A new recording by June Tabor allows me to pursue further the special relationship which, unknown to her, we have had since the late Sixties. Tabor left her home in Leamington Spa in the English Midlands, where she had begun attending the local folk club, and went to study at Oxford, where she was exposed to the flourishing University folk club. At about the time that she
did this, I left Oxford University, where I had sometimes attended the folk club, and moved to a job in the Midlands, settling a couple of years later in Leamington Spa, where I made the acquaintance of the folk club where June had cut her musical teeth. I didn’t actually see her in the flesh for about 20 years after that, but I felt that we were linked in some way.I was unaware of this personal connection when I first heard her sing on the highly praised and (for a “folk” record) very successful Silly Sisters album that she made in 1976 with Maddy Prior and a set of backing musicians prominent on the British folk scene. Like most people, I was very familiar with Prior’s singing from her work with Steeleye Span, whereas June Tabor was new to me. She had already gained something of a reputation for live performances at folk events and had recorded on some compilation discs, but was still largely unknown, especially compared with Prior. However, Tabor in no way played the role of junior partner to the better known “sister” on this record.
The collaboration with Maddy Prior was to be repeated in 1988 on the Silly Sisters’ second record, No More to the Dance, with a different but equally prominent set of accompanying instrumentalists. Sadly, June told me last year that there are unlikely to be any further such collaborations with Prior, since their voices have evolved in directions that would now make them incompatible. (Readers may recall that Maddy Prior was absent from Steeleye Span’s last CD, Horkstow Grange for the same reason .)
The development of June Tabor’s style and repertoire has been fascinating. She followed the collaboration with Maddy Prior with two impressive solo discs, Ashes and Diamonds and Airs and Graces. At first, she stuck almost exclusively to traditional songs with occasional contemporary items composed in a quasi-traditional style by singer-songwriters such as Eric Bogle, Bill Caddick or Richard Thompson, i.e. the non-trad stuff was usually pretty thoughtful material. She was normally accompanied by musicians playing in the style that was generally thought appropriate for “folk music” — lots of guitars, fiddles and squeezeboxes. Even early on, however, she seems to have developed a liking for keyboard accompaniments, initially synthesizers, and later pianos.
The essentially “folky” period in Tabor’s career probably reached its peak with her collaboration with the extraordinarily talented British guitarist, Martin Simpson, on A Cut Above (1980), which contains some delightful singing and playing. Thereafter, she recorded relatively little in the Eighties. She had given up her “day-job” as a librarian when professional singing beckoned, but later decided to ensure a certain financial security by becoming a restaurateur — if this may indeed be considered a secure occupation — with music playing a secondary role.
In her temporarily less frequent performances and recordings, Tabor continued to sing the traditional songs which first impelled her into her musical career, and issued some fine albums (Abyssinians in 1983 and Aqaba in 1988), as well as doing radio work, some of which is still available on record, and guesting on other people’s records. However, her work in the Eighties demonstrated a growing desire to broaden the range of material on which she drew. As well as the songs by contemporary composers, she developed an interest in jazz standards, which were increasingly well suited to her voice as it darkened with age. This interest came to full fruition in 1989 with her entirely jazz record, Some Other Time. This recording paired her with pianist Huw Warren, who has played with her ever since, both live and on record, as well as Mark Lockheart, regular reeds player on her subsequent recordings and frequently a guest at her concerts too.
The jazz album did not mark a major breakthrough in terms of instrumentation, but the following year Tabor raised some eyebrows with her collaboration with the English folk-rockers The Oyster Band, which produced concert appearances and a new record, Freedom and Rain, again mixing traditional and contemporary songs. The fuller musical sound that June Tabor acquired through teaming up with the Oysters was largely lacking from subsequent albums, until her newest CD, A Quiet Eye. Incidentally, attentive readers will already have remarked that all Tabor’s solo albums have, for some quirky reason, titles that begin with “A”, and those that followed the Oyster Band period are no exception: Aspects and Angel Tiger.
A Quiet Eye unites the fullest orchestral sound that June has ever had, backing a solo album consisting of the now familiar eclectic mixture of traditional and contemporary songs, plus one jazz standard. The “special relationship” that I mentioned above compelled me to go out and buy the new CD as soon as it appeared (I didn’t wait for Folk Tales to send me a review copy!), and I do not regret my purchase. However, despite the enthusiastic reviews that I have read in the specialist press, I have a few misgivings about the recording.
Tabor is backed on the new CD by Lockheart and Warren, as well as by Mark Emerson and Dudley Philips, the violinist and double bassist who were on her last CD, Aleyn, and who may sometimes be seen on tour with her, plus the Creative Jazz Orchestra, a contemporary band with which Tabor has recently toured.
For which market is this album intended? Such a mixture can, in my view, appeal only to dyed-in-the-wool June Tabor fans and is unlikely to win converts. The songs are wrapped in arrangements that pay homage to jazz without always really being jazz, and there are several instrumental pieces of a quasi-classical nature that will probably not appeal to lovers of traditional or contemporary acoustic music. More than any of Tabor’s other albums, moreover, this one is stamped throughout with Huw Warren’s prominent piano-playing (not to mention his composing and arranging), which seems to me almost to justify giving him equal billing with Tabor, as was done for Martin Simpson and the Oyster Band on the recordings referred to above.
The CD opens with “The Gardner”, which is none other than Child Ballad no. 219 without some of the more obviously Scottish-sounding words. Being English, Tabor tends to adopt an admirable policy of avoiding imitating Scots pronunciation (although the border ballad “Johnny O’Bredislee,” Child 114, which Tabor has regularly sung in concerts over the last few years and which appeared on Aleyn, has proved impossible to perform in this way, since it rhymes only if you do it in Lowland Scots). “The Gardner” begins in a slightly irregular rhythm with Huw Warren’s swirling piano, which owes more to the classical tradition than to jazz (however Huw can swing with the best when required). It is only after the simplicity of the first verse that the band gradually enters, with strident brass building up the dramatic character of the narrative. A highly original way, all in all, of presenting a Child ballad.
The second cut is Maggie Holland’s “A Place Called England,” a jolly political/social/economic/environmental attack on contemporary England. The song gets the full bigband jazz treatment, although there are moments when Huw Warren’s piano takes over as backing. Amusingly, the cast of down-to-earth stalwarts who will apparently rescue England from the plutocratic mafia that currently has the country in thrall includes Mr. Harding, the eponymous hero of Maggie Holland’s song “A Proper Kind of Gardner,” which Tabor included on her previous CD. In recent concerts, she has tended to sing the latter song from Aleyn and the opening track of this current CD back to back, leading to a heart-stopping contrast of two rather different gardners.
The disc continues with “I Will Put My Ship in Order,” another traditional song collected in Scotland (though without the Child pedigree) that Tabor sings again without trying to sound Scottish. To my ears, the elaborate arrangement played by the Creative Jazz Orchestra on this cut gets a little in the way of what is essentially a very simple song. The band is, however, more appropriate on the following song, “I’ll Be Seeing You,” a 1938 standard by Kahal and Fain that takes us straight back to World War II and the pains of separation. Perversely for a song from the golden age of big bands, Tabor’s version starts up with the accompaniment limited to dreamy piano, and the CJO only comes in much later.
After this exercise in Forties nostalgia, we move forward to memories of the Eighties; “Out of Winter,” a haunting instrumental piece composed by Mark Emerson and which reminded me of film music, leads into two songs written by Tabor’s great contemporary, “the blessed Richard Thompson,” (as she is wont to call him). She has the audacity to perform “Waltzing’s for Dreamers,” followed immediately by “Pharaoh,” in other words the last two songs — and in the same order — from Thompson’s 1988 album Amnesia, songs that the author is moreover still playing regularly in concert in 1999. (Isn’t it a wonderful coïncidence that this is another record title beginning with the letter A? Perhaps we can expect Tabor to get her teeth into Thompson’s other “A” album Across a Crowded Room shortly!). “Waltzing” is another instance in which the piano takes us a long way into the song before the full band enters on the second of the two verses. “Pharaoh” is highly dramatic and is taken at a more energetic pace than in Thompson’s own version, impelled by insistent percussion, with prominent tom-toms. Tabor’s strident vocal is punctuated by a resounding brass part, and there is real jazz feeling in a saxophone solo.
The mood calms down with another traditional song, “Must I be Bound,” on which Huw Warren’s piano is once more the dominant voice. After this song, Tabor gets a chance to go to town on a long composition, “The Writing of Tipperary,” by Bill Caddick, another of her contemporary favorites. She follows seamlessly with the World War I anthem “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” which the Caddick song commemorates. June Tabor has almost cornered the market in new recordings of songs about WWI, with her moving versions of Eric Bogle’s “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” and “No Man’s Land” on earlier albums. “Tipperary,” with a brass band arrangement and a breathy vocal by June, gives rise to one of my misgivings about the CD. The inherent resonance of a song sung by soldiers marching, in many cases, to their death, is such that June Tabor’s dramatic flourishes are hardly necessary. Moreover, the troops who sang it 95 years ago did so in a jovial manner, heedless of the fate that awaited them, and a hindsighted version full of sinister foreboding strikes me as overly indulgent.
The song that follows is Ewan MacColl’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” sung totally unaccompanied in an irregular phrasing. This is not at all an obscure song, but a total surprise in its unaccompanied treatment on a CD composed mainly of highly orchestrated pieces. Then, having drawn our attention to well-worn songs, Tabor moves on to a ballad that she must have encountered very early in her folk club days, namely “The Water is Wide,” which few folk-singers can have failed to record already. Frankly, I was astounded to find such a familiar song presented here. This treatment of the song leads the band into its final virtuoso performance on a Huw Warren instrumental, “St Agnes,” before the closing segue into yet another theoretically Scottish traditional song, “Jeannie and Jamie.”
As a long-term fan of June Tabor’s work who has many of her recordings and who has seen her perform live many times, I remain uncertain what to think about this CD. Because I love her music, I would not be without it; but, compared with her other discs, I would possibly find this one harder to recommend to less committed punters. The Creative Jazz Orchestra is certainly creative and provides a strikingly original backing to June’s vocals. Its jazz credentials, in terms of improvization, which is surely the esssence of jazz, seem less obvious, despite the undoubted talent of the musicians. This CD will undoubtedly be bought by those who enjoy June Tabor’s work, but it falls between several stools so far as its target audience is concerned, and will surely not be acquired by the uninitiated.
One final note: the CD booklet announces that the musical arrangements were made with funding from the British national lottery. It is encouraging to see such enlightened use of gambling profits, whatever one thinks of the end result.
(Topic, 1990)
