Folk Round-Up (New music from Leonard Barry, Amy Laurenson, Louise Bichan, The Naomi Berrill Trio, Philippe Barnes & Tom Phelan)

She won last year’s BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of the Year award at Celtic Connections, and Amy Laurenson’s Strands (Amy Laurenson ★★★) draws the strings on melodies from ‘Shetland, Scandinavia, Mainland Scotland and Ireland.’ It’s a set of tunes that combines piano, guitar, double bass and bodhrán, alongside piano and guitar duos and solo piano pieces. She’s a brilliant player, inventive and finding the pulse across a range of improvisations, as her music tells a story of sorts, beginning in her native Shetland, and encompassing contemporary and classical inflections rising out of those trad roots. Check out ‘Da Trowie Burn’ for some stunning solo work. 

Mike McGoldrick produces uilleann piper Leonard Barry’s Littoral (Leonard Barry ★★★★), his third solo album, its title (meaning ‘on the shore’) a nod to the atmospheres of Barry’s coastal home town of Kilmoyley in North Kerry, and his current home in Sligo. It’s his first solo set in more than a decade, drawing on waltzes, slides and jigs from Kerry, Sliabh Luachra and Sligo, mixed with contemporary pieces. McGoldrick guests on flute, with fiddlers Kevin Burke and Andy Morrow, guitarist Shane McGowan, cellist Alice Allen, Seamie O’Dowd on guitar and Michael Holmes on bouzouki. The likes of the solo ‘Aisling Ghael’ show Barry at gloriously full spate.

Orkney fiddler Louise Bichan’s second album, The Lost Summer (Adhyâropa Records ★★★) features her own tunes alongside traditional pieces such as ‘Deltingside / Squirrel Hunters’ and those from friends including fellow Orkney fiddler Jennifer Wrigley, whose ‘The Watch Stone’ is a beauty of a tune. She is accompanied by a core band of guitars, mandolin and cello, with guest turns from the likes of pianist Jennifer Austin and Simon Chrisman’s beautifully-placed hammered dulcimer on ‘Deltingtide / Squirrel Hunters’. Her tune ‘Adam and Erics’ and the beautiful elegy ‘Tune for Claire’ are highlights of a fine set that’s from the tradition but fully contemporary. 

Recorded live with no edits and no overdubs, Irish flautist, soundtrack artist and member of the London-Irish group CrossHarbour, Philippe Barnes and a longtime musical companion, pianist Tom Phelan, present The Clearwater Sessions (Tom Phelan & Philippe Barnes ★★★), which features selections of Irish and Scottish tunes alongside self-penned pieces. The playing is exemplary, with feel, rather than speed, set as their priority, from the opening ‘Clearwater Waltz’ through the mysteriously titled ‘Midnight Accountant’ to the standout air, ‘Blackbird’, with Barnes exchanging silver flute for whistle on ‘Ali’s Reel’, before he and Phelan raise the pipe tune ‘Hag at the Spinning Wheel’ between them, and close the album with the penultimate lovely solo flute piece, ‘May Morning Dew’. 

Naomi Berrill’s cello takes on a range of characters and states of being across The Naomi Berrill Trio’s Inish (Casa Musicale Sonzogno ★★★), an album inspired by Inishark and Inishbofin, two islands off the west coast of Ireland where beauty and hardship combine for the souls who’ve lived and carved out a living there. These dichotomies are reflected in the music, with its mixing currents of folk, classical and jazz. Berrill is joined by producer, guitarist and vocalist Lorenzo Pellegrini, and drummer and cellist Andrea Beninati, whose restless percussive figures are a contrasting match for the innovative means that Berrill brings to her playing, and to her compelling, layered vocals and lyrics.