Northern Soul's Modern Monsters

The London Souls album ‘Here Come The Girls’ captures the seismic, raw rock & roll and prowess that’s landed them on stages with The Roots and Trombone Shorty, combined with sophisticated studio flourishes yielding psychedelia-kissed power pop a la ‘Revolver’ and Big Star. Guitarist/singer Tash Neal and drummer/singer Chris St. Hilaire recorded every instrument on the album and it was produced by Eric Krasno of Soulive/Lettuce. This is the debut release on Krasno’s Feel Music label, to be released in conjunction with its partner label Round Hill.

Spring 2020: Corona embarks on its world tour of destruction. Musicians may be grounded, but dreams live on, and suddenly there’s time to finally realise one of them: record some of Boccherini’s music with my friends from The Northern Consort.

The four works on this album, all composed in the 1940s, embrace the lingering end of one musical tradition and the vigorous upsurge of another. Mellifluous, retrospective and playful, the Duet Concertino and Prelude to Capriccio were works of Richard Strauss’s Indian Summer – an old man’s refuge from the barbarism of war and its aftermath. What the public thought of them was incidental, even irrelevant. In the same decade, Aaron Copland and other younger American composers were reaching out, via radio, recordings and film, to a new mass audience. The European influence of Appalachian Spring and the Clarinet Concerto, though inescapable, was minimised in a populist, vernacular idiom that absorbed native folk music and jazz.

Irish by birth, John Field gained an international reputation as one of the finest pianists of his time, with an influential delicacy and nuance in his playing that is expressed in his innovative and poetically lyrical Nocturnes. Field’s earlier Sonatas are more classical in feel, but their sense of flow and dramatic narrative exhibit qualities that are developed and given added virtuoso panache in his fine Piano Concertos, works admired by Liszt, Chopin and Schumann. ‘Benjamin Frith has done a stellar job in bringing these concertos into the sunlight, brilliantly supported by the Northern Sinfonia under David Haslam’ (Pianist magazine).