The Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs of Black British Experience
by Angeline Morrison
(Topic Records, CD, LP, DL)
topicrecords.co.uk
★★★★★
While walking the beaches near her Cornwall home, Angeline Morrison began thinking of the slave ships, some possibly carrying her ancestors, that once sailed past with their human cargo to the English ports. One death from a shipwreck was a nameless child, buried in the Isles of Scilly, who inspired ‘Unknown African Boy (d. 1830)’, one of the 10 songs on this ground-breaking album.
Morrison scoured the folk repertoire for evidence of people of colour who have been in Britain for centuries. She found them instead in news items and historical records: the Liverpool race riots of 1919, the Crimean war, ‘Black John’, an 18th-century Welsh gardener. It is these people who inspire her songs, all written and delivered in form and melody to encourage others to make their own versions of them – in other words, keep them moving forwards.
Morrison calls this process ‘re-storying’, a word that conjures up the possibility of new narratives and retellings as well as the vital restoration of peoples otherwise missing from existing repertoire. Her sonic world rings with a folky familiarity. Acoustic violin, accordion and guitars combine with plangent vocals and minimal percussion.
Morrison’s courage in reconstructing folk repertoire is truly revolutionary. Five spoken word ‘interludes’ consisting of archival quotes about British attitudes to ‘coloured people’ are interspersed between the songs. The content is easy to guess, repellent to hear, and, for this reason, the album comes with a trigger warning. But, most importantly, these interludes show how vital Morrison’s project is.
$/He Who Feeds You... Owns You
by The Brother Moves On
(Native Rebel Recordings, LP CD, DL)
nativerebelrecordings.co.uk
★★★★✩
Since 2008, The Brother Moves On have been making a name for themselves in their native city of Johannesburg. Named after Brother Mouzone, the stylish hitman in the Baltimore crime drama The Wire, TBMO are a six-piece whose members often reconfigure into different ensembles, with brothers Zelizwe and Siyabonga Mthembu – guitar and vocals respectively – having a presence in live poetry and gallery scenes.
This recombinatory process is mirrored in the band’s take on music, which is firmly in dialogue with what has gone before. Just as the previous album, Tolika Mtolik (2021) reappropriated old material to express the discontent of post-apartheid South Africa, so too does this one. The title is a slight adaption of a famous quote from pan-Africanist politician Thomas Sankara: here, the message is clearly about food poverty, sovereignty, the dilemmas that freedom brings. ‘We are suffering, rainbow child,’ chants Siyabonga on ‘Mazel’, ‘Freedom is daunting…’.
Siyabonga is himself part of a web of visionary jazz, to some extent through his association with Shabaka Hutchings, the British composer and reeds player who is blazing a trail through a range of contemporary musical genres. (Siyabonga is lead singer of Shabaka & The Ancestors; Hutchings has produced this album for his imprint, Native Rebel Recordings.)
$/He Who Feeds You bristles with a revolutionary energy with its brass section providing a vibrant tonal palette for the moods that the Mthembu brothers lay on it. Recorded in three days flat there is a speed and emotion to the album that makes it irresistible.
