Jenny Gall & Ian Blake - Cantara

Price in Australian dollars $30.00: / Unit Click on the Cart button to buy this CD now. VISA, Mastercard, American Express, Paypal accepted. Postage charges are calculated by the shopping cart.

Jenny Gall, in collaboration with musician and sound artist Ian Blake, has here produced a recording of Australian women's folk music that is much more than a fine and inspiring aesthetic experience. This CD of nine songs and two instrumental tracks is also intellectually and artistically challenging, surprising, and at times slightly unsettling. It is strongly unified by its consistent reference to the essential paradox and ambiguity of life. That this is an essence which is at once contemporary and also generations deep, is convincingly expressed by Jenny's seamless juxtaposition of modern piano-based composition (Blue Fox; Gwen Harwood Impromptus) with traditional pieces like A Bhanarach Donn a Cruidh and As Sylvie Was Walking. Right throughout this beautifully crafted album, the ancient is integrated with the modern, the innovated with the long-inherited, the organic with the synthetic.

While Jenny employs symbolic ballad poetry as her main communicative vehicle, ingenious musical support is provided by settings that tightly combine elements as starkly traditional as the unaccompanied voice, with those as experimental as random digital sound generation. Typical of this treatment is her performance of the ?magical" ballad, Green Bushes, where the obscurity of a mythological narrative of death and regeneration is emphasised by the radical ambiguity of Jenny's interpretation of the song's rhythm and tonality. Worlds of meaning ? both personal and universal - are further implied by sound effects woven through what is a typically non-standard musical arrangement.

The choice of material here reflects also the paradox of a European-Australian identity. Classic lyrics of the bush such as The Reedy Lagoon and The Stockman's Last Bed? both performed in ways which give them new life and meaning ? alternate with ballads like The Female Rambling Sailor and The Bonny Bunch of Roses that exhibit far more explicitly their Anglo-Celtic provenance. That all these songs were learned by Jenny from field recordings of Australian women singers, and the fact that all are performed in a similarly contemporary and convention-defying manner, suggest that the tale of the stock-camp or river bend must be taken together with the portrayal of the elemental forces of love, loss, and ambition, as contributing equally to the expression of a fundamental Australian feminineness. The sounds you will hear on this recording are clear, fresh, colourful, and thought-provoking. Sung voices of varying timbres are interwoven with the thick complexity of pianos, the simple plucked poignancy of the harp, the brash throatiness of trumpet and trombone, and the smooth richness of clarinet, viola and string bass. Other sounds â?? no less pleasing - are far harder to classify, having their origin in the infinitely surprising realm of electronic creation. review by Barry McDonald .

From Jenny's notes on the CD: A colleague once remarked, "There is no Australian women's folk music." Being an Australian woman folk musician with a grandmother who was a fiddle player, I found this a bit difficult to swallow; but certainly, the predominant image of Australian folk music in published sources presents a very masculine 'beards and bottle-tops' image. My doctoral research is concerned with discovering the kind of music Australian pioneer women played and sang and how it reflects their lives. As there is very little written about this in official sources, I am using various kinds of primary source material. One fascinating source is the manuscript collection, in the State Library of Victoria, of Scottish bom Georgiana McCrae, who came to Victoria in 1840.1 have been able to cross-reference the hand-written music manuscripts with her diaries through the dates she wrote on both sources. This link sheds light on Georgiana's emotions as she came to terms with her life in Australia, far from her Scottish roots. I am also using field recordings held in the National Library of Australia gathering information from the conversations and background noises in the old tapes to give me clues about how these women used their music as lullabies, work songs a way of making social networks and for keeping family singing traditions alive. The choice of ballads reveals a great deal about the singer and the narrative structure of these songs offers a vehicle for dealing with complex emotions and life-changing events. For women the piano was very much a bush instrument and there are some wonderful tales of pianos being carted to the most remote locations, suffering dreadful damage: but the owners steadfastly refused to be discouraged from playing their beloved instrument! In collaboration with sound artist/musician lan Blake I have produced the CD, Cantara, in which I perform these songs.

MP3 samples:

This is a page from the Indie-CDs.com catalogue.If you do not see a site menu on this page click here to visit our home page and browse our extensive selection of top quality independent music (opens a new browser window).