Music
Cahalen Morrison & Eli West
Pleasance Theatre, Edinburgh
Rob Adams
FOUR STARS
Edinburgh's Tradfest celebration of the traditional arts from many cultures opened with a duo whose music drinks deeply from the wellspring of American folklore. Although they write most of the songs they sing and the guitar they offered for sale in an extension of the typical concert merchandise stall only dates back to 1961, listening to Cahalen Morrison and Eli West is probably as close as we can get today to turning on the radio in the 1930s when the Carter Family were broadcasting.
They're not siblings - Morrison would be the Danny Devito to West's Arnold Schwarzenegger were they to star in a remake of Twins - but the way their voices blend and closely harmonise, with West's lighter sound a perfect complement to Morrison's deep, rich tone, has a very familial quality. Accompanying themselves skilfully on mandolin, banjo and guitar and occasionally swapping instruments to play one of their deftly turned, tumbleweed-strewn instrumentals, they evoke an age of god-fearing, rural living that's largely consigned to sepia prints now and yet their own songs, and their well-chosen covers of Townes Van Zandt and Alice Gerrard classics, live strongly in contemporary times.
Indeed, the a cappella When a Man Has Lost His Will to Live sounds as if it'll still be relevant and just as affecting hundreds of years from now and a new song about Noah and the Flood takes a subject already much addressed in Americana, finds a fresh way of bringing the story to life and tells it with the stoic warmth, human touch and sense of realism that Morrison and West bring to everything they perform.
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