Music

Never mind if quiet is the new loud: is folk the new jazz? The hip indie kids who were giving props to Alice Coltrane a few years ago are now namechecking Barry Dransfield; trendy boutique imprints like Honest Jons are making exquisite Soul Jazz-style compilations of rare folk gems; and the last few years has thrown up an abundance of neologisms – acid folk, folktronica, freak-folk, free-folk, scary folk, spooky folk, nu-acoustica, lysergic folk, outsider folk, glitch folk, folk noir, anti-folk, alt.folk… Feature continues

And, to match those funky Blue Note or Verve samplers that once swamped the market, this month sees a deluge of indie-label folk compilations. Just as acid jazz borrowed from specific areas of fusion – early ’60s hard bop, late ’60s boogaloo, early ’70s funk – acid folk cherrypicks the catalogue. Mainly it venerates the late ’60s and early ’70s when a generation of musicians – Drake, Martyn, Thompson, Jansch, Graham, Leitch, Denny – were making indigenous English and Celtic music hip by introducing it to Indian ragas, modal jazz and psychedelic rock.

‘White Bicycles: Making Music In The 1960s’ (Fledgling), which accompanies Joe Boyd’s autobiography of the same name, is a good entry point into this world, featuring as it does Boyd protégés like Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, John Martyn, Martin Carthy, Vashti Bunyan and the Incredible String Band.It is these funkier, more soulful folk fusions that dominate most of the retro compilations. Indeed, one of them is basically an acid jazz album: most of Mark Pritchard’s ‘Feel The Spirit’ (released by Optimum Sounds and subtitled ‘Other Worldly Folk Music Gems And Psychedelics’) share that requisite funky backbeat and could have been spun by Patrick Forge ten years ago – especially tracks like Donovan’s ‘Get Thy Bearings’ and Spleen’s ‘Along Came Sam’.

That nerdy, crate-digging rare groove aesthetic also takes us into wyrder areas. ‘Garden Of Delights’ (Sanctuary), compiled by Pete Lawrence and AJ from The Big Chill, explores spookier trad territory (covered in more detail earlier by Topic’s recent ‘Anthems In Eden’ four-CD box-set) as well as some of the more icky episodes in ’70s ‘folk rock’. Among the joys here are June Tabor’s deadpan take on ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’, the baroque harmonies of Decameron’s ‘Rock And Roll Woman’ and Gryphon’s terrifying ‘Ploughboy’s Dream’ (which shows us that folktronica dates back to at least 1974). If acid folk has its own Gilles Peterson, it is Saint Etienne’s Bob Stanley.