GEORGE STEVENS – A Toad In The Hand – GPJ Records GBN7M1100001-12

George Stevens is a maker of bespoke musical instruments by profession and a maker of music by instinct and inclination. His debut EP, 3 Tunes, came into my possession last year and I really liked it. It was by way of being a demo and perhaps a testing of the waters and there was talk of a full-length album. This is it.

His principal instruments are bouzouki, percussion and border pipes but he also plays keyboards and hümmelchen, which was a new one on me, but is a small German bagpipe dating from the Renaissance. With influences ranging from the Middle East to the Scottish highlands, George’s style is nigh on unique with an emphasis on rhythm. He can play solo pipes that should call from a castle’s battlements and beat out a bouzouki rhythm as an underpinning to a whirling tune that speaks of the desert. The EP tunes ‘Age Of Empires’, ‘Two Camels’ and ‘Polesworth Abbey’ are reprised here but that’s fine; they were almost certainly his best three pieces at the time.

The new material includes two more solo pipe pieces and one oddity in the shape of ‘The Ryton Ruse’, a rap with bagpipes. Both ‘Grasshopper’s Lament’ and ‘Gallows Birds’ are particularly fine tunes but in truth A Toad In The Hand speeds by and is always entertaining. The old-fashioned CD is available from George’s web-site and the download from the usual suspects.

Dai Jeffries

Artist’s website: www.gstevensluthier.co.uk