At extraordinary times like these, we realise that the world is smaller than we think. We’re also reminded how music connects us intimately, wherever we come from, which makes this album an especially moving experience in March 2020.
Wu Fei is a Chinese-born, Nashville-based folk musician and master of the guzheng, a 2,500-year-old zither-like instrument. Grammy winner and old-time music veteran Abigail Washburn plays clawhammer banjo, an instrument brought to the US by west African slaves, her liner notes tell us, despite often being claimed by Appalachians. This duo’s first album mixes folk sounds and styles from their home countries deliberately, but it never sounds disjointed. More often, it’s curiously transcendent.
Take the track The Roving Cowboy/Avarguli, combining a 1920s composition by North Carolina banjoist Frank Jenkins and a song of the Uighurs, an ethnic minority from north-west China. Fei’s guzheng dazzles for two minutes at its start, as if struck by sunlight, before the women’s voices echo and interweave in their native tongues.
They sing different lines simultaneously on Water Is Wide/Wusuli Boat Song. Hearing the Scottish ballad (famously sung by Steeleye Span and June Tabor) rolling together with a Hezhe song, the connections feel seamless and blissful.
There is fire here, too. Who Says Women Aren’t as Good as Men spits, stabs and screeches. Fei’s vocals whirl and leap like that of Japanese vocalist Hatis Noit in Ping Tan Dance, while Washburn mimics a grouchy old southerner railing against the world. Throughout, the production is glossy and immediate; with tracks such as Pretty Bird, you can even imagine some of these songs flying into the mainstream. Many beautiful worlds lurk within them.
Also out this month
James Elkington continues to mix gorgeous Bert Jansch-like guitar lines with prime 6 Music melodies. Ever-Roving Eye is his best album yet, his lazy, heated vocals helping songs such as Carousel and Nowhere Time burrow deep in the brain (fans of Bill Callahan and Wilco, listen up). Sam Sweeney’s Unearth Repeat provides fiddling manna for trad fans, with several intriguing ambient diversions, especially on tracks Winter 350 and Repeat. Hereford’s fantastic Weirdshire collective, a great supporter of challenging music, also release a new 17-track compilation, Weirdshire 3: A Cure for Souls, featuring great tracks by Sproatly Smith with Marry Waterson, Trappist Afterland and 60s psych-folk veteran Keith Christmas.
