Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne

Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne’s powerful and intense singing, brilliant musicianship, wide choice of material, and rapport with the audience left us captivated, a bit amazed, and maybe a little stunned (he is satisfyingly loud) last Wednesday evening.
He was playing anglo concertina and a hybrid converted melodeon-accordion based on a pre-war Hohner Lucia, which gave melodeon-style punch and drive on the right hand but a full range of bass chords, which he used very effectively, on the left. Effectively an instrumental hot rod.
Almost all his material was traditional, ranging from classic early twentieth-century songs collected by people like Lucy Broadwood and Ralph Vaughan Williams, through to striking material from his latest CD, Play Up The Music, a collection of English-origin songs as sung in the Caribbean and by African-American artists in the USA. This included Pretty Little Sailor, a version of Soldier, Soldier, Won’t You Marry Me? which many of us learned at school, and a mesmerisingly powerful version of Little Musgrove.

The depth and range of his instrumental playing was wonderful. On the melodeon, he started the evening with a lively and powerful version of two country dance tunes and then moved on to a representation of some Welsh fiddle tunes from a player who ‘knew a lot of notes, and was determined to play every single one of them’ (and Cohen showed us just what that meant). On the concertina he gave us ‘a sailor’s hornpipe, as it would have been arranged by J.S.Bach’ – completely convincing, very funny, and a virtuoso performance – followed by his own very moving Fantasia on a West Indian Burial based on the songs traditionally sung at funerals to help to guide the souls of the dead back to their home in Africa.
It wasn’t just an evening of varied songs, powerful singing and wonderful playing. He was very much with us as an audience. Many of his songs had choruses or refrains, which suited the club’s good reputation for chorus singing, and for almost every piece he gave us informative, interesting, amusing and sometimes touching introductions and explanations. Both sets were closed off with just the right kind of rousing finales: a less-than-serious music hall song from Vesta Tilley in the first half, and a remarkable concertina piece, ending with whirling the instrument round his head to use the Doppler Effect to imitate the sound of bells, at the end of the evening. Good stuff.

Go and see him again if you can, either solo or in the group Granny’s Attic, with George Sansome and Lewis Wood (who are playing at Gunthorpe Village Hall in November).

Hugh Miller for the committee