Oj Borom, Borom

This beautifully produced set comes with a fascinating essay from singer Maniucha Bikont about the source of these songs, and the story behind her recordings with double bassist Ksawery Wojcinski, made for Polish Radio in the autumn of 2016.

The principal source of the album is the village of Kurchytsya and specifically three elderly female citizens, Hanna, Halina and Lonia, who would allow Bikont to have a song once they agreed she had mastered it. She then took the songs to Wojcinski, who developed the vocal motifs by way of improvisation. The running order illuminates the shared folk mythology between the songs: she begins with the title-track, a spring courting song, which is followed by the twisted blues motifs of ‘Oj Hore, Hore’, an orphan's lament, through to a wedding song potent with mythic imagery (‘Mother gave birth to a son, coiled the moon around him girdled with a star and sent him off to the world’) before breaking up into tributaries of age, death, and bitter experience. The sensitivity and power of Wojcinski's playing and Bikont's voice is of the highest order. This is a superb set of deeply mythic songs from Poland's living tradition.