Sarah Jane Morris, The Sisterhood 2, Fallen Angel ***1/2

Not quite as good as The Sisterhood numero uno. But not too shabby. And yet, pulling the rug from under my feet, I worry: can you really compare apples with pears? No. Let’s instead pick up a few peelings and squeeze the pips. The most jazz relevant track core to this collection of many compatible styles ripened and harvested in Sarah Jane Morris and Tony Rémy’s hands appropriately earmarked to their dedicatees are the Amy Winehouse tribute ‘The Edge Is Where The Magic Is Found’ and the thumping bluesy riffery that works so well on the Etta James ‘Also Known As’ number.

A follow-up to 2024’s The Sisterhood – ‘The Jazz Side of the Road’ was the big highlight of that earlier album. I still play that Rickie Lee Jones tribute quite a lot for kicks and to crack an amused grin at the great lyrics.

Dedicatees on this new one are Peggy Seeger, Sinéad O’Connor, Tracy Chapman, Dolly Parton, Joan Baez, Bonnie Raitt, Joan Armatrading, Patti Smith, Etta James, Janis Ian and Amy Winehouse – the latter the most jazz relevant of the tracks. The deliciously smoky number features the widely admired pianist Jason Rebello and there’s great time set by Martyn Barker known for his work with veteran ABC hired gun, Matt Backer.

As the very fine Liverpool Irish-English London based jazz journalist Peter Quinn – brother of the novelist Anthony Quinn whose Curtain Call inspired the very darkly amusing satire The Critic – writes on The Arts Desk: “With her fabulously rich timbral quality and storytelling gift, Morris inhabits each subject while remaining unmistakably herself.”

Peter seems to like the ‘Crazy Angel’ for Patti Smith and the Etta James track best. I’ll defer, without resorting over fastidiously to the much practised rarely properly executed art of arslikhan, to his always illuminating, kind and positive writing and point you to his review above.

For my tuppence ha’penny worth, your honour, brown nosing, tick, deadpan 😐 emoji, completed – the cheque’s in the post he says – I preferred the initial album but the O’Connor track with its Celtic lilt appealed to my ever growing interest in Irish traditional music although trad is only lightly touched upon.

Like everything here the track is an amalgam of styles and it isn’t an album for bores. If you like hybrids and mixing and matching then great. It’s a big world out there after all and no point in being restrictive as an artist or listener. SJM certainly does not restrict herself to trying new things.

Sadly, as an aside, some jazz listeners are stick in the muds and continue to draw the portcullis down by restricting their retrofitted mock dansette playlists strictly to boring old Muggsy Spanier or if more progressive spang-a-lang and, what larks, the relatively daring toe tapping derring do of boogaloo that the critics of the day were always sniffy about.

I have always liked Tony Rémy’s guitar playing and heard him a few times when he sounded far more in thrall to Jimi Hendrix back in my Jazz on CD days in the 1990s heard most memorably at a tiny place on Denmark Street at the 12 Bar Club circa Jammin’ at the 12 Bar Club.

It was a fun gig. In those days album launches were extended, highly refreshed affairs, often held at lunchtime. And because the venue was at the heart of the music publishing industry in London just off Charing Cross Road – the street by then was mostly large music instrument stores – there were a lot of interesting ligger and blagger type members of the biz roaming around who know their music and just as significantly how to enjoy themselves suitably and go with the, er, flow.

I went down there with my boss at the time the reliably Falstaffian Jonty Abbott and remember chatting inside to Tony Hall who Jonty introduced me to and whose copy I subsequently edited.

Sadly Tony passed away in 2019. I went down to his funeral in Brighton. He was known for Tempo records and as a massive advocate of Tubby Hayes and Dizzy Reece both of whom he produced. He was also manager of soul act The Real Thing – one of Liverpool’s very finest bands in the decades after The Beatles.

As a pre-teen I was bewitched by the band watching them on Top of the Pops and saw them live many decades after their peak at a packed pub in Whetstone, north London, when despite the fact that the line up of the moment was kind of miming to the PA it didn’t matter. I could listen to 1976 no 1 hit ‘You To Me Are Everything’ all night every night even when by then they had become their own tribute act, a karaoke to their own genius. And why not? The crowd after all were mainly there to dance around their handbags to the exact sound they knew from the radio and so the band could relax, happily oblige and bask in the then and sort of now adoration.

It was a great night although I was bamboozled by the source sonics from the PA; afterwards I headed down to Nancy’s fine Irish bar, Toolan’s, who serve the best Guinness in Finchley, a place I returned to recently after a Simon “Tubby” Spillett gig a few hundred yards away down in the Bohemia. It’s still good. Someone was singing ‘Pretty Little Girl From Omagh’ for the dancers to shuffle along to. But Nancy I think is no longer at her perch. Old news.

To my regret I still haven’t heard Sarah Jane Morris live. Maybe one day. She used to play the Vortex in David Mossman’s day when the club was in Stokie. I knew David a bit, we sat on the Perrier jazz awards judging panel together with Barb Jungr down at the 6 in Chelsea a few times. Sadly he passed away some years ago. What a nice chap he was. A former taxi driver and keen mountaineer who later expanded his empire to run a cafe in dear old Margate, he loved Neil Diamond and of course oodles and oodles of top jazz. He practically coined the phrase that the Vortex was a “listening room”. Fond memories.

Anyway to draw this post to a close and without prolonging your misery, dear reader, by rambling on, as a child I also used to like watching SJM on Top of the Pops when she was with Ian Hislop lookalike Jimmy Sommerville in the brilliant pop band The Communards. Their version of Gamble and Huff’s ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’ still comes across fresh as a daisy and her voice listening to the Sisterhood – QED – remains a mighty, nuanced, variegated, sound a long way down the road all these years on.