Feature night with the Jennifer Bell Trio

Our guests for a feature night on 29th July were The Jennifer Bell Trio, with songwriter Jenny on vocals and 12-string guitar (occasionally exchanged for a lute), Wilson Walker on fiddle, and Daniel Kittmer on bodhrán and backing vocals.

The first song of the evening, Ho! Sailors, is also the opening track of the trio’s recently-released mini-album Old Bones and Silver Fishes. Recounting the many ways in which a sailor can drown, it got us off to a cheerily grim start, ‘swimming with the fishes where the sun has never shone, rattling in the deeps with the bones’. From the same album we heard the merrily unsettling Silver Fishes in which rising seas mean farmers become fishermen (‘and we’ll all be dead in the morning!’), and Little Nut Tree in which the King of Spain’s daughter, having stolen the tree, unwittingly feeds herself to it (‘a meal of blood and bone’). The macabre is one of Jenny’s lyrical specialisms, disarmingly offset by the almost Elizabethan sweetness of her vocal delivery.
Wil’s sensitive bowing turned gently pizzicato on the poetic Song of the Strand (the no-man’s land ‘where it all began, neither sea nor shore’), while Dan’s harmony vocals were particularly effective on Colours of Harmony (a song of love for the lute and the lutenist, though the lute itself took exception to the 30-odd-degree heat in our upstairs room this evening and understandably declined to be tuned). The hooves of the horses which come flying out of the mist in Newmarket Anthem were beautifully evoked by bodhrán rumbles and fiddle flourishes.
A great range of characters and narrators is to be found among these songs. And so to Bedlam offers an inmate’s view of the crazyhouse (‘My mind is clear, just coloured up with too much life’), Foxtrot is a jolly singalong number observing a hapless fox in his efforts to, ahem, dance with three little wise hares, and a song which may be called Fish Food (my notes fail me at this point) gives colourful voice to a particularly angry mermaid (‘You dirty pink longpigs! You’re just fish food! You’re thick as plankton!’), with whom it was hard to disagree. Stirring original songwriting set to tunes in which echoes and snippets of trad and early music are never far away.
Paul Carbuncle

Our next guests are Honey and the Bear on 16 October, with the postponed visit by Virginia Kettle on 7 October