Quercus, Arena Theatre, Wolverhampton, 25/042014.

First impressions of the trio that is Quercus are of an unlikely alliance as the celebrated folk diva June Tabor enters into a collaboration with the jazz musicians Huw Warren (piano) and Iain Ballamy (saxophones). Then one remembers that Warren, in addition to his many years as Tabor’s musical director, was also a key member of the jazz/folk quartet Perfect Houseplants and that Ballamy has been part of a successful duo with the Norwegian accordionist Stian Carstensen, a free spirited partnership that embraced folk among many other musical forms.

However rather than concentrating on what divides the three musicians of Quercus it is perhaps best to look at what unites them, a sense of beauty, a sense of musical exploration that knows no boundaries, a love of words and literature and an underlying political conviction that leans inexorably towards the left, the natural inclination for all purveyors of minority music. All these unifying factors became apparent in this absorbing performance at a sold out Arena Theatre in Wolverhampton.

This was a gig that had been particularly keenly anticipated following the postponement of the original concert scheduled for the autumn of 2014 due to the illness of June Tabor. With the singer restored to health Quercus enthralled their audience with a performance filled with beauty and a quiet intensity.

The trio initially came about when Warren invited Ballamy to appear on Tabor’s 2005 album “At The Wood’s Heart”. The three musicians quickly established a rapport and subsequently toured together as Quercus, the collective band name coming from the Latin for “oak” and acting as an oblique acknowledgement to the album that first brought them together. Tabor spoke of their music reflecting their collective moniker thanks to its blend of “deep roots and new shoots” and surely nobody who witnessed this compelling performance would feel inclined to disagree. 

The busy musical lives of the three individual musicians conspired against Quercus ever recording a studio album together. However in 2013 the group released its long awaited début album on the prestigious Munich based ECM record label, a live recording of a concert from 2006 captured at The Anvil in Basingstoke by Paul Sparrow, the sound engineer who still handles the trio’s live sound and who was behind the mixing desk at Wolverhampton tonight.

I’m assuming that the live tapes were taken to ECM’s Manfred Eicher by Ballamy, who already records for the label with Food, his electro-improvising duo with Norwegian drummer Thomas Stronen. In any event Eicher seemed to like what he heard and helped to mix the album at Oslo’s famous Rainbow Studio with engineer Jan Erik Kongshaug before acting as co-producer alongside Ballamy and Warren. The recording benefits from ECM’s typically fastidious production values and is a thing of beauty that has received considerable critical and popular acclaim and given the group a new lease of life. With the applause from the concert at which it was recorded duly edited out the album actually sounds like a studio recording, such is the pristine clarity and quality of the sound.

The material from the ECM album formed the core of tonight’s programme but there were also one or two other quite delightful surprises of which more later. Although tonight’s concert was presented under the Jazz at Wolverhampton banner I’d surmise that many members of the audience were folk devotees,  but in any event all of those present seemed to delight in what they heard. Helped in no small part by the intimacy and superb acoustics of the venue plus the work of Sparrow on the mixing desk the sound was superb throughout and this allied to the performances of the musicians ensured that this was a very special event. 

With the stage sparsely lit and with the trio members all clad in black the focus was very much on the music. The performance began with the sound of Tabor’s unaccompanied voice singing the traditional English folk song “Brigg Fair”, a folk club staple that has long been part of Tabor’s repertoire. Tabor has said “as I get older I understand more the depth of sorrow and joy that make a song” and this was borne out by her performance. The singer is a superb interpreter of a song and although her choice of material invariably veers towards the melancholic her love of the music and of the tradition behind it shines through. However Tabor is not exclusively a folk purist and her numerous recordings have embraced other genres from jazz to pop and rock. As Warren and Ballamy joined her on the bare stage the music segued into “Rufford Park Poachers”, a traditional East Anglian folk song collected by Joseph Taylor. The song tells the tale of a pitched battle between poachers and gamekeepers on the Rufford Park estate in 1851 resulting in the death of the head keeper and the transportation to Australia of four poachers found guilty of his manslaughter. The song is sung from the viewpoint of the poachers, oppressed members of the rural working poor of the nineteenth century. Tabor’s surprisingly rousing vocal was mirrored by Ballamy’s equally rousing tenor sax on a song that established the trio’s left wing sympathies from the start.

Tabor left the stage to allow the instrumental duo to fully introduce themselves by playing Warren’s composition “Old Song, New Song”. The pair have worked together for years in other, jazzier, contexts and have established an instinctive and intimate rapport as they demonstrated here. Ballamy remained on tenor sax, specialising on the instrument throughout the evening.

Tabor returned to the stage and the trio performed a remarkable version of the Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Jobim’s song “How Insensitive”. The song is usually performed as a breezy bossa nova but this slowed down version was much more substantial with Tabor’s deep contralto bringing out the darkness and pathos in Norman Gimbel’s English lyrics. Ballamy’s tenor solo matched the mood while subtly alluding to the song’s jazzier tendencies.

A second instrumental interlude featured Ballamy’s “Strawberries”, a composition written back in 1985 that appeared on his debut solo album “Balloon Man”. The composer’s evocative solo tenor sax intro was followed by a virtuoso passage of unaccompanied piano from Warren that drew a round of spontaneous audience applause. Ballamy’s closing solo sax cadenza then introduced an element of the very British humour and whimsy that has been part of his music making since his initial Loose Tubes days.

The tune to the song “Near But Far Away” was written by Ballamy for the quartet edition of the Food group and it appeared on that band’s album “Organic and GM” under the unappealing title of “Floater”. Still taken with the melody Ballamy asked Tabor to write some lyrics but Tabor is not a songwriter, she is instead a superb interpreter of other people’s songs. However feeling obliged to make some sort of an effort she seized upon Ballamy’s original title and the folk idea of “floating verses”, lyrical quatrains that occur in multiple songs as the words go through the “folk oral transmission process”. Tabor sourced her words from Carolyne Hughes (1902-71), a gypsy folk singer from Dorset known as “the Queen of the Romany Gypsies”. Tabor’s emotive singing belied the “found” nature of the lyrics and her vocals were interspersed by luminous instrumental passages from Ballamy and Warren.

The trio’s superb interpretation of Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright” was an undoubted set highlight with Tabor’s semi spoken vocals adding a layer of regret to Dylan’s caustic lyrics. Ballamy’s saxophone solo at the end of the song seemed almost valedictory.

A spellbinding first half concluded with Mack Gordon’s “This Is Always”, one of the few “affirmative” love songs in the Tabor canon. More obviously “jazz” than many of the other items in this first set the piece concluded with a sparkling tenor sax solo from Ballamy.

The second set was to prove as emotionally demanding but ultimately satisfying as the first.  The first piece was a setting of A.E. Housman’s “The Lads In Their Hundreds” with music by George Butterworth. Housman’s poem was written in 1896 with Butterworth’s contribution coming in 1912 but the whole piece was strangely prescient of the First World War which was to claim the life of Butterworth, killed on the Somme in 1916, and the lives of so many more “lads that will never be old”. More than a a century on it seems even more poignant and Tabor and her cohorts treated this simple but beautiful piece with appropriate sympathy and gravitas. As on the album the song was followed by “Teares”, a solo piano piece written and played by Warren that drew its inspiration from the music of the lutenist and composer John Dowland. Teamed with the Housman setting this classically influenced piece constituted a kind of requiem.

Equally moving was the song “Who Wants The Evening Rose” , originally written as a collaboration between an Israeli composer and a Palestinian lyricist in the 1970s. The beautiful tune has since been given English lyrics translated by Les Barker, a folk performer more usually associated with the comic Mrs Ackroyd Band. But there’s a serious side to Barker’s work and his poetic words are a good match for the direct beauty of Yosef Hadar’s tune. The current situation in the Middle East added extra poignancy to yet another exquisite trio performance.

Politics of a sort even imbued the traditional English folk tune “The Shepherd And His Dog”, a song full of evocative bucolic imagery and a paean to the dignity of the working man collected in rural Somerset. Tabor couldn’t let the moment pass without commenting on the Foot & Mouth epidemic of 2001 and the very different sights to be seen in the countryside at that time.

Perhaps it was fate that the original Quercus show had to be cancelled and that the rescheduled performance was scheduled for Anzac Day. Eric Bogle’s brilliant song “The Band Played Waltzing Matilda” was written in the 1970s after he witnessed an Anzac veterans parade. This haunting description of the ill fated Gallipoli campaign and its aftermath is sung from the point of view of an Australian soldier who loses both his legs at Suvla Bay but survives the war a broken man. It’s a piece that’s been in Tabor’s repertoire for some time and her stunning solo vocal performance on Anzac Day itself was a tour de force. After the tumultuous applause had died away Tabor thanked us for our attention, the rapt silence had been remarkable, not a single shuffle, not a single cough. Tabor avoided the “pin drop” cliché, instead offering the rather more earthy “thank you, that was mouse fart territory!”. Despite her somewhat austere image Tabor proved to be a drily amusing between tune interlocutor, mixing humour with political comment and a scholarly knowledge of the origin of the trio’s material. Despite the quiet intensity of the performances I was pleasantly surprised by just how funny she sometimes was.

Tabor took a well earned break as Warren introduced his own “Fernhill”, a piece from his Dylan Thomas inspired suite “Do Not Go Gentle” that was premi?red in 2014 in Brecon Cathedral by a quartet featuring Ballamy - part of that year’s Brecon Jazz Festival. Tonight’s duo version was equally effective with both musicians acquitting themselves well.

Quercus chose to end their performance with the tune that actually begins their album, a setting of Robert Burns’ poem “Lassie Lie Near Me” by John Playford that has been subtly re-arranged by the trio. Slightly lugubrious but undeniably beautiful this was a fitting end to a memorable concert.

The inevitable encore was “All I Ask Of You” , a stunningly direct and beautiful melody written by the Benedictine monk Gregory Norbet that was recorded as an instrumental by Ballamy on his début solo album “Balloon Man” back in 1989. Even then the piece had words and was a dedication to Ballamy’s late wife, Jess. The lyrics have since been adapted by Les Barker and now express a message of “love triumphant”, sentiments perfectly expressed by Tabor’s rich vocal and the empathic, understated accompaniment of the musicians.         

Tonight was arguably the highlight of an exceptional concert season presented by Jazz at Wolverhampton. A full house and a spellbinding performance were a winning combination with Tabor’s solo performance of “The Band Played Waltzing Matilda” on ANZAC day a truly unique musical experience. I’m more used to the more shambolic version by the Pogues but this was, if anything, even better.

I was surprised by just how much I enjoyed this performance and then re-visiting the Quercus album again subsequently. With my jazz hat on I’ve been a fan of Ballamy since the early Loose Tubes and of Warren for nearly as long. I’ve always felt a degree of antipathy towards Tabor due to her collaborations with my folk rock favourites Oysterband. I’ve always preferred the Oysters on their own, raw and undiluted, and their albums with JT, “Freedom And Rain” and the award winning “Ragged Kingdom” have never been my favourites in the Oyster canon. Tonight June Tabor went a long way to winning me over, the event was a triumph in its own right and may cause me to re-assess and re-evaluate both her recordings with the Oysters and her own solo back catalogue.