Roots Round-Up (David Brunelle, Jordan Wax, Pawlo Humeniuk and more)

A one-man encyclopaedia of Québécois folk music, fiddler and harmonica player David Brunelle seems to know the history behind every tune and fiddler from La Belle Province. Interestingly, with his debut album, Vieux Airs Neufs (David Brunelle ****), he’s leaning into his own compositions on the fiddle. Propelled by the driving rhythm of Québécois podorythmie (foot percussion), the album sounds great with Brunelle buoyed by top-notch friends like the mustachioed Dâvi Simard, fiddle legend Lisa Ornstein, Colin Savoie-Levac of Rosier, the women from Galant, tu perds ton temp, and founding member of La Bottine Souriante, André Marchand. I’m not usually a fan of newly composed tunes, but Brunelle’s huge knowledge of the tradition means his tunes are carefully crafted and would fit as easily in a backroom session as a dusty archive. Bonus points for cross-tuning his fiddle in fascinating ways for most of the album.

I don’t know what it is with Vancouver, BC, but it’s unexpectedly become a hotbed for flamenco. I first saw this with Farnaz Ohadi, whose Toronto concert I covered in Songlines #205, and now bansuri flute player Lara Wong and Spanish guitarist Melón Jiménez have a new album, Confluencias (Scatcat Music ****), of flute-first flamenco fusion. Wong grew up in Vancouver and now lives in Spain. It’s world music the old-school way, fusing flamenco guitar with the hypnotic bansuri flute and throwing in Indian tabla to boot. Jiménez has already traced these pathways with Anoushka Shankar, and the end result works nicely.

An intricate, mosaic-like work of literary songwriting and sophisticated arrangements with a lot of instruments, the new album, It is Cyclical, Missing You (Lily Talmers ****), from Brooklyn-based, Michigan-born singer-songwriter Lily Talmers, is fascinating. She first came to my attention from a surprisingly moving, almost sardonic, cover of ‘Arthur McBride’. Songwriters who are into literature first are always a cut above the rest, and Talmers has been teaching lit to college students for some years now. Her songs are long, storied, intense and full of slow-burning passion.

Speaking of intricate, the debut solo Yiddish album, טײַטש [The Heart Deciphers] (Borscht Beat *****), from New Mexico’s Jordan Wax (Lone Piñon) is a virtuosic tour of ethnolinguistics. Wax ties together three different threads of Yiddish dialects, inspired by his late friend Misha Limanovich, a retired Albuquerque Pizza Hut driver and Holocaust survivor/partisan fighter. The songs are mostly original, with some traditionals from Limanovich, and touch on both ancient concepts of Judaism and today’s headlines. Wax doesn’t shy away from tough topics like the violence in Israel/Palestine or climate change. It’s part of his new creed to live in Yiddish, something he learned from Limanovich who lived throughout the world, far from his Jewish roots in Poland, and never gave up his heritage.

Baltimore reissue label Canary Records has been cranking out amazing compilations of old 78s at a prodigious rate, and Garland Weaving: Ukrainian-American Dances, April 1926 – Nov 1930 (Canary Records *****) is one of their best. Played by the popular 78-era recording star and fiddler Pawlo Humeniuk, an immigrant living in New York’s Ukrainian community, the music on these tracks leaps off the grooves. It’s amazingly vibrant and heartbreaking when you think of the horrors going on in Ukraine under invasion now and what’s possibly to come with Trump now in charge. The music on this album is from a lost world, not least because Humeniuk grew up in a majority Jewish village in Ukraine and that clearly influences the music. The poignancy of the life depicted in these recordings is transcendent.