Scottish traditional folk music isn’t my usual terrain. But I was drawn to this. And just like what Fergus McCreadie does in a far jazzier vein it isn’t shortbread and sporrans at all. A world away from Brigadoon, I like it maybe because of jazz pianist Dave Milligan’s presence. Maybe too because there isn’t an imposed strictness to the approach.
I liked Milligan’s work in the Bancroftian Caber Records days. Ransack your memory. Late Show from nearly a quarter century ago – that was the one. Hear what he does on ‘Piper’s Bidding’ on that recording and you can easily fold into Windblown.
Small caveat however there isn’t any jazz here. Does that matter? No.
Perhaps you get glimpses of what Milligan can do on ‘Lay My Old Body’ and ‘I Am Windblown.’
That’s a perhaps.
You don’t have to hunt the proverbial jazz thimble to enjoy Windblown or feel bereft, however.
Because what a plenitude rather than lack it proves.
Huggable: this is a tribute to a palm tree facing its chainsaw demise. It works on a literary level given the quality of the lyrics and how it hovers in a genre-less slipstream of riptides, distant unknowable flow and treacherous waters.
That tree is 200 years old brought from Bermuda to Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden in the early 1800s.
Windblown according to the description on the Hudson website explains a bit more that the album explores “themes of colonial legacy, ecological care, grief and resilience.”
‘In between nothing much happens under glass’
But nobody virtue signals in a crass way as there is a logic to the reveries and the songs expand from a framework to be that bit more universal as tales. It’s probably more a triumph of the underdog kind of record when your dog happens to be a tree. The fact that the tree is quite ordinary, two a penny, is the twist. But the love is there to protect its ordinariess down the ages as gardeners tend it and the ravages of time affects it.
Pippa Murphy does sound design and for once that nebulous term referring to effects means something because the album has beautiful electronics, wrapping the voice and piano in a velvety hue which is organic and appealing.
Polwart writes the main tunes and lyrics. Her speaking voice in the monologue at the beginning of ‘Bend and Bow’ is warm and welcoming.
You get a sense of, bear with me if the comparison seems outré, Alasdair Gray-like place completely without the scatalogical fervour mind Gray brought to Lanark in this work.
Because on some level Windblown is a love letter to Edinburgh but one that’s in the world rather than in a parochial sense.
KP inhabits the characters and weaves a salt speckled coal black stovepipe hat wearing story.
Milligan’s chunky chords contrast well with the lilting melody.
And Murphy’s contribution comes into its own here as this song becomes more visual and certainly the track at that stage of the album is the most imagistic of the tracks.
Here I am with the fern, the bamboo, the begonia from India, Vietnam and New Caledonia
Karine Polwart
‘After Hours’ is a great ballad.
There is vulnerability in these shanties and Scottish traditional melodies that transcend neat labelling.
I love the setting of Caledonia’s greatest poet Robert Burns’ ‘The Silver Tassie.’
Polwart sings the parting glass song with great gusto and somehow makes it tender for all that.
I also like the sound of the ocean on ‘My Secret’s Out’ and Milligan’s brief intro to ‘Hear the Rigging.’
