Julia

Thoroughly trained by his father Johann Sebastian, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach became renowned as a virtuoso harpsichordist and organist. His surviving organ music includes the seven choral preludes and ten fugues on this disc, which range from relatively simple settings to elaborate displays of counterpoint. Born in Rio de Janeiro and based in the USA, Julia Brown, who has made several acclaimed recordings of keyboard music by Buxtehude and Scheidemann for Naxos, has been praised as ‘a first-class artist and superb technician … an exceptionally sensitive stylist’.

Like his legendary father, Ali Farka Touré, Vieux is a guitarist who likes to collaborate. He has worked with the Israeli keyboard player Idan Raichel, and now comes an even more powerful partnership, with American singer Julia Easterlin. The opening Little Things starts with the familiar guitar lines of that Malian favourite Kaira, before Easterlin eases in to nudge the song towards western balladry. Elsewhere, this bravely original fusion switches from an African funk treatment of Fever Ray’s I’m Not Done to slow, thoughtful laments. The traditional In the Pines has been covered by everyone from Lead Belly to Nirvana, but is here reworked with chilling, whispered vocals and desert blues guitar, while the most startling track is a slow, African-edged treatment of Dylan’s Masters of War, which sounds like a pained meditation on the recent chaos in Mali.