A Beginner’s Guide

Readers of Songlines will already be familiar with Jim Moray’s latest CD, In Modern History, which was pre¬released with the June edition of the magazine. A Beginner's Guide is a selection from his previous albums, released to bring people up to date with his work.

Moray declares that traditional songs ‘belong to us all to bend into new, break down for parts and have fun with’. There is a danger, when performing a traditional song, of being so influenced by the way it has been previously sung that the piece itself is overshadowed, its meaning lost. What is so interesting, and important, in the work of Moray, is the stripping of these layers away, like paint, until the bare wood of the song itself is revealed. He then seeks a way to perform it that expresses its true nature. A Beginner’s Guide begins with one ‘Early One Morning, one of the most familiar of traditional songs. Usually this is sung as if the narrator is entranced by ‘a maiden calling from the valley below’. He is so charmed that he is deaf to the desolation of her appeal not to be abandoned. For Moray this is the essential point, and his endeavour is to capture her desolation and fear. To do this he employs all the forces available to a contemporary musician – techno, found sound, jazz, the eloquence of the string quartet, the enfolding of a big choir – and so produces a great example of the modern, original and engrossing music collected here.