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Music: Rebel Musics

Roots men make a stirring rebel connection in Glasgow

Rebel Musics

Oran Mor, Glasgow

4 Stars

Much has been written about the links between British folk music and roots music from the US, much less so about those between British folk and Jamaican reggae.

But that is the area Scottish-Canadian musician Jason Wilson and his band have been exploring in the last few years with the help of English fiddle player Dave Swarbrick and Scottish troubadour Dick Gaughan.

This Rebel Musics concert at Oran Mor, part of Glasgow's Celtic Connections festival, showcased the results of that work and previewed the collaborative album Lion Rampant that Wilson and his band, along with a multinational galaxy of guests, have recorded.

The links between the music are certainly more evident now than they were two years ago when I last saw them.

As a dance tune, Swarbrick's Spanish Ladies works surprisingly well with a heavy reggae bass beat behind the fiddle and Gaughan was clearly "dancing in the oldest boots he owned" as he delivered Tom Paine's Bones.

And singer-songwriter Fraser Anderson - think early John Martyn meets a quiet Loudon Wainwright - played a laid-back set mixing his own material with Bob Dylan, Peter Sarstedt and the Woody Guthrie poem Sweetest Angel he'd set to music.

To add to the international mix Pee Wee Ellis, ex-member of the James Brown and Van Morrison bands, provided excellent funk sax on a version of And It Stoned Me.

At the risk of being heretical I'd suggest that sometimes the link appears too contrived - I'm not sure adding Marley's No Woman, No Cry on to the end of Robert Burns's My Luve Is Like A Red, Red Rose adds much to our appreciation of either, despite Gaughan's inimitable delivery.

Yet links between national musical traditions, as this concert showed, can come up with excellent new takes on old standards.

They demonstrate too that connections between peoples are often much more important than national divisions.

The conclusion, Gaughan's traditional rendering of Hamish Henderson's international anthem Freedom Come-All Ye, was eloquent reminder of that.

Chris Bartter

 

For more information on Lion Rampant, visit www.jasonwilsonmusic.com.

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