last act to play was another that is a stalwart of the arts scene hereabouts - Ben Waller and the Tell Tale Signs. Usually a five-piece they were joined, for the purposed of looped sounds, by a Toshiba laptop that proved wholly uncooperative! They got on fine without it and then, as if one trouble was not enough, one of Ben's guitar strings broke. The result of this was that he borrowed Leander's acoustic guitar, when he needed one, for the rest of the set. I never quite managed a picture with all five band members in it as this one lacks the drummer.

Towards the end one of the rarer instruments seen at Acoutic+ made an appearance...

Autoharp. There is a whole festival dedicated to this instrument.

That leaves just one of the four acts to mention. It was the only one about which I had no prior knowledge at all and, if you know me, you will already know that such things are one of my favourite festival pastimes and why I like the smallest of stages and opening acts in general. In this case, however, they were first support and the band was Budada.

The four-piece based in Bristol/Bath are an interesting find indeed and difficult to categorize. You might therefore best check it out for yourself!

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.