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June Tabor, Iain Ballamy and Huw Warren’s Quercus released earlier this month is a folk-jazz revelation, an album that not since 1990s-era band Lammas with saxophonist Tim Garland, and Don Paterson now a leading poet, has jazz and folk combined so effectively. The record also combines English folk traditions with hints of Celtic songcraft, a very unusual feat deftly accomplished. Touring at the moment with dates at the Stables in Milton Keynes tomorrow, Exeter on the 23rd, and then Bristol, Gateshead, Coventry, London and Salisbury, the band having taken on the name of the album straddles folk and, by association and intent, jazz. The 11 songs on the record have taken some time to be released, seven years since they were recorded in Basingstoke on a fabled piano in the town’s Anvil venue. But it’s more than worth the wait and it’s Warren’s interplay with the full expressive sound of Tabor’s voice (like Norma Waterson’s slightly, but darker than Christine Tobin’s) that counts.

Iain Ballamy here and in Food recently has been on the form of his life, and his solo for instance on ‘Near But Far Away’ distils a life time’s work on ballads. At the end ‘All I Ask of You’ is a reminder of the moving version of the song on Balloon Man Ballamy’s first big breakthrough in the late-1980s. Texts of the songs draw on disparate sources including Robert Burns, A. E .Housman and Shakespeare, and highlights include the lovely ‘Who Wants the Evening Rose’ where the honesty of Tabor’s voice momentarily recalling the late Kirsty MacColl, is truest. Ballamy here, oak-sturdy as the genus the band itself takes its name from, intertwines his improvisations with Warren’s superbly empathetic accompaniment so appropriately.

June Tabor pictured