For forty years June Tabor has had no equal in turning narrative songs into emotional and spiritual experience. As a school girl singing Festés "Come Away Death" in Twelfth Night, as a teenage folk performer duetting with her friend Polly Bolton at the Heart of England Folk Club, with the Oysterband singing a definitive version of "All Tomorrow's Parties", or singing with Huw Warren on a jazz festival stage in Berlin, she can stop time and draw tears from the stoniest heart. She sings with compassion, honesty, stoicism and a painfully acute sense of life's transitory hold.
Tonight, as befits real art, we don't know what to expect. The tickets promise "June Tabor Trio". The announcer asks us to welcome "Quercus". The first song starts without introduction.
For most of us it needs none. Tabor has started us where we feel comfortable - with Joseph Taylor's song "Brigg Fair", made as new and alive as the day that Grainger collected it. The glorious rolling melody passes on from June's rich and resonant voice to Iain Ballamy's masterful saxophone. Huw Warren spans the generations between the two idioms with delicate linking piano. As Ballamy's solo subsides, the tone shifts to the poaching song that Taylor also sang for Percy Grainger: the tragic story of "The Rufford Park Poachers".
Surprises follow. The audience can't sit back and wallow in the marshmallow nostalgia of greatest hits. Here is a new project with new tunes and new ideas. It's a captivating experience. June sings the three sections of Noel Coward's "Mad About The Boy": the society lady, the school girl and the tart (with a heart). The inflections, the eye flickers, the tone of voice - perfection. Being 1932, it's good jazz, too. It's followed by a tune-a-piece from Warren and Ballamy, formidable musician/composers whose CVs in jazz and world music establish their right to be on this bill as equal partners with June. As if their fabulous playing didn't do that anyway.
The first half ends as it started, with a pair of songs: there's a Donegal tale of missed opportunity and wasted love, and a setting of Burns' "Lie Near Me" from October's magnificent Tabor collection "At The Wood's Heart". After the interval we have a finely jazz rendered Dowland piece from Huw Warren. The George Butterworth setting of A.E. Houseman's "The lads in their hundreds" is poignantly delivered, and chillingly framed by June's spoken reminder of Butterworth's own early death among the hundreds of thousands at the Battle of the Somme. The song's final line "The lads that will die in their glory and never be old", first published in 1896, is given no more emphasis than is needed to makes its point.
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Memory lives in stories, and songs are the stuff of memory. Without our songs we remember nothing of our history that is worth remembering. The songs need to be stronger than any of us, and they need to be sung by artists with the integrity of June Tabor.
Iain Ballamy captivates us with his "On the Mend" tune, and we've reached the point where the three talents are at fullest stretch. The idea of putting them together reaches its fullest expression. Les Barker's "Who Wants the Evening Rose" is based on a classical Arabic theme of evening seduction (of a young man by an older woman)in a scented garden. Tabor makes the song human and credible, Warren and Ballamy give it layers of intricacy and mystery that keep it exotic.
An angry song about meaningless violence, a setting of June's girlhood "Come Away Death" and a brilliantly simple love song called something like "All I Want of You" complete a gracefully perfect programme that (let's hope) will make a fine recorded album one day.
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