Talking Elephant 2024
A potent potion brewed by English sorcerers sourcing their magic from the well of ages.
Live:
A Sonic Tonic
It’s not so surprising that this ensemble have never issued a full-length live recording – for all the earnestness of their art and for all the faithful following they enjoyed back in the ’70s, what the medieval folk-proggers offered during their initial lifespan didn’t seem commercial enough to warrant such a release – so a proper stage album has been an aficionado’s dream for a long while. Yes, a couple of discs with their halcyon-days sessions emerged more than two decades ago, and videos of the veterans’ 1974 concert and a stunning 2016 show appeared on YouTube, but since their performative extravaganza can distract the listener from investigating every aural detail of the troubadours’ instrumental tapestries, stripping their pieces of visuals must be important in terms of pure musical experience. And with the music they play, delivering a live report is never very late: give or take a century, it’s always contemporary.
Still, there’s a significant difference between how the collective operated 50 years ago and how they go about it now: having aged, the Gryphs stopped taking themselves too seriously. Themselves – but not what they do. Preserved for posterity mostly at “The Junction” in Cambridge on November 28th, 2023 and fleshed out with a few numbers from other places to represent the artists’ outing in its entirety, in original running order, the depth of “A Sonic Tonic” is easy to fathom on their profound reading of traditional tunes. As “The Unquiet Grave” gains a new weight when sung by septuagenarians, and “Kemp’s Jig” and “The Astrologer” open this record via shifting the mood from jovial to tragic, a timeless warp and spiritual wrap are revealed to get disrupted once light melodies like “Dumbe Dum Chit” and the vaudevillian “Hospitality At A Price” come to the fore to get higher and higher. The setlist elements perfectly balance fresh renditions of familiar classics and cuts from 2019’s “ReInvention” 2020’s "Get Out Of My Father's Car!" – the band’s latest studio platters – so the well-loved antiques “The Red Queen Muddle” and “Estampie,” which serves up the wondrously unhinged finale here, rub shoulders with smile-inducing musicological essays “The Brief History Of A Bassoon” and “A Bit Of Music By Me” where Brian Gulland and Andy Findon’s flutes follow Dave Oberlé’s gentle groove to share the air with Clare Taylor’s violin.
But if vocal lines get passed around and occasionally tied into tight harmonies in the most elegant manner, Graeme Taylor’s guitar riffs rock “Normal Wisdom From The Swamp” rather hard before turning elegiac, joining piano in a solemn swirl and then surrendering the ground to a reeds-and-cymbals-sculpted soundscape and the Vivaldi-scented coda. And if “Christina’s Song” and “Forth Sahara” provide a pastoral perspective to the ensemble’s otherwise imposing presence, so apparent in the finely electrified ballrooms of “Sailor V” and “Reduced Krum Dancing” which come firmly anchored with Rob Levy’s bass, the histrionic, jazz-tinged epic “Haddocks’ Eyes” marries Carrollian humor to panoramic landscape of orchestral scope. That’s why after “Parting Shot” begins to wind things down with immense warmth, pouring the milk of human kindness into the attentive audience’s psyche, a sense of bliss is formed to stay with all the good folks until – probably in another half-century – the ensemble deliver their next concert album.
*****
