Not Leaving Quietly

A track on a folk album led by a bassoon! That’s a rare pleasure. In ‘Hole in the Wall/Nabo’, the penultimate track of Not Leaving Quietly, the bassoon dances around a pizzicato cello like one of those overweight elderly gents who turns out to be light on his feet, a sprightly mover. Joe Broughton has the joy of arranging for bassoon and band because his ensemble is made up of students and graduates of the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. There are 50 of them, offering an array of instruments. ‘Hole in the Wall/Nabo’ is a pleasure too because it doesn’t involve most of the ensemble all playing simultaneously and is comparatively spare.

The album opens with ‘Kitchen Girl’, which sounds like a traditional Irish tune played by a wayward salsa school. There is a stately orchestral beginning to ‘Rise’ before the onset of brass, rising indeed to a tasty trumpet solo at the end. But, really, few traditional tunes can stand the (very) big band treatment. A solo flute played fast is exhilarating, half a dozen is frantic. These are classy, accurate players; even so the clarity of line is lost, smudged like an overworked sketch. However, ‘Murder in Medina’ is a witty narrative piece, the victim followed, attacked and dispatched in a jazz sax garotting. I imagine Joe Broughton’s Conservatoire Folk Ensemble live is something to see and hear. But all that energy, all that noise, makes for a relentless record.