Women in the Sage Gateshead spotlight

By Alan Nichol, Evening Chronicle

ALAN NICHOL has all the latest news from the North East roots music scene.

FOUR women performers capture this week’s spotlight with headline shows at The Sage.

There is, as ever, more besides ... Scottish patented klezmer/Balkan music and a high-calibre electric guitarist with a pretty impressive list of big-name associations.

Starting on Monday, the arrival of Texas gal Nanci Griffith will ensure a busy night in The Sage’s Hall 1.

Griffith has appeal across several genres – she often labels herself as a folkabilly performer – as she draws from country, folk and rock.

Her award-winning album Other Voices/Other Rooms included cracking versions of Dylan’s Boots of Spanish Leather and John Prine’s Speed Of The Sound of Loneliness and also included contributions by Iris DeMent and Judy Collins (more on her later) among others. Nanci’s current album is called The Loving Kind (Rounder Records).

By the time this column appears, she will also be able to boast a Lifetime Achievement award from the 2010 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards.

JUDY Collins, the Seattle-born singer is at The Sage the following night, Wednesday, in Hall 2.

Collins is another performer to have emerged from the 60s Greenwich Village scene although her career path could have been so very different.

She studied classical piano as a child and made her public debut – playing Mozart’s Concerto For Two Pianos – at the age of 13.

Collins, now playing guitar rather than piano, was initially fired by the songs of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger and her arrival in New York allowed her to witness, first-hand, the emergence of Dylan, Paxton and Phil Ochs and she recorded songs by all of them, making an impression on the best-sellers lists with Stephen Sondheim’s Broadway ballad Send in the Clowns.

Over the years she has appeared on The Muppet Show, Sesame Street and played at President Clinton’s inauguration (the Clintons named their daughter after Collins’s cover of Joni Mitchell’s Chelsea Morning).

THE two other women singers, Mariza (Tuesday, in Hall 1) and Yasmin Levy (Thursday in Hall 2) specialise in the traditional fado music of Portugal and the Ladino hybrid of Judeo-Spanish music respectively.

Mariza was born in Mozambique, moved to Lisbon and later her family spent time in Brazil, too.

She has sold over half a million albums and albums like Transparente broke through into the world music scene, winning over many critics with her captivating live shows.

Yasmin Levy, born in Jerusalem, extends the romantic theme by weaving strands of flamenco and Moorish music into the 15th Century Sephardic tradition of Spanish Jews, known as Ladino.

Extending the middle-eastern connection, Moishe’s Bagel use klezmer, jazz and Balkan music as the base ingredients and add their own improvisational skill to the mix.

They may be Scottish based but the quintet includes three Englishmen and a Brazilian. The individual members have seen service with Salsa Celtica, Scottish National Jazz Orchestra and Celtic Feet. You can catch the feverish five piece in Hall 2 this Sunday.

NOW for that electric guitarist mentioned at the top of the page. Appropriately enough, given the recent weather, it is Snowy White. He was born Terence Charles White in Devon but grew up on the Isle of Wight, moving to London in the early 1970s.

White’s reputation next led him to his long-standing connection with Pink Floyd, touring extensively with the band as one of their additional members. Next Thursday’s appearance at the Cluny features Snowy with his Blues Project line-up, a quartet which has Matt Taylor on vocals/guitar, Snowy on lead and a Dutch rhythm section.

ANOTHER act to squeeze in this week are is in Newcastle’s Ouseburn Valley. Francis Dunnery – the former It Bites frontman – is in Cluny 2 and he always draws a devoted following.

The Cumbrian singer/guitarist was once dubbed the most interesting man in rock music, although he has long since left the pop element behind, in favour of a more rootsy approach.

Across the river, back at The Sage, the Northumbrian piper/pianist – and member of Jez Lowe & the Bad Pennies and Baltic Crossing – is the subject of Kathryn Tickell’s Focus.