Shirley Collins, Davy Graham
Folk Roots, New Routes

LA RECENSIONE

Listen, listen, there's a voice, something like "a crystal in the sun"...

Listen, I tell you, there's a guitar that wanders but you almost don't notice it.

Everything moves, everything is so still. No emphasis.

Are we at home? Is this room still your room? Beautiful difficult questions...

It must be like the perspective that, with its accuracy, gives the impression of reality. Only then no one sees with perspective eyes.

And so that room that is no longer your room is really a kind of dream...

Like the hypnotic whirlpool of sound, an almost otherworldly sensation declined in the simplest and most graceful way. I wouldn't want to blaspheme, but it almost seems like a preview of "Pink Moon".

Even though, yes, beyond that crystal that cannot be honey, the carved figures are certainly not inner ghosts. Or rather, they are in their quality as archetypes, as this is still the "mythical realm of folk".

The difference is that Nick Drake went beyond time on his own strength.

And then, of course, there's always that room that is no longer your room. The sensation that that voice and that guitar are right there with you. A sort of miracle, archetype or not.

And anyway, if an album reminds you of Pink Moon, well...

Then, regarding Shirley and Davy, let's say that certain souls always end up meeting, no matter if only for a moment.

She has the air of a good girl, he has restlessness written on his face. You'd say they don't match at all, but instead, it's a perfect yin and yang. Besides, they are both wanderers, both seekers. She of ballads. He of sounds.

So here is our very serious mother folk marrying the blues, jazz, the sounds of the world.

And thus you find things you don't expect, I don't know, traditional ballads with oriental scents, instrumentals that allow themselves to pass through Tangier, Thelonious Monk remade with the guitar.

All with the utmost economy of means: the simple singing (I couldn't sing any other way, says Shirley), the wandering of the guitar almost in the background, the spices and musical aromas dosed with delicacy. Almost as if to say one is no longer the singer but the song, no longer the musician but the music.

And then the dust of time, that sort of suspension that holds ghosts mid-air. The love skirmishes, the idea of destiny, the theft of the soul. A glass zoo projected on the walls of that room that is no longer ours.

Finally, last but not least, here is where the English folk of the late sixties is born. "Reynardine" is already "Liege and lief," "Jane jane" certainly jazz/folk of the Pentangle, the raga of "Pretty Saro" all the east to come.

And then there's "Nottamum Town," one of my heart's favorites.

"In the fair city of Nottamum, the soul does not look up, the soul does not look down"...

What does it mean? They've all been asking themselves for hundreds of years. Everyone except me...

Never solve a mystery, it wouldn't be one anymore...

Trallallà...