Glasgow Jazz Festival

Sarah Jane Morris sings John Martyn

City Halls, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

****

A STALWART of political song still in full voice in an era when some have wondered at its silence, Sarah Jane Morris turned 60 this year, the same age at which Glasgow-raised singer-singwriter John Martyn died a decade ago. With a new album of her versions of his songs, Sweet Little Mystery, poised for release, and an upcoming Edinburgh Fringe run of a fuller show that includes documentary film shot by her brother, this was a taster of her tribute to him, accompanied by guitarists Tim Cansfield and long-time collaborator Tony Remy.

She prefaced the personal politics of Martyn’s songs with some addressing her wider concerns. There are indeed regrettably few contemporary songsmiths who would sing in the voice of the Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram, or amend John Lennon’s fairly vacuous Imagine to address the plight of refugees and migrants, but Morris is your woman for that.

She describes her voice, with only slight exaggeration, as “baritone” and it is still a delight to watch the faces of novice listeners when she first opens her mouth and that rich, deep sound emerges, perhaps a little gravellier than in her younger days, but no less expressive for that. As well as the title track of the new album, Remy’s arrangements of the Martyn back catalogue include many of the best known of them, with the first selection, Couldn’t Love You More, sounding an octave lower than Martyn himself recorded it, and Solid Air perhaps the most effective showcase for Morris’s voice at full power.

The riff Remy adds to that song is a very near relative to the one John Cale applied to Heartbreak Hotel in 1974, a year after its first release, while May You Never was furnished with a lick that Rickie Lee Jones would surely have recognised. A bouncy One World allowed Morris to demonstrate her own improvising, a vocal skill at which Martyn himself excelled, while the least familiar of the set was the revealingly misogynistic Call Me, from the Glasgow-recorded Cooltide album of 1991.