I have belatedly discovered a shared enthusiasm for folk music with one of my friends and former colleagues. A little while back she organised our trip to Ipswich to hear the four fine singing and fiddle playing ladies, and last night she took up my offer of entertainment, an evening at the Colchester Arts Centre with Mike Vass and Fiona Hunter.
It was the third time I'd seen Mike Vass live, and I unintentionally mis-sold the concert slightly to my friend, since I waxed lyrical and enthusiastic about his fiddle playing, and it turned out that the current tour is more of an evening with Fiona Hunter and Mike Vass. She is a Scottish singer, who after a decade of singing with a Scots group has put out what is being described as her first solo album. It is not literally solo, since other people support her on it, including Mike Vass, who also produced it, but it is her album, and last night was about promoting it.
I heard a track from it on the R2 folk show, after I'd asked my friend to come, and wasn't too worried when I discovered that the evening was going to major on Hunter and be Vass-lite. She has a super voice, strong, clear, always controlled and quite deep. I like it when performers have voices in the same register as mine, so that I can join in with choruses, instead of pitching everything too high like the Church of England does, so that the third line of most hymns rises above my range. Fiona Hunter is from Glasgow, is bright and sparky, and plays the cello and a strange little squeezebox described as being as an accordion in a handbag, called a Shruti box, which provided a drone and harmony section when needed.
Mike Vass played his fiddle some of the time, but mainly provided guitar accompaniment and backing vocals. He is a good accompanist, not as flashy and virtuosic a guitarist as Martin Simpson or his protegee Ewan Mclennan, but tight, competent, and utterly focused on the singer at all times. That's what you want in a guitar accompaniment, which is why Martin Hayes' understated musical partner Dennis Cahill is one of the finest going.
They came over as a serious minded and scholarly pair of souls. Fiona Hunter did a music degree at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, and an internship at the Smithsonian. She has collected traditional songs from Scottish Travellers, helping record a culture that is fast dying out. They will interrupt the narrative of a big ballad to put in a cello interlude, while the audience reflects on the murder and mayhem so far. Serious minded and scholarly is good by me, I am pretty serious minded and scholarly myself from time to time. If you wanted a rip-roaring, och-aye, hearty evening of boisterous traditional fun, you wouldn't book Hunter and Vass as your first choice. If you like traditional material treated with a high degree of respect but not set in aspic, you'll like them.
There was a support act last night, and it was surprisingly good. I say surprisingly, because the quality of local talent is mixed, north Essex not being a folk hotbed compared to some parts of the UK, and I have sat through some toe-curlingly awful moments in the lead-up to the main act at Colchester Arts Centre folk nights, but yesterday we had a banjo and fiddle duo, and they were good. Nice crisp sense of timing, not rushing into taking everything really fast to make it more exciting. Their repertoire is from the Carolinas and thereabout, and they describe it as Old Time. They call themselves East Street Union, and have a facebook page, which lists their other forthcoming gigs. I see that in April they will be performing in Coggeshall, and in the Bull in Colchester's Crouch Street, which according to its website does live acoustic music in a little studio out the back on the second Thursday of every month.
Meanwhile, Mike Vass and Fiona Hunter have departed back to Scotland, and who knows when they will be visiting these parts again?
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