Wheel and Dive - CD from Cambridge and Walker
Review by Val Haines
How lovely to have a new CD plop onto the doormat during lockdown. Jenna and David recorded this last year but kept it back as their expectations of performing it live in 2020 were thwarted. Now seems the right time for release as the promise of venues reopening is on the cards and organisers become eager to start rebooking. Hopefully soon the duo will be able to show Wheel and Dive off to the world.
David Cambridge is well known in East Anglian acoustic circles as a singer/guitarist/songwriter and teaming up with Jenna Walker has given this sound a new dimension. Her voice is reminiscent of the Unthanks and, whether solo or in harmony with David, it cuts through as an additional instrument. Jenna adds piano, accordion and sansula, Hattie McCall Davies adds cello and there is an assortment of percussion.
There are a couple of new songs: Jenna’s title track Wheel and Dive which uses piano, and the song of a Devon skylark from 1966, is an eco-song for our times, and David’s Sea Change which is a homage to the East Coast fishing industry in decline. The duo have successfully recreated several cotemporary classics: Richard Thompson’s Waltzing for Dreamers, Joni Mitchell’s Case of you and John Martyn’s Hurt in Your Heart, all given the distinct Jenna and David treatment. Tom Waits’ The Briar and the Rose is sung a capella; they are right to call it ‘traditional sounding but non-traditional’. It work
The remaining tracks are well-known reworked traditional songs; Two Magicians, Reynardine (with the spooky sansula – nice), Come All Ye Fair, a version of Let No Man Steal Your Thyme, and the Unfortunate Tailor, for which Jenna has composed a new melody. Also included are smatterings of Walter Scott, Robbie Burns and a children’s rhyme.
There is lots to like here: great musicianship and singing and a variety of material moulded the Cambridge and Walker style.
Wheel & Dive
Sea Change
You can find out more about Cambridge and Walker here: www.cambridgeandwalker.com
“Herding Cats” is the debut album by Berkshire-based quintet Wolfnote. The band comprises four women (Gill McCoy, Bex Rennie, Ceri Rushent and Ann-Marie Thomas) and one man, Mike Tuffery, the elder statesman of the band, so to speak. They are highly versatile, as they all sing, all play a stringed instrument of some sort, they have two recorder players (Bex and Ceri) and two percussionists (Mike and Ann-Marie).
Here is a real cornucopia of catchy cheerful ceilidh band tunes led by the very versatile Val on a variety of different recorders – ranging from the energising fast fingerwork on garklein, sopranino and descant on several tracks, to the mellower tones of treble, tenor and great bass on others.
If you were in the audience at the Canopy Theatre in Beccles on October 31, you will have seen two first-rate performers: Finn Collinson and Zoe Wren. Since that evening Zoe has released her long-awaited 10-track album. I have been l lucky enough to receive an advance copy of this excellent album. Here is my longer-than-usual review. First some information about Zoë herself.
On listening to this 6-track Ep from the Cambridge-based band Red Velvet, I felt with each track that I was being taken back to another time of sepia colours and pork pie hats. The CD begins with the title track If Hawks Were Doves where I could imagine myself sat in an old time, honky-tonk bar drinking in the atmosphere. In some ways this song would fit well as the theme tune to a 70s comedy show, the words paint a story and the blues piano break in the middle fits perfectly. 
The Silburys are a full-band extension of Silbury Hill, the well-known guitar, mandolin, flute duo playing regularly around East Anglia. Here, Scott Dolling and David Stainer are joined by Diz Deacon on bass / 12-string, and Martin Linford on drums. When this live album arrived on my doorstep for review, I was delighted to realise I had been at the event when this was recorded and am one of the lucky listeners who can reminisce from my armchair.
On first listening to this recording made by East Anglian musicians, it took me back to music I’d first heard and been thrilled by in the mid-1970s: The Old Swan Band’s first recording: No Reels. Until that point I’d been a folk rock fan obsessed by the music of the Albion Dance Band, specifically the sophisticated drum and bass dominated The Prospect Before Us. That is still one of my favourite albums, but the appearance of No Reels sent me to music from older Topic label recordings: English Country Music (1965) and Country Music from East Anglia (1973). I felt that this was music that would have been played by the people of my grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ generation and I identified with it.