ACTRESS, burlesque performer and former magician's assistant Paloma Faith now gets to play extravagant dress-up on a national stage, as the latest post-Winehouse wannabe. She's got the vocal goods but doesn't succeed in investing much personality int
o innocuous jazz-tinged radio fare such as the title track.
Elsewhere in her mixed bag of a debut she plays cutesy coquette on Romance Is Dead and surrenders herself to the melodrama of New York, My Legs Are Weak and Play On, though even here the glossy production airbrushes out some of the emotional weight.
FIONA SHEPHERDFOLK
DONALD GRANT: THE WAY HOME
****
GLEN ROY RECORDS, £10.76LOCHABER fiddler Donald Grant has a dual career in both classical and folk music, and an eclectic musical curiosity that takes him into even wider fields of inquiry. This album focuses firmly on the folk side of the equation, and reflects his grounding in Scottish traditional music, albeit inflected with those other influences. He is a superbly accomplished player in a technical sense, but also has a more intuitive feel for the shape and emotional expression of the largely self-composed Scottish and Gaelic tunes and songs featured here.
His collaborators include harpist Catriona McKay and guitarist Fionàn de Barra from Fiddler's Bid, Donald Shaw on harmonium, Seamus Egan on low whistle, and the Red Skies string section, while Karen Matheson and Sally Doherty provide vocals on a Gaelic song (co-written by Grant and his father) and sultry Mexican bolero respectively.
KENNY MATHIESONVARIOUS: THE BALLAD OF BRITAIN
***
HERON RECORDINGS, £11.74A MUSICAL companion to Will Hodgkinson's book of the same name, The Ballad Of Britain aspires to be the 21st century equivalent of Alan Lomax's US field recordings of the 1950s, gathering together spontaneous performances taped by Hodgkinson on his travels around the British Isles. The lo-fi results range from a cappella folk ballads to droll Mancunian blues, from an X Factor-style rendition of Summertime to a child singing Do-Re-Mi, from a haunting choral sea shanty to a recording of sheep in a field.
Occasionally, a familiar voice, such as King Creosote, Martin Carthy or Super Furry Animals frontman Gruff Rhys, applies some quality control to this curious, charming hotchpotch of regional song.
FIONA SHEPHERDCLASSICAL
BACH: THE SIX PARTITAS
*****
ECM, £19.56 (2 CDs)BACH'S Six Partitas, self-published in Leipzig in the 1730s, were considered major keyboard challenges of their time – ferociously virtuosic, yet laden with the innate spiritual lyricism that marked Bach out from so many of his contemporaries. Those who played them could be considered masters of their craft. Might they even have been played on the new-fangled fortepiano, an instrument Bach never comfortably adopted, but on which he will have kept a watchful eye?
He would surely have had few qualms with the modern piano in Andras Schiff's capable hands. Schiff is well-known for his cool and effortless Bach interpretations, and this revisit by him to the Partitas – they are considerably more flamboyant here than his earlier recordings – set them out as a rising sequence of keys, beginning with the lustrous G major. Schiff fans will not be disappointed by these live recordings.
KENNETH WALTONJAZZ
VIJAY IYER TRIO: HISTORICITY
****
ACT RECORDS, £13.70THOSE who like their piano trios straight-ahead and swinging may find the density and abstraction of Vijay Iyer's work daunting, but anyone open to more adventurous forays into that most canonical of jazz ensembles should check out this powerful offering.
Iyer has made a big impact since emerging as part of saxophonist Steve Coleman's groups in the mid-1990s, and combines a rigorous, mathematically-inspired intellect with a freely expressed invention. It is a potent combination. His ideas tumble and twist in a busy rush of inspiration, and bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Marcus Gilmore are highly responsive partners in these adventures, even conspiring to sound like a bigger group at times.
He casts his net widely for repertoire, from his own knotty compositions to imaginative re-workings of tunes by Stevie Wonder, Andrew Hill, Julius Hemphill, Ronnie Foster, Leonard Bernstein and a surging take on MIA's Galang.
KENNY MATHIESONWORLD
YASMIN LEVY: SENTIR
****
WORLD VILLAGE, £13.70SINCE her emergence ten years ago, Yasmin Levy has collected an army of devoted fans. She's been lucky in having a background which no other singer has tapped into – Ladino songs, the music of Sephardic Jewry. But she's also a serious artist, with a lovely and distinctive voice: each of her albums has its unique character. This new one is her most interesting yet, benefiting from a wide range of influences brought in through her accompanying ensemble. Her producer is the flamenco guitarist Jose Limon, who puts his forceful stamp on many of the tracks, but his parallel activities as producer for the Portuguese fado star Mariza ensures that there are fado moments as well.
Meanwhile, Abdul Sharif (bouzouki) and Amir Shahsar (ney flute) bring in Middle-Eastern sounds, and there are Cuban and jazz moments too. But this album is essentially a Ladino homage, with songs which Levy learned from her mother and from Ladino singers she heard in Turkey, and with a remarkable act of filial piety at its core. For Yasmin is the youngest child of Isaac Levy, who pioneered the preservation of Ladino culture by collecting songs from Sephardic immigrants to Israel; he died when she was a year old.
Here we get his recorded voice, singing a wistful Ladino love song. His timbre is generous and open, making a lovely contrast to his daughter's voice as she joins his digitally remastered sound with her freshly recorded one. Yet though this is an impressive disc, I can't entirely yield to it, and the obstacle lies in Yasmin Levy's style. It's as though her voice is constantly on the verge of breaking under the intensity of her emotion: a fado technique, which here feels more calculated than genuine.
MICHAEL CHURCH