Katy Carr
Album: Paszport
Label: Deluce
Tracks: 16
Website: http://www.katycarr.com

This is an intensely original and powerful artistic statement, couched in the form of a brave and ambitious concept album. Nottingham-born (and now London-based) Katy is no stranger to this kind of project however, for her justly acclaimed 2009 album Coquette was both commendably theatrical, and suitably thematic (an homage to Britain in the 1940s, a decade for which Katy has a particular affection and fascination, and with which she feels a special affinity).

Paszport (Katy's fourth CD) also provides even stronger evidence of Katy's interest in her own Polish ancestry (on her mother's side); while a tribute to the heroism of men and women of Poland in the face of the most harrowing of adversities, it pays homage to the soldiers and pilots who after fighting so hard for their country's independence then were forced to become refugees following its annexation by the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War - each man and woman effectively losing his/her personal passport to so many aspects of normal life.

Paszport is a sequence of compellingly emotive songs directly inspired by tales collected from displaced refugees, survivors of detention camps and other war veterans. The disc begins with the sound of the voice of 92-year-old Kazik Piechowski, who in June 1942 had made a remarkable escape from Auschwitz, which leads straight into the first song, Kommander's Car (a remastered version of one of the tracks from the Coquette album), which depicts Piechowski's uneasy, edgy emotional state during that escape. The link between Kazik and Katy across the generations, via her mother's roots and heritage, is both the key to her emotional involvement and the springboard from which history enters, and becomes, the contemporary. As well as tellingly viewing through the lens of history the inevitable topics of personal freedom and status, hope and despair, love, loss and deprivation, incidental issues also addressed during the sequence include biodiversity (Wejmutka).

The various life-tales comprising this song-cycle are elegantly performed by Katy and her select band of musicians, with the distinctive, rich primary colours of cello and violin supporting Katy's own piano and ukulele, all further augmented at times by brass (tuba and trombone), bass and (tuned and unturned) percussion - the whole affair having a special, attractive, and singularly evocative musical ambience that sinuously intermingles elements of klezmer, gypsy jazz, Polish folk song and classical song.

Katy's the possessor of a really fine natural singing voice, supremely confident of its own identity and expertise and with a persuasive combination of tenderness and strength. If you're seeking a reference point, she perhaps most closely resembles Kate Bush, but without Kate's more extreme and eccentric mannerisms, displaying a more robust legato with melodies altogether less wayward (any use of tremulous vibrato technique is purely for dramatic effect, as on The Partisan's Lullaby). Katy loses nothing in expressiveness, and her vocal dexterity and versatility is striking, moving as it does so easily from the heart-rending, austere (yet almost desperately resigned) passion of the title song to the almost cinematically busy Red Red Rose (which portrays the unnerving feelings of Poles evading capture in the harsh climate) to the diva-like croon of Weronika, the coquettish operetta-waltzery of Alicja, and the angular, exotic exploratory lines of Travelling To You. And yet I was even more taken with Katy's expressive range on the heady pair of dramatic scenas at the centre of the disc, Ma?a (Little Flower) and Czarne W?osy, Zielone Oczy (Black Hair, Green Eyes). And what's more, Katy's gained an impressive mastery of singing in Polish (six of the disc's 14 songs are rendered entirely in that language, while a further three alternate English with Polish lyrics), and yet these prove in no way inaccessible as full translations are given in the beautifully designed accompanying booklet, together with notes on pronunciation and usage). On the deceptively jaunty closing number Let's Go, Partisans!, Katy is joined by the voices of the Polish Partisan Choir, while soldiers from the Polish 22nd Artillery Company lend their chorus to Wojtek, the tale of a brown bear who was made the company's mascot during World War Two, and Katy's pronunciation coach Wojciech Wentura appears as opera singer on Alicja.

Yes, Paszport is an extraordinary achievement, on which Katy immediately removes at a single stroke any hint of the potentially less-than-desirable stereotype which might normally be invoked by mention of the term "singer-songwriter" (which you'll note I haven't used before now in this entire review!). Instead, this latest project represents a real triumph of creativity.

David Kidman