Tag: Midnight Followed

You can tell Firelight Trio mean business by the brisk and choppy way they scythe into Midnight Followed, staking their sturdy claim from the start. With a sound solidly on the severe wing of stately, there is a sense of ceremony around the rich swirling textures of accordion, fiddle and nyckelharpa, all tending to the lower register. Pan-European is how they describe their repertoire of traditional folk tunes, klezmer, jazz and classical, imparting the essence of a medieval middle Europe, all smoke and woodcuts.  

A second album for Gavin Marwick, Phil Alexander and Ruth Morris, it consolidates the promise of 2023’s eponymous debut. Three friends, each virtuosi in their own right, as they burst into ‘Dirty Euro’, the first tune in the opening set of four, their tinder is dry and eager to combust. The notes weave and wend the three instruments together, initially mournful, becoming more pastoral as it segues into ‘Viridian Skies’, more urgent into the aptly titled ‘Storm in a Teacup’, ahead closing on the syncopated hornpipe of ‘A Hatful of Euros’. All tunes by fiddle man, Marwick, it’s a cracking start. 

Pizzicato fiddle introduces the unmistakeably Gallic fumes of ‘Left Bank Reels’, gliding in on a sway of accordion. These two tunes, ‘The Dragonfly and the Gauloise’ and ‘The Yellow Jersey’ come from Alexander, whose accordion pumps out low tuba like notes on one hand, the other keeping the steamy coffee coming, especially as the second tune accelerates downhill on squeaky brakes. 

Alexander switches to jazzy and jaunty piano for another set of his tunes, ‘Sunday Jig/Ellen Galford’s’, which marries that ambience with the folkier hues of the two string players, the whole sounding like a relaxed Sunday service at a liberal prayer meeting. Alexander’s ‘other gig’, in Moishe’s Bagel, then comes to the fore in ‘Praying Mantis’, his mastery of the Yiddish idiom all to obvious, with Morris adding a decidedly percussive feel to her nyckelharpa. It is paired with Marwick’s ‘The Plague of Wasps’, which despite a possible play on cultures in the name, offers more of a similar style, his fiddle sweeps becoming all the more frantic.  

‘Tune For Tomorrow’ sees Alexander back at the piano. A delicate air, it has first Marwick adding his textures, before the nyckelharpa provides an almost woodwind-like timbre to the proceedings. A thoughtful and reflective piece, there comes a gradual build, as the three instruments up the tempo, into almost a fugue. The longest track here, it sits proudly in the middle of the album, allowing a wash of sound to wallow in. 

More brisk bowing and bass squeezing introduce ‘The Malmi Polka’, which is what it says, if, with, at first, a quasi-military bearing, with a delightful oompah unwinding, as the three musicians chase about the melody. Dances like this tend to sneak in extra gas, bar by bar, keeping those upright on the hop, and this is no exception. With both these two coming from Alexander once more, the baton is then passed back to Marwick, for the triad of ‘Jericho Bridge/The Darkest Hour/Just Before The Dawn’. The most overtly Caledonian of the selections so far, with his fiddle lilting over the notes, his bandmates adding a solemn scaffold for him to prance from. Each of the tunes occupy a slightly different metre, but the handovers are handled seamlessly. Morris’s nyckelharpa is shown to its best, with all those hurdy gurdy textures this fiddle hybrid can produce on show. 

A pair of waltzes are up next, ‘The Boy And The Bear’ and ‘Midnight Followed’, one each by Alexander and Marwick, the fumes of 18th c. Austrian high society drifting through the first, elements, oddly, of something more Latino filtering into the cha-cha-cha second. Or possibly even a whisper of Brubeck’s Take Five, transposed to Vienna in 1755. Odd, but diverting.  

The final track has, at last, a Morris composition, if preceded by the anticipatory road-trip vibe of Marwick’s ‘Life On he Road’, which makes it all sound very buoyant and joyous. As it breaks into ‘Six Weeks to Náměěť’, this is a complex geometric construction of the duelling instruments, that, if anything, is more joyous still, and is a terrific way to close the album. 

This is just the tonic for these dreich days before spring appears, and, just by listening, suddenly the world seems warmer and more inviting. File under eclectic and enjoy. 

Seuras Og 

Artists’ website: www.firelighttrio.co.uk 

‘Left Bank Reels’: