‘Exceptional, highly-entertaining night of superb folk music’

Will Pound and Jenn Butterworth at Ace Space on Saturday, September 16. Review by BRIAN HARRINGTON

When two exceptional, award winning musicians get together one hopes for great things. Will Pound and Jenn Butterworth do not disappoint. Tonight was a wonderful blend of traditional and contemporary folk music.

Will is an incredible harmonica player, he coaxes sounds from his instrument that test it to it's limits, Mark Radcliffe of BBC Radio 2 declared him "a flat out genius", while Uncut magazine called him "a master of the mouth harp". He also plays some virtuoso melodeon.

Jenn meanwhile is a winner of musician of the year in the Scots Traditional Music Awards and has been nominated for a BBC Radio 2 folk award. She is an excellent guitarist with a lovely and powerful voice.

Together Will and Jenn released an album entitled Volume 1 in February of this year. Jenn is also working on a solo album which celebrates women and feminism in folk music.

Tonight's performance featured both traditional music and self-penned tracks and opened with a trio of reels which included The Reckoning and Clinch Mountain Backstep, which is heavily Bluegrass influenced. Two of Will's own tracks, written during the covid lockdowns Circular Reel and Castle Park followed before Jenn took vocals for the traditional Come All Ye Fair And Gentle Ladies, a song celebrating feminine retribution on a faithless lover.

B Flat Bourrée (a French folk dance) was beautiful and Jenn's excellent rendition of the Peggy Seeger track There's Better Things To Do, which celebrates the Aldermaston marches of the 1950s and 60s added local interest.

Jenn's song One In Ten, which discusses the failure of doctors to diagnose endometriosis , starkly showed the power of music to highlight issues.

The enthusiastically demanded encore was Sheba, a brilliant piece based on GF Handel's The Arrival Of The Queen Of Sheba, but with a Quebecois, French-Canadian folk twist.

An exceptional, highly entertaining night of superb folk music.