Often admired outside the world of folk music for her darkly penetrating, hypnotic vocal, June Tabor is also a gripping interpreter and storyteller whose tastes can broaden to anything from jazz standards to contemporary rock songs. Tabor is in fact genre-blind; it's always, and only, the words that count. The pianist Huw Warren takes care of the music having been her pianist and artistic director for the past 25 years. But for Quercus, a live recording at the Anvil in Basingstoke in 2006, she is also joined by Iain Ballamy, one of the most admired saxophonists of his generation and another open-minded musician-composer. The selection of songs here has Tabor's signature range. From Warren/Gordon's standard ‘This is Always’, a love song written by a Benedictine Monk through to Ballamy's resetting of Shakespeare's ‘Come Away Death’. Both Tabor and Warren are unaccompanied; the pianist on a soothing take on John Dowland's ‘Tears’ and Tabor is breathtaking on her arrangement of the folk traditional ‘Brigg Fair’. For Ballamy, less is more, as his tenderly warm, breathy sax goes directly to the essence of the songs as opposed to an interpretation that deviates from the theme, more typical of a jazz musician. He goes syllable-to-syllable with Tabor with high impact on Irish singer songwriter David Ballantine's ‘A Tale from History (The Shooting)’ and it climaxes with Warren and Ballamy's rousing piano-sax jazz dialogue. ECM boss and producer Manfred Eicher was so impressed with the quality of this ‘live’ set, a studio date to re-record the album was subsequently cancelled. That's a high accolade coming from him of all people. Just listen and be mesmerised.