You can’t quite categorise the fine plumage of this interesting folk-improv band. Info on it is sketchy. I am not parroting a press release. A lorikeet is a parrot, fact, any old excuse for a pun, but seriously and without swearing like a sailor in exasperation I have no idea if that’s why the band is so named. Ventriloquising other people’s publicity material brings me out in a rash. It’s marlbank, not Orville.
But I am not allergic to conducting a little rudimentary online research. So, from what I gather – and do erect a gallows if I am wrong – Lorikeet hail from the Frome scene in Somerset where all this fruit of the loom was recorded at the Bert Jansch studio a couple of years ago and just released by the resurgent Babel label.
‘My Mother Is A Leader’ according to the band who formed four years ago is “a song about mothers stepping into their power as leaders.”
Written by Lorikeet’s English singer-guitarist Rosanna Schura known for her work with the Andrews Sisters-loving close harmony act the Puppini Sisters, the band also has American cellist Heather Truesdall best heard on the improvisation called ‘Fell Line’ and English drummer Dave Smith, known for his work with Robert Plant.
Under the latter name English folk rockers Steeleye Span recorded the song on their second album Please to See the King (1971).
Lorikeet’s treatment is quite a bit jollier! And overall the humour on this bucolic clebration is upbeat rather than doom laden.
Woven has several improvisations that hook in my interest. Truesdall is quite Shirley Smart-like on ‘Unspool.’
But in the end I liked Schura’s ‘Dandelion Seeds’ even more. She is quite Sandy Denny like on this.
There’s a 1920s song interpreted called ‘Sugar Baby’ a lament of a henpecked man that has a chorus line: “I’ll rock the cradle when you’re gone.” Sam Amidon is among artists to have covered the song in fairly recent years.
What else? There’s jazz trumpet from Laura Jurd in a ‘St James Infirmary’ vein on Schura piece ‘Hot Slow June’. Jurd is also a presence on Puppini Sisters album The Birthday Party released earlier this year. Other Woven guests include violinist Theo May on 3 tracks.
Also good on Woven is a take on the mid 19th century folk song ‘Cuckoo’ that the Hastings born folk eminence singer Shirley Collins – now in her nineties – interpreted in the 1950s on Sweet England.
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