FolkWales Online Magazine

Welsh, English and US musicians line up for Roots Unearthed

Dave Haslam’s Roots Unearthed series continues on Tuesday October 13 at Lefel 3 in St David’s Hall, Cardiff with outstanding guitarist Martin Simpson and Don Flemons, banjo player with the award-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops. The concert starts at 8pm. The Roots Unearthed programme promises a mouth-watering winter list, with Cylchcanu2/ Songchain2 bringing together Kate RonconiBeth Williams Jones, Stacey Blythe, Christine Cooper, Ceri Jones, Gareth Bonello, Jamie Smith and Patrick Rimes for an exciting evening of new collaborations and unique arrangements of both traditional and contemporary Welsh tunes and songs (Wednesday, October 14); Faustus, with Jamie Kirkpatrick, Paul Sartin and Saul Rose (October 27); Jamie Smith’s Mabon parading their new album, The Space Between  (November 17); and Sweet Liberties, with Martyn Joseph, Nancy Kerr, Maz O’Connor, Sam Carter, Patsy Reid and Nick Cooke marking the 800 years since the sealing of Magna Carta (November 27).

The roots celebration continues in 2016 with Oysters 3 (Tuesday, January 26), with John Jones, Alan Prosser and Ian Telfer, the three founder members and creative heart of Oysterband, play an evening of fresh acoustic performance and not-entirely-discreet stories – an insight into their history, sometimes turbulent, often funny, with great songs from every era of a unique career: “The idea arose from Sidmouth and Shrewsbury Festivals recently asking us to do ‘something different’ as well as the regular Oysterband style of concert. We more or less improvised the show and it went down a storm – and we wondered how on earth we’d never thought of doing this before”. And folk-rock originators Fairport Convention play in St David’s Hall, with leader Simon Nicol, mandolinist and fiddler Chris Leslie, bassist Dave Pegg, fiddler Ric Sanders and drummer Gerry Conway (Sunday January 31).

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