My review of Nightfall, the second album from Quercus, the trio that -featuring traditional singer June Tabor, pianist Huw Warren & saxophonist Iain Ballamy (Bill Bruford's Earthworks, Mark I), today at All About Jazz.
It may have taken seven years for the innovative British trio featuring singer June Tabor, saxophonist Iain Ballamy and pianist Huw Warren to find a label and release their first album together, but they sure landed on their feet. Not only was the trio's 2013 debut, Quercus, released on the renowned ECM imprint; it was also enthusiastically received by critics and fans alike, winning that year's prestigious German record critics' Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik, Jahrespreis (Album of the Year). And so, it's very good news that the trio named after its ECM debut has managed to release Nightfall a mere 17 months after its live recording at Cooper Hall in Frome, a small town in the southwest of England.
And a fine album it is, representing an inevitable and consequential evolution of the language first hinted at on Tabor's At the Wood's Heart (Topic) - her tenth album working with Warren but her first with Ballamy and, no doubt, the session where the seeds of Quercus were first sown.
That Quercus has been so well received is, of course, no surprise to any who had the good fortune of seeing this trio in its earliest years. Bringing British traditionalism (and music farther afield) together with improvisational explorations that push each song's boundaries while remaining true to its heart, the trio's 2007 performance at Kristiansand, Norway's Punkt Festival was a deep, dark and beautiful confluence of disparate musics and interpretive ideas that, on paper, might have seemed incongruous but, in the hands of Tabor, Ballamy and Warren, clearly posited a new and eminently alluring musical syntax.
A longtime favorite of the British folk scene, with a somber, low register voice and sparse delivery that have only become more so with the passing of years, Tabor has long stretched beyond the admittedly expansive confines of traditional music with a discography ranging from the bleaker atmospheres of 1983's Abyssinians (Shanachie) and more balanced Silly Sisters (Shanachie, 1976) - the first of two duo recordings with Steeleye Span's Maddy Prior - to albums focused on jazz and Great American Songbook standards, like Some Other Time (Hannibal, 1991)...all preparing Tabor for the emergence of Quercus, where the singer's characteristically spare, subtly embellished and faithful (to her own conception) delivery is taken, by Warren and Ballamy, into unexpected terrain, only to be drawn back by Tabor...the group's clear anchor and structural lightning rod.
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Originally Posted by mozo-pg
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