 |
| Janice Jo Lee |
On the last night of Folk Alliance, Janice Jo Lee opened her set with a spoken word piece that asked, “What Is Folk.” The piece opened the doors to all manner of ways people share and build upon their spiritual yearnings, providing an axis to suit all the colors and flavors of the performances that would make up the evening.
With a keyboardist the crew recruited from Minneapolis, fellow
Toronto vocalist Camila Diaz-Varela and dancer Sam Yoon, Lee kicked
out any purist notions regarding framework and built a set that repeatedly
answered the question with self affirmation (“Crumpled Heart Unfolding”), dreams of hope in the midst of worldwide turmoil (“Swim
Forever”), and a call to find one’s role in the midst of community--both that
around you and that handed down from those who came before (“Ancestor Song”).
That last is the title track for the new album constructed around this work,
and folks like me who can’t wait to hear it can contribute here:
 |
| The Pairs |
Before her, on that same Toronto stage, the five-piece band, the Pairs (named after two sets of twins who grew up together, three of them the frontwomen) turned out an endearing and remarkably powerful set. Renee and Noelle Coughlin lived up to the promise of sister harmonies, bright, close, and shining in every direction. Flanked by the twins, Hillary Watson anchored the sound with her own bold, close vocals.
and here, with an opportunity to contribute to their new
album’s crowdfunding:
 |
| Eljuri |
 |
| Missy Raines and Allegheny |
Introducing her band Allegheny, Missy Raines noted fiddler Ellie Hakanson was having a case of laryngitis, but “you can still hear her because that’s how you do.” Indeed, the band seemed unstoppable with breakneck interplay between Hakanson’s fiddle, Tristan Scroggins’ mandolin, Ben Garnett’s guitar, and newest member Eli Gilbert’s banjo. As with the voiceless Hakanson joke, their set was peppered with humor, Scroggins at one point introducing a ballad as, “Not as dark as most bluegrass; nobody dies, but it’s still plenty passive-aggressive.”
More on Missy Raines: https://www.missyraines.com/
 |
| Madam Fraankie and Talibah Safiya |
Up in the Memphis Room’s private showcase, Talibah Safiya arrived with a quiet radiance. While her guitarist tuned up, she looked out around the packed room and smiled, her voice soft and genuine, she said how nice it was to see all these new faces.
She began with a propulsive piece about weathering the hard edges
of reality, “Up and Down,” her voice soaring and plunging with the refrain. She then sang the sultry “Middle of the Night” and lingered in
the seemingly doomed relationship of “Like Water,” before calling the lover out
with “Imagine that Mutherfuckers.” “Ten Toes Down” closed the set with a call
for honest self-interrogation and commitment. All through this set, Safiya’s guitarist
Madame Fraankie kept her head down, delivering soulful, poignant arpeggios, a riff
here and there, perfectly matching the precision of Safiya’s eloquence.
Talibah Safiya: https://www.talibahsafiya.com/home-1
 |
| Emma Langford |
Up in the Women of Note room, Irish singer Emma Langford’s bright
eyes and smile lit the room when she looked up from concerned concentration over
the set-up of her trio. Surely without knowing, she echoed Safiya. “It’s so good to be here in new spaces, playing new
music for new faces,” she said.
She launched into an otherworldly performance of her new song
“Abigail,” which she described as a sort of pagan prayer dedicated to the Irish
goddess Gobnait. On her Bandcamp site, she explains, “it is written in the form
of a love song in honour of someone who embodies all the values of the goddess:
kindness, forgiveness, healing, generosity. It celebrates divine feminine
energy….”
With carefully stepped support from Hannah Nic Gearailt’s
keys, Langford’s beautiful voice began with a distinct focus on surefootedness.
Then, her wordless crooning shifted to a series of shining, joyful cries met by warm woodwind accompaniment from Alec Brown (who otherwise played
cello). The song modulated to what seemed as much like another plane of existence as a key change, carrying those in the small, tightly packed room with it.
You can hear the song on YouTube, but I strongly suggest picking up a copy here: https://emmalangfordmusic.bandcamp.com/track/abigail-tomhas-ghobnatan
Langford’s set was filled with warmth and beauty, as well as plenty of entertaining stories. She recalled a wonderfully “witchy” music school teacher who warned her that the world would “gobble you up and leave nothing but bones,” before singing a song just such an experience inspired, “Birdsong.” At one point, after explaining the context for a song called “You are Not Mine,” she explained that she had to add “(This Song Isn’t About You, You Lying Bolix)” to the title because someone claimed it was about him.
A woman shouted from my left, “It’s the ‘Your So Vain’ of Limerick!”
Without missing a beat, Langford grinned and said, “Yes, I’m the
Limerick Carly Simon.”
Emma Langford: https://www.emmalangfordmusic.com/
Wonderful as Simon is, as humbly as Langford meant the joke, it seemed an understatement.
Langford’s set was followed by Aoife Scott’s usual song-trading
at midnight with the four women of note for the day. It’s a key ritual of Folk
Alliance I’ve written about before that started as an event back in Dublin, the
Temple Bar Tradfest, a weeklong January festival that takes place in various
landmark buildings around the city, recently taking place at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Saturday’s Women of Note began with Scott singing “Liverpool Love” for an aunt who constantly gives to others without doing for herself. The great Clare Sands, who I wrote about in more detail last summer, followed that with a song to St. Brigid of Kildare, who she noted was somewhat absurdly the only woman saint of Ireland.
 |
| Clare Sands and Aoife Scott |
Carrying forward this tribute to women, Kitty McFarlane, a
singer-songwriter from Sommerset County in South West England, sang of the Mediterranean women who make this rare, golden fabric from fibers made
by a particular clam. She explained that she was fascinated with textiles, the women
in her family going back several generations working with fabric. Her full-throated
vocals shone with a delicacy that suited her pledge to “spin salt water into
sun.” That song, "Sea Silk," is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBRaQwGcMCs
Kitty McFarlane: https://www.kittymacfarlane.com/
“Wow,” Jean Rohe said after the other three finished. She said she didn’t know how to follow all this ethereal beauty. But, then, she stood and delivered an extraordinary song that tied her own abortion to her father’s death. Though she joked that, being from New York, she only knew how to sing about herself, that song, “Animal,” perfectly complemented what came before, her description of work in a garden a powerful metaphor for the tough choices we are forced to make in life. The song is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSfyP5zbQmc
More about Jean Rohe: https://jeanrohe.com/
 |
| Jean Rohe |
On their second round, Scott sang a cover of Damien Dempsey’s “Colony,” a passionate protest song calling out the "Christian" powers that forcibly rob indigenous people of their homes, their freedom, their dignity, their livelihood, and lives. Scott introduced the song explaining that Dempsey taught her to try to find a way to sing in her true Dublin accent. The mix of her traditional style and its contrast with her more colloquial spoken word made her extraordinarily gripping.
You can hear Dempsey’s original here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0igMlr0tmXo
And here is Scott singing it from a few years back:
When Scott would sing, Sands added some impromptu fiddle support to Andy Meany’s guitar. (As I've mentioned before, Meaney backs Scott's sets.) This time, Rohe, also began to add some counterpoint with her own guitar. These snatches of improvisation hinted at what was yet to come.
McFarlane finished up with “Glass Eel,” a song that ties the migration of eels across the Atlantic to the plight of refugees facing arbitrary and inhumane borders.
 |
| Kitty McFarlane and Clare Sands |
At that point, Rohe realized she was due at another showcase, and she had to leave.
Sands agreed to fill in, and though the plan was made with whispers, it took seconds for the women who would perform the final two sets of the evening--the Henry Girls and Karan Casey—to pile into the front of the room, the Henry Girls pulling a harp and accordion out of their cases and ready in seconds. Scott pulled out a hand drum.
Meaney decided to let the women have this and sat back in the crowd.
Together, these seven women, and most of the room, erupted into a triumphant
performance of Sands’ “Awe Na Mna (Praise the Women).” Exuberant voices filled
the room and one another's hearts. It was a perfect moment to carry us home, in the moment and well into the days ahead.
More on Clare Sands: https://claresands.com/
