English folk music: drawing from the past, pointing to the future

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/may/13/spiro-leveret-english-folk-music-reviving-old-tunes

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Set against Scotland’s unbroken and thriving tradition and the reels and airs of Ireland, English dance tunes have been more or less drowned out by her neighbours. “Try anything once but incest and Morris dancing,” the old trope goes. But now it goes like this: in recent years, some of English folk’s best young players and new groups have sprung up to bow, squeeze and blow new life into the lost world of old English dances, freeing them from centuries of stillness in antique songbooks.

Traditional English songs have been kept at the forefront of contemporary British folk culture by singers ranging from the Copper family in the 1950s through to Sam Lee and Jackie Oates today. But it’s not until these last few years that the much more obscure English tune tradition is being revived and redefined by a new wave of groups, and now, some of those old tunes are beginning to move again, and in unexpected ways.

Acts such as Spiro, Leveret and Tom Kitching are all bringing a dynamic contemporary approach to English dance tunes that draws on jazz-like improvisation, world music influences, minimalism and systems music. For them, tradition is less about preservation and more about innovation and extension, of both the form and of the feeling.

Leaders of the pack are Spiro, the Bristol quartet who are currently touring their fifth album, Welcome Joy and Welcome Sorrow. Spiro create ecstatic, interlocking, intricate patterns that are as hypnotising, beguiling and elegant as the most complex Fibonacci sequences. Accordion, guitar, violin, mandolin and cello conspire to take 500-year-old tunes from their source without losing the emotion of the original. “Music taps into something fundamental to us all,” says mandolin player Alex Vann. “Instrumental music is particularly rewarding and meaningful because you don’t know why you’re feeling emotional. You’ve reached a place beyond words, the most amazing place that we all share.”

Leveret (an old name for a young hare) got together last summer, recorded their debut album in a day, sans overdubs, and prefer their concerts unamplified, and in the round. Bellowhead fiddler Sam Sweeney, English concertina player Rob Harbron and accordionist Andy Cutting – three of the very best on the scene – reanimate the same antique realms as Spiro, taking in the 17th-century songbook Playford’s Dancing Master, as well as the magisterial, semi-pagan Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, first documented in August 1226, but likely much older.

Theirs is a rich, sinewy immersion, less abstract and more improvised, guided by a mutual sense of exploration, space and a very English kind of swing. It’s an intimate, contemporary reinvention of the source material, each member weaving fluently in and out of focus as soloist. Harbron’s English concertina, especially, casts an almost supernatural glow across the tunes. Indeed, their ensemble interaction on the expansive, otherworldly Horn Dance takes off and flies high like some yeasty Jacobean Hawkwind, the trio probing the music the way Spiro do (though by quite different means) and elevating it as the Gloaming have done with Irish music.

Tom Kitching’s pan-European Interloper band, meanwhile, delivers an eclectic, outward-facing account of what he calls “the continuum of English traditional music”, with a mix of fiddles, flute, clarinet, Nordic mandola and hurdy-gurdy, and a repertoire ranging from the medieval to the present. “Interloper captures a tradition that is open to the world,” he says in his sleeve notes, “confident and comfortable with the journey.”

These groups share similar sources but flow in very different directions. All point to the future more than they peer into the past. It’s interesting, too, that this plumbing of English instrumental music’s hidden depths and shady hollows by some of English folk’s most outstanding young musicians comes at a time of heavy shifts in Britain’s body politic, and when more pressing questions are being asked about national identity than in many years.

What it also suggests is that the conundrum of what it means to be English is perhaps expressed better in music than in politics. Behind the tunes there is the permanent discord – the clashing weather fronts of contemporary political discourse, trailing the same hanging questions of identity, interconnection and distinctiveness that play out through these tunes, and how young folk musicians are engaging with Englishness as a distinct culture and redefining what it is by playing these ancient tunes. With Leveret, Kitchener and Spiro’s music, a specifically English folk culture has found the leg room to stretch and dance to an old tune in fresh hands.

Spiro’s Welcome Joy and Welcome Sorrow is on Real World, they are touring until 10 June; Leveret’s New Everything is on Rootbeat, they perform at Ruskin Mill College, Nailsworth on 19 May and St Martin’s Church, Stoney Middleton, Derbyshire on 20 May; Tom Kitching’s Interloper is on Fellside, he is touring until 20 July.