English folk queen June Tabor moves from Silly Sister to majestic blend of jazz

JUNE Tabor brings majestic eloquence and her smoky contralto to a near-perfect album that blends folk with jazz.

Jazz folk trio Quercus _ Iain Ballamy, June Tabor and Huw Warren _ have released their 2017 Nightfall album on the ECM label. Picture: Tim Dickeson

• Joan comes out of Africa
• Tell Laura we love her, encores or not
• The not so famous five

GERMAN prestige jazz and classical label ECM, whose stable includes jazz maestros Keith Jarrett and Jan Garbarek and the top-notch a cappella group Hilliard Ensemble, has joined Universal Music, which handles top classical labels Deutsche Grammophon and Decca and jazz icon Blue Note.

This improved distribution deal is good news for fans of producer Manfred Eicher’s unique and uncompromising approach to music. Set up in Munich in 1969, ECM’s pure production values, distinctively austere artwork and Eicher’s refusal to be bound by genres have built an enormous following.

Among recent releases is Nightfall from Quercus, English folk singer June Tabor’s collaboration with Huw Warren and Iain Ballamy. This is the follow-up album to their award-winning self-titled debut disc made with ECM in 2013.

MATCHLESS

Pianist Warren is a longstanding collaborator and arranger with Tabor and the jazz saxophone of Ballamy, whose group Food also records on the label, works in wonderfully with this material.

I loved their first effort — so did the German reviewers who voted it album of the year — but if anything this one is finer.

Album artwork for Quercus's Nightfall release on ECM records.

Of the 11 tracks six are gorgeously arranged traditional tunes ranging over the time-honoured themes of broken love (Once I Loved You Dear), girls wanting to go to war with their soldier lovers (The Manchester Angel), shipwrecks (On Berrow Sands) and life in the country (The Shepherd and His Dog, The Cuckoo).

Tabor’s ability to tell a tale and her matchless interpretations show why many have considered her the greatest living British folk singer ever since her Silly Sister days with Maddy Prior.

Her smoky contralto handles anything from the doleful Billie Holiday classic blues track You Don’t Know What Love Is to the autumnal arrangement of Robert Burns’s Auld Lang Syne which opens the collection.

Tabor moves with majestic eloquence and deft emotional shadings through each track

She’s equally at home with Bob Dylan’s Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right — surely not another version, you say, but you should listen to this.

Also in the mix are a couple of original instrumentals — Christchurch by Warren and Ballamy’s tune Emmeline — which break up the mood nicely and show two sensitive jazz musicians at their best.

This is the album to play when you need to slow down. Tabor moves with majestic eloquence and deft emotional shadings through each track, superbly complemented by Warren’s ever-inventive piano and Ballamy’s seamless melodic lines.

If there’s a weakness it is perhaps the closing track, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s Somewhere from West Side Story. It’s nicely delivered but for me it makes a bland ending to an otherwise near-perfect collection.

You can get the CD from JB Hi-Fi for $22.99.