Pianist Huw Warren, long one of the most versatile players to grace these isles, is a brilliant composer, improviser and leader, but also an outstanding accompanist. And, as decades of work with the peerless June Tabor, or his equally vital partnership with Italian vocalist Maria Pia da Vito indicate, he only works with the very best.

So there’s a definite sense of anticipation on learning he has found a new singer worthy of his company. I caught a low key set from Warren and Irish singer Sue Rynhart one Pizza Express lunchtime at the London Jazz festival in 2019, and it did not disappoint. Neither, after the usual pandemic hiatus, does this first fully realised recording.

The two resolved to work together after meeting at the Galway Jazz Festival. Rynhart has voice of unusual purity, and has worked in early music, classical and folk as well as improvisation. In the lead up to this session the pair worked up material that locates it mainly in the folkish territory where songs concern love and death, but more often the latter – death witnessed, already done with, or perhaps just dreamt of, as in the duo opener Lowlands.

Elm, a meditation on a tree and a river, is a new Rynhart song, the addition of Dan Bodwell’s bass bringing a flavour of the great Pentangle to the intro. Other new songs draw on literary sources including Dickens, Sheridan le Fanu, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Edgar Allen Poe, and Rynhart crafts elegant lyrics. Educate’s words are recited against solo guitar their first time round and survive that treatment, a feat few contemporary songwriters could bring off.

The remaining songs are of similar quality, from Catacombs’ rumination on time and loss to the enigmatic assertions of River – which prompt a fine solo from Warren – the disconcertingly minatory Cat and the spooky tale of The Signalman.

The closer, Long Years Ago seals the elegiac mood with another folk ballad of drowning and lost love. Yes, it’s a resolutely downbeat offering, but for all that a most uplifting one, the vocal consistently clear and compelling, the accompaniment a perfect complement to each song. This is a brilliant collaboration whose slightly delayed fruition is a real pleasure to hear.

from https://ukjazznews.com