Festival Music
Yorkston/Thorne/Khan
The Hub, Edinburgh
Nicola Meighan
four stars
THIS wonderful concert came with a health warning. “It gets a bit erotic,” warned – nay, promised – unplugged punk poet James Yorkston, the Cellardyke bard who's lately joined forces with double bass maestro Jon Thorne of Lamb and sarangi master Suhail Yusuf Khan, to meditative and thrilling effect.
Yorkston's ardent proclamation was followed by the singer-songwriter raising a red-denimed leg onto a chair, the better to wield a Swedish nyckelharpa, which he occasionally bowed amid elemental guitar mantras, improvisations, original laments and gentle but striking reworkings of works by Lal Waterson (Song for Thirza) and Ivor Cutler (Little Black Buzzer), the latter of which was embellished by remarkable support act Lisa O'Neill.
The trio's warm and fascinating Indian-jazz-folk explorations saw each take turns on vocals, with Thorne leading on Everything Sacred – the gorgeous, bruised and undulating title track of their recent album. “We needed something uplifting, so I came up with this little song about infidelity and devastating heartbreak,” he deadpanned.
Khan's effortless, mesmeric command of the short-necked, bowed sarangi was matched by the force of his body language and voice, not least on a song which echoed Piya, thus tracing the trio's roots back to The Dewarists' Experimental Batch #26 LP (wherein Yorkston and Khan teamed up with King Creosote and Raghu Dixit among others), but it also urged them forward: there was welcome talk of new material.
Yorkston continued his droll gig admonishments. “You're at the wrong gig for the hits,” he said. There was nary a miss in sight, either.
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