Celtic Connections
Sarah Jarosz
City Halls, Glasgow
Rob Adams
four stars
SARAH Jarosz probably didn’t have to go to music college to learn about leaving an audience with a song they can sing on the way out. If she did, she learned the lesson well, as her encore, Tom Waits’ Come on Over to the House, could be heard from various sources on the way to the exits.
Jarosz is a graduate from Berklee School of Music and there’s maybe a certain schooled proficiency about her single string guitar playing, yet when she switches to mandolin and banjo for accompaniment she’s clearly a product of the bluegrass picking camps that nourished her from a young age and gave her such strong grounding in the tradition.
Anabelle Lee, her adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe poem that’s fascinated other singers including Joan Baez and Stevie Nicks, underlined her feeling for folk ballads with a simple, genuine delivery that could have come from some backwoods holler.
She keeps good company onstage and off. Her musicians here were top notch, Anthony Da Costa adding energy, nous and fizzing invention on both acoustic and electric guitar and Jeff Picker providing a lovely, warm double bass tone and discreet presence, and some of her best songs were co-written with class acts including Darrell Scott, Parker Millsap, and Aoife O’Donovan, her colleague from the group I’m With Her.
As well as the Tom Waits encore, she chose excellent covers in Bob Dylan’s Ring Them Bells, another particular highlight, and an instrumental medley from bluegrass mentor Tim O’Brien’s copious catalogue that featured Jarosz’s mandolin and Picker’s bass in a duet that was as relaxed and natural as it was seriously accomplished.
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