Various Artists
Album: The Elizabethan Session
Label: Proper
Tracks: 14
Website: http://www.efdss.org
www.folkbytheoak.com

Scene watchers will by now be well aware that The Elizabethan Session is not some Albarn-like rediscovery of Tudor musical mores it's far more fascinating than that. This is what happened when the English Folk Dance and Song Society and the Folk By the Oak festival persuaded Martin Simpson, Nancy Kerr, Jim Moray, Bella Hardy, Rachel Newton, John Smith, Emily Askew and Hannah James to shut themselves up in a farmhouse in Herefordshire and play together.

The fruits were premiered at Hatfield, the childhood home of Elizabeth I and now home to Folk By the Oak. Ecstatic reviews decreed the only logical next step was to make an album, which they duly did, recording at Hatfield and Cecil Sharp House.

Commissions like this are rare, not least because for all their good intentions it is perhaps inevitable they cannot live up to expectations. Such a conglomeration of talent could so easily have been less than the sum of its parts, but that it is at least equal to that aggregate is something to be extremely glad about.

The remit was to draw on 16th century stories, characters, myths and politics, not to recreate the music of the age and even though the cast includes early music specialist Emily Askew, this is thoroughly modern music that's rooted in tradition not overawed by it.

Album closer Suspicious Mind puts a tantalising twist on a title that cannot outrun the long shadow of Elvis. But where the King delivered a straightforward anthem to romantic insecurity, this song draws on the Queen's poetry to deliberate on the hocus-pocus that passes for 16th century science while echoing her fluttering heart as she considers the attentions of her final official suitor the Duke of Anjou.

Bella Hardy's telling interjections on Love In Idleness make her lamentation for Shakespeare's Hermia one of the album's standouts, every bit as rich and involving as the immediately direct styling of the opening track, The Shores of Hispaniola, Nancy Kerr's searing indictment of the slave trade.

Martin Simpson delivers a brace of social commentaries as he recounts the deaths of Christopher Marlowe and Mary Queen of Scots, the latter in the particularly affecting Elizabeth Spells Death. Broadside injects a flavour of the sea, essaying the inspirational efforts of proto-feminist privateers; while Rachel Newton provides a beautiful musical setting for poems by Marlowe and Raleigh in Come Live With Me.

And in an album of highlights that rewards each return to its grooves, it is perhaps The Straight Line and the Curve, Jim Moray's pensive and precise ballad in tribute to mathematician John Dee (the subject of Damon Albarn's much-feted folk opera) that best encapsulates the project.

A fine artefact of an inspired project.

Nick Churchill
www.thegranvillechambers.co.uk