HANNAH JAMES AND THE JIGDOLL ENSEMBLE - The Woman And Her Words
Private Label JDR002
Following her 2016 release, Jigdoll, this ensemble offering represents the next formative stage in singer, musician and dancer Hannah James’ fascinating personal development. Recorded, mixed and mastered at the Budapest Music Centre, with Arts Council England funding, it’s a sophisticated piece of contemporary composition with a distinctly European feel celebrating ageing, concomitant wisdom and the pursuit of female truths through seven original songs and three instrumentals.
Supporting Hannah (accordion, vocals, mouth music, step dance, foot percussion) are Scot Kate Young (fiddle, vocals), Estonian Marti Tärn (bass), and Hungarian András Dés (percussion) with French cellist Toby Kuhn as special guest. The material is beautifully played and expressed, with acute awareness, in the deployment of some deliberately sparse and spacious arrangements, that less offers more and that both rhythmic and melodic instrumentation can create captivating textures, mood and atmosphere in animating and dramatising songs.
Hannah’s sweetly winsome voice is imbued with folk sensibility in its expression of deeply lyrical material about the value of urban canalside corridor greenspace (an emerald in the ashes), the magical sublimity of dance, the beguiling nature of spring displacing the dully shrouded hibernal hues of winter, dance as a vivid metaphor for choosing to fly, glide and soar in experiencing life, and a dark lullaby about mendacious masculinity. The title piece is an edgily epic tour de force about an anguished man with misguided priorities and suppressed sadness in his family relationships who, following a phantasmal encounter with a prophetic sibyl, undergoes revelatory change, although the extent of his ensuing kindred rapprochements cannot be revealed here!
www.jigdoll.co.uk
Kevin T. Ward
This review appeared in Issue 131 of The Living Tradition magazine