WILLIE TAYLOR, WILL ATKINSON & JOE HUTTON - An Audience With The Shepherds
Veteran VT159CD
Combined from four different live recordings, this CD is the first public release of music from three remarkable musicians. Willie Taylor, Will Atkinson and Joe Hutton were key figures in Northumbrian music through most of the 20th century. Shepherds by profession, they were also master musicians and repositories or creators of a large repertoire of music in their regional style. Fiddler Taylor, piper Hutton and moothie maestro Atkinson joined forces in retirement and toured as The Shepherds in the eighties and nineties. There were LPs by each of the three, and a few tracks are available on CD from Topic and Smithsonian, but this is the only full CD release currently available. An Audience With The Shepherds has collected a fraction of their repertoire, remastered from private recordings between 1988 and 1991, and presented it with detailed notes on the music and the musicians.
Most of the tunes here are quite well known nowadays, at least in Northumberland, but some of the local pieces and The Shepherds' own compositions are certainly new to me. The material in this collection is a mix of old Northumbrian airs and dance music, Scottish marches and reels, a few North American melodies, and more recent Northumbrian compositions including several by Willie Taylor, Billy Pigg and Archie Dagg. Morpeth Rant and Cheviot Rant are at the well known end of the spectrum. Nancy Taylor's Reel and Little Jenny are probably at the other end, with the polka Nancy Clough and the lovely Elsey's Waltz somewhere in between. The playing of these old masters - in their sixties, seventies and eighties when the recordings were made - is exceptionally skilled and lively, first rate traditional performances. This is not a studio-quality album, but it's a pretty clean live recording for the most part, with consistent volume levels and a good mix in the ensemble pieces. Solos, duets and trio tracks fill almost an hour with highly enjoyable music.
Alex Monaghan
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this CD online from The Listening Post The Listening Post is the CD mailorder service of The Living Tradition magazine. This album was reviewed in Issue 110 of The Living Tradition magazine. |