Zoé Basha: Gamble review | Jude Rogers’s folk album of the month
Bookended with canonical traditional songs and sung in eerily bright a cappellas, Gamble is a confident, self-produced debut by an exciting new voice. This is Zoé Basha, a Dublin-based French-American singer and guitarist whose folk music swims deftly around country, jazz, French chanson and the blues.
This is a nourishing, impressive 11-song set, with Basha’s voice swooping high and low like the Appalachian mountain music she loves. It begins boldly with Love Is Teasin’, first recorded by Appalachian singer Jean Ritchie and covered by Shirley Collins on her 1954 debut. Basha’s precise enunciation nails her protagonist’s wearisome experience of love, but a friskiness also lurks at the ends of her phrases, her highest notes tremulous with heat. She also masters playfulness on Sweet Papa Hurry Home (a cover of Jack Neville and Jimmie Rodgers’s 1932 country song, Sweet Mama Hurry Home, which shows how naturally the genre’s roots mixed with jazz), sweet suggestiveness on Come Find Me Lonesome, an original tailor-made for a blues club: “Cold is creeping up my spine in the night-time.”
She’s also a nifty collaborator. In her version of the ballad Three Little Babes (with nyckelharpa player Aina Tulier and singer Anna Mieke, with whom she sings in three-part-harmony group Rufous Nightjar), the tale of death and dreams bristles with hunger of horror. But she also writes great originals full of texture and feeling. The best are Dublin Street Corners, a great patchwork of failed dreams in a booze-soaked city (“I’m the one you lie next to in bed / When you’re too tired to try, or so’s you said”) and the chanson-flavoured Traveling Shoes, full of the nonchalant ruminating of a fly-by-night lover. “I can’t leave my heart trailing behind just to greet you in the morning,” Basha sings, as you try to hold tight to these fabulous songs
Also out this month
Nordic duo Maija Kauhanen and Johannes Geworkian Hellman bring together the hurdy-gurdy, kantele (a plucked Baltic psaltery) and sympathetic synthesisers on Migrating (Gammalthea), an album mirroring the passages of birds through the seasons. The spike and shimmer of their strings whip and whirl gorgeously, plus their voices create lovely murmurations on tracks such as Mother’s Song. The Andrews Massey Duo’s From the Roots … Come New Branches (self-released) is another blissful listen, bringing together flautist Emily Andrews’ pastoral, breathy playing with guitarist David Massey’s tender arpeggios. On Caller Herrin’, the mood becomes positively Balearic, channelling the KPM library music of the 1960s and 1970s. And the endlessly curious Alasdair Roberts crosses the Atlantic with Scottish Gaelic singer Màiri Morrison and double bassist Pete Johnston on Remembered in Exile: Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia (Drag City), full of spirited, briny songs that journeyed west between the 17th to 19th centuries.
