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Andrew Cronshaw: On the Shoulders of the Great Bear
Andrew Cronshaw: Ochre
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Reviews
(Click an album title for extracts
from its reviews...)
Ochre
On The Shoulders Of the Great Bear
"As a hardened philistine when it comes to English folk music, I was taken aback to find myself enjoying an album whose sleeve note documents the exact provenance of each track, establishing that they are all indeed English folk tunes.
…the musicians approached the melodies with fresh ears, and the result is an album that will be surely welcomed with open arms throughout the world."
Charlie Gillett, BBC Radio London & BBC World Service
"One of the finest albums of the year"
Fiona Talkington, BBC Radio 3 Late Junction
"It’s the sense of rootedness in a gritty, marginal England that allows this music its brush with profundity. And the fact that this landscape exists principally in Cronshaw’s head makes the achievement all the more impressive."
Mark Hudson, Daily Telegraph
"This fabulously restrained and crystalline-cool album
consists of, strange to relate, versions of English folk tunes. Dominant
cultures generally don’t do folk very well (in these islands, Irish or Scottish
folk has a lot more spirit) because folk music has always been a way for
cultures under threat to rebel and forge a sense of identity.
Cronshaw’s take on English folk has a twist - it’s recorded with a panglobal ensemble...
The result is splendidly unclassifiable. Cronshaw is a musical adventurer.
My first impression of
Ochre was
that it could if anything be too tasteful - the kind of thing you might hear in
an upmarket spa. But further hearing reveals something deeper, woven with a
filigree of sounds - a meditative sense of landscape and place, with occasional
shafts of illuminated light."
Peter Culshaw, The Observer
"It's exotic and mysterious, and it comes as a shock to realise that the music being played is actually English"
Colin Irwin, fRoots
"Consummate musicianship it may have, but it is the ideas that seethe and shoal in this music that really excite."
Ken Hunt, Record Collector
"For a man with such a substantial discography and back catalog of collaborative enterprises to his credit, Andrew Cronshaw has somehow
managed to maintain a relatively quiet profile. Working with diverse artists,
master of eclectic instruments, and journalist on a wide range of traditional
music, it is not surprising that Cronshaw’s musical horizons have taken him a
long way from his British musical origins.
Ochre seems,
on paper at least, to be the mark of the full circle. It is an album based on
seven traditional English songs, and would appear to be something of a
home-coming project, a chance for Cronshaw to zoom in on his own cultural
soundings. But then one turns on the CD player, and the reality is very
different. The ‘Englishness’ of the project is not much in evidence at all.
Instead, we are compelled to explore the universality, the wider outlook and
potential of a tradition. Through the employment of an array of instruments -
harp, whistles, voice, piano, double bass, oud and more - the essence of each
song is taken on a journey like never before. Over freezing seas and desolate
mountains, through ghostly castles and smoky jazz clubs, the core of each song
is teased out, given the space and time to breathe."
Jennifer Byrne, Sing Out! (USA)
"Stripped of their English lyrics, the songs grow contemplative rather than narrative, but the old strangeness of the tunes is only enhanced by colorful instrumentation and understated performances: Cronshaw’s zither has a crystalline, starry presence, given roundness by Chhadeh’s qanun; the grim murder tale Lucy Wan is rendered airily unearthly with just a ghostly harmonic whistle against Bernard O’Neill’s droning bass while Sofķa, The Saracen’s Daughter is sung in Arabic by Natacha Atlas. This tale of a landowner kidnapped in Turkey, who befriends the jailer’s daughter, who sets him free and years later follows him to England, holds the key to this disc: the heart and soul know no boundaries."
Tom Jackson, Global Rhythm (USA)
"Treating a variety of British folk-songs by performing them with unlikely varieties of instrumentation - Greek lyra, Syrian kanoun, prepared piano and the vocals of Egyptian/British singer Natacha Atlas - Cronshaw creates elegiac, dreamlike textures that override the tunes’ origins and which place them in a global context. Slow-moving and reflective, the album sets its own languid pace.
World Music Charts Europe
If anyone is guaranteed to create an exciting, stimulating and totally different album - even when the music’s origins are very familiar – it’s Andrew Cronshaw. With his mastery of various exotic instruments and his extraordinary musical vision, he never fails. Like previous albums, it’s brilliantly adventurous, though it’s an adventurousness characterised by remarkable restraint."
Keith Hudson, Taplas (Wales)
"As a passionate explorer of the world’s musical undercurrents, there’s not a lot that surprises me any more. Yet once in a while I come across a completely unexpected type of music that is so incredibly beautiful that I stop all I’m doing and at the end of the record can only do one thing: hit the repeat button."
Ton Maas, Ode (USA & Netherlands)
"This man is an English original. He paints unusual sound pictures with the melodies we love and brings out totally unexpected aspects of them."
Vic Smith, The Folk Diary
"In a just world, a man with the talents of
Andrew Cronshaw would be a household name.
Cronshaw is a musician/producer of
rare quality. Don’t worry about categorising this album as folk, classical,
world or any other kind of music - just file under 'Essential'."
Mel McClellan, BBCi
ON THE SHOULDERS OF THE GREAT BEAR
"Perhaps as a result of our being such a mix'n'match culture to
begin with, British musicians excel in the subtle art of hybridisation. The
average American muso, faced with the task of reconciling apparently disparate
cultural modes, is more likely to use them as separate, ethnically 'correct'
sections in some grandiose multipartite composition that has as little to do
with the notion of combination as American society has with the notion of a
'melting pot' culture. We Brits, on the other hand, are fortunate enough to live
in a culture that, rather than viewing other cultures with suspicion, exults in
their very difference and seeks to introduce their music into our native
strains.
There are few more specific indicators of a country's
culture than its folk music, yet as far back as the mid-Sixties, the likes of
the Incredible String Band were introducing such exotic elements as sitar and
gimbri into their Celtic-mystic whimsy, with unparalleled commercial success.
The zither virtuoso Andrew Cronshaw is, in some ways, the ISB's direct
descendant. He has sought in his records to find some rapprochement between folk
and New Age music, while his performances have struck out from folk's
traditional bar-room home - in the early Nineties, for instance, he did a tour
of English village churches.
Cronshaw's musical wanderlust drew him to Finland for
1993's The Language of Snakes, a connection that this long-awaited
follow-up develops further. The most obvious link is between his zither and the
Finnish kantele, but Cronshaw takes the connection further by introducing the
marovantele, a hybrid of kantele and marovany, the Malagasy instrument familiar
to him from his work with Madagascar's excellent Tarika. When that instrument is
used to suspend twinkling trails of notes behind Ian Blake's meditative soprano
sax figures, as on
Ema Haual/Hällilaul, the effect is utterly enchanting. The tunes are
mostly taken from traditional Finnish and Ural airs, along with a few others of
Celtic derivation, but in each case Cronshaw blurs the borders to produce
something unique, whether it is the layers of shawm, sax and concertina adding
warm, Celtic textures to
Halullinen Sielu/Käin Minä Kaunista, or the Finnish singer Jenny Wilhelms
offering a vocal interpretation of a Gaelic lament. Most striking of all is the
title track, a reference to Finland's place in relation to Russia, in which
jew's-harp sets up a hypnotic resonance behind the bizarre growled rap that
Heikki Laitinen constructs from mythological runic imagery. Even at this early
stage, it's safe to say you'll hear nothing else like it all year."
Andy Gill, THE INDEPENDENT
"Andrew Cronshaw's astonishing record is the album Oregon never made. Where they were sober and punctiliously eclectic, he is joyous and playful, and still utterly loyal to the traditions he explores. The cover photograph of his outline squirmed into fresh snow tells you most of what you need to know, for this is music that rightly relegates 'personal' expression to the ghostly fringes. It is utterly un-self-indulgent."
Brian Morton, SONGLINES
"a serene sense of purity beyond the realms of anything else most people have in their collections, yet paradoxically sounding familiar enough to be welcoming too."
Colin Irwin, fROOTS
"...opens with the distant tolling of Finnish church bells. Under that Cronshaw slides the recorded debut of the 'marovantele' - a zither cross between Finland's kantele and the Malagasy marovany - playing two Estonian airs. Soprano saxophone, string bass and effects add to the atmosphere. Therein lies Cronshaw's gift. To list the sources of his material as Finnish, Ingrian, Estonian, Siberian and Scottish Gaelic may make this music sound fearsomely recondite but he is a master of atmosphere."
***** Ken Hunt, CLASSIC CD
"One of my top CDs of 2000, from anywhere in the world. Inspired composition, inspired music..."
Fiona Talkington, BBC Radio 3 LATE JUNCTION
"An enthralling album that proves that Northern Europe can be as much a source of 'world music' as Africa or Latin America."
Dave Laing, MUSICIAN
"...the energetic, gritty title piece that features the unique sub-verbal growlings of one of Finland's national treasures, vocalist Heikki Laitinen, colliding and swirling with the instruments like a Bosch landscape. Andrew Cronshaw may not be prolific, but each of these fourteen songs is worthy of the waiting."
Cliff Furnald, ROOTSWORLD
"Cronshaw has taken sixteen traditional tunes, some are Finno-Ugrian (from Finland, Ingria and Estonia), one is Ob-Ugrian from Siberia and three are from the Scottish Gaelic-speaking tradition, and created a masterpiece with them. All are quite exquisite. ....a remarkably wonderful album, it washes over you taking you to new landscapes and new places within your psyche. For me it was a very melancholic place, a soulful place. It's great when an album hits you just right. If you like northern European music, its delicate nature, the hypnotic charm, then you'll be bowled over by this wonderful collection of tunes."
Tim Arthur, ENGLISH DANCE & SONG
"Here he plunges deeper and with even greater authority into ancient Finno-Ugric traditions, creating the sort of masterpiece that only he could. This is an album of starkly haunting beauty, full of unexpected twists and turns and it demonstrates once again Cronshaw's unique creative genius."
Keith Hudson, TAPLAS
For reviews of earlier
Andrew Cronshaw albums click
here; it takes you to the Press page at
www.andrewcronshaw.com