Kate Westbrook: Granite

Rating: ★★★★

Record and Artist Details

Musicians:

Billie Bottle (b)
Coach York (d)
Matthew North (g)
Kate Westbrook (v)
Mike Westbrook (elec p, cond)
Roz Harding (s)
Jesse Molins (g)

Label:

Westbrook Records

April/2019

Media Format:

CD

Catalogue Number:

WR003

RecordDate:

March/April 2018

Granite is an evocation of all things granitic as found amid the unforgiving Dartmoor landscape. Granite could be seen as a counterpoint to Alice Oswald’s Dart poems: Westbrook’s songs of obduracy, immovability and timelessness contrasting with Oswald’s poems of fluidity and flux. The passage of time may bring constraints to performance – “I am restrained”, Westbrook sigh-sings on ‘Winter’ – but it also brings affordances: she can rock out (all pun’s intended) on the opening energies of ‘Tracks of Desire’, but be yearning personified on ‘Curlew Cry’. Her sung-spoken, cabaret style cracks through ‘Spread-Eagled’, with Harding’s keening tone superb, as it is throughout. This is a voice for winter, exile, anger: but also for love and prophecy. Mike Westbrook’s settings leave that voice unrelentingly in our presence, while the addition of found sounds reflecting from granite surfaces further propels the ritualistic patterns of these songs into mythic proportions. Like A Lark Ascending, Granite etherialises into an aery nothingness, as the Westbrooks dissolve into nature itself. On the climactic ‘Yearning Bird’, Mike Westbrook’s chords decay beneath Kate’s voicings as her whistled fragment of ‘Let’s Face the Music’ fades into wind sigh and bird song. Magic.

Follow us

Jazzwise Print

  • Latest print issues

From £5.83 / month

Subscribe

Jazzwise Digital Club

  • Latest digital issues
  • Digital archive since 1997
  • Download tracks from bonus compilation albums during the year
  • Reviews Database access

From £7.42 / month

Subscribe

Subscribe from only £5.83

Never miss an issue of the UK's biggest selling jazz magazine.

Subscribe

View the Current
Issue

Take a peek inside the latest issue of Jazzwise magazine.

Find out more