When the term “world music” became a category in record stores, it’s doubtful that triple harps, cerdd dant and canu plygain would have been thought to belong under the umbrella. And yet here they were on display at WOMEX. The annual world music expo has put down roots in Cardiff this year, and to bid welcome to the delegates Cerys Matthews hosted a celebration of traditional Welsh music under the title Gwlad y Gân/Land of Song. Bar the odd burst of Under Milk Wood and a version of "Men of Harlech", very little of it was, for obvious reasons, in English.If Welsh folk music is less widely Read more ...

It had to finish with “When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease”, the commentary on a building block of British life which marks the passing of time more acutely than anything explicitly counting the minutes which precede leaving the field, whether in sport or life. Roy Harper originally released this elegy in 1975, when he was in his 30s. As last night’s encore, it was even more poignant. Harper is now 72. There were moments when he explicitly said he might not see an audience again. He was in fine form: alive, joking, scatty and, at times, on fire. It didn’t feel like a final bow, but with a Read more ...

Linda Thompson, one of Britain's great living singers, has just released her third solo album since her return to recording with 2001's Fashionably Late.Talking in her London home before travelling to the US, she opens up about her latest record, It Won't Be Long Now, working with ex-husband Richard and her children Teddy, Kami and Muna, coping with the dysphonia that has afflicted her voice since 1973, and her enduring love for traditional music and the work of Martin Carthy, Dave Swarbrick and other old friends. Also today, exclusive to theartsdesk, she runs through her top 10 all-time Read more ...

"I’m up to my ass in traditional songs," Linda Thompson says in the extensive Q&A published today on theartsdesk. When she talked to me she also discussed her early adventures in traditional folk music. "I was already interested in folk singing in Glasgow," she said. "Great people like Archie Fisher. When I came to London I got friendly with Sandy Denny, who was singing at The Troubadour. I’d been singing seriously since I was 18, in folk clubs, with Martin Carthy, Norma Waterson, all those people. I really liked the music. I’d grown up with American music, so had never heard Read more ...

Showbiz is a cruel and mysterious cosmic code that can grind the artist down, before he comes close to cracking it. That’s the message behind the Coen brothers’ elegy to the Greenwich Village folk scene of 1961. Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) stands bruised and baffled at its heart.Speculation mounted in the wait for the Coens’ sixteenth that Davis’s resemblance in early footage to Dylan on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’s sleeve meant he’d be a satire on the singer. Actually, he’s Dylan’s shadow: the folkie scuffling round New York who then doesn’t get the breaks, and whose American dreams aren’t Read more ...

Four days in Norway’s capital attending Folkelarm, the festival of Nordic folk music, raises the perennial and always knotty question of how far music can move beyond the traditional yet still be labelled as folk? With the charming and reassuringly old-fashioned accordion- and string-driven dance band the P. A. Røstads Orkester there’s no such problem. But Slagr, despite the presence of a rootsy Hardanger fiddle in their ranks, are closer to the drone of La Monte Young’s eternal music and could never liven up a Saturday night dance. Straying even further from the source, Sami singer Elin Read more ...

The Full English album and live tour is the stage and studio result of an ambitious project from the EFDSS (English Folk Dance and Song Society), drawing together songs from the early 20th-century collections of songhunters including Lucy Broadwood, Percy Grainger, Frank Kidson, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Cecil Sharp.The Full English is also a web portal, describing itself as the most comprehensive searchable database of English folk songs, tunes, dances and customs in the world. For fans of traditional songs, the newly-launched Song Collectors Collective site features living source singers Read more ...

It's only the truly great albums that usher you into a sound-world that is entirely sui generis. And so it is with this second chapter of jazz sax player and composer Matana Roberts's Coin Coin project, a vast musical work-in-progress exploring themes of history, memory and ancestry. Divided into 18 separate tracks, but heard as one continuous arc of sound, we enter into the leader's all-encompassing “panoramic sound quilting”, as she calls it, a reference both to her family’s handicraft heritage but also to the collage-like juxtaposition of her materials.Over a bowed pedal note in the Read more ...

If it seems mythical that a singer-songwriter in his early seventies has made an album this vital yet so timeless, then it’s worth pondering that Man & Myth is Roy Harper’s first for 13 years. In 2011, he celebrated his 70th birthday on stage but in the decade before his profile had been low, with time in his Irish home seemingly filled by anything that wasn’t creating new music. It might be making up for lost time, but Man & Myth’s 23-minute closing epic “Heaven Is Here”/“The Exile” is a career highlight. With 20 albums behind him (depending how it’s counted), the first of which came Read more ...

Ed Askew’s singing voice is made for melancholy. When not carrying a melody, his reedy vibrato becomes conversational, telling of a turtle laying her eggs, a baby crying in a cradle, a boy arguing with his girlfriend. The graceful, harpsichord-like tone of his Martin Tiple – a plangent, 10-string ukelele-sized instrument – makes the whole all the more wistful. Askew’s haunting, minor-key contemplations probably aren’t going to win him a wide audience but this, his sixth album in 45 years, brings Marc Ribot and Sharon Van Etten on board as collaborators.For the World is an album of great Read more ...

The Green Note had put up a Sold Out sign on Monday night when Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker stepped in to play a sometimes mesmerising set on the little stage by the door. It’s a great venue that a lot of big artists have stepped inside to test their real stature, and Clarke and Walker have a future that could see them grow their audience in the way that some of their heroes - Sandy Denny, Richard and Linda Thompson, Nick Drake, Bert Jansch, June Tabor – have done with three simple but rare ingredients: a compelling voice, dextrous guitar work and great songs.There were a few Sandy Denny Read more ...

In a world of reality television show winners and interchangeable flash-in-the-pan singer-songwriter critical darlings, Frank Turner stands apart as the real deal. Over the past 18 months, you’d have been forgiven for thinking that Turner had appeared as if from nowhere and his name was suddenly everywhere. But the groundwork for the songwriter’s considerable recent successes - a pre-show slot at the London Olympics Opening Ceremony (pictured below), a sell-out show at Wembley Arena, his latest album reaching the top of the iTunes Chart and number two on the Official UK Album Chart - has been Read more ...