My review was originally published by the Hastings Online Times here 

Hastings’ annual Jack In The Green is renowned for its May Day parade and its morris dancing but the programme always throws up a handful of good concerts, too, and that is before you even get to the Hastings folk week events in the week that follows.

One of the highlights this year was Molly Evans & Jack Rutter performing in St. Clement’s Church in the old town. Molly Evans is an upcoming traditional singer from Cheshire who has just released a well-received album. Jack Rutter, meanwhile, is one third of folk trio (and one-time Young Folk Award winners) Moore Moss Rutter. Evans and Rutter have been playing together now some two years and Rutter, along with his colleague Archie Churchill Moss, plays on Evans’ album.

Evans has been immersed in traditional song since being carted around folk festivals as a tiny child, she tells us. That love and passion for traditional song shines through, both in her between-song chat and in her singing itself. However, perhaps even more fascinating this evening is her reworking of material from children’s fantasy author and folklorist, Alan Garner, and it is these songs that form the basis of her new album and much of the set tonight. Folklore tales and poems collected by Garner as well as extracts from some of his own novels have been given a new setting and a new life by Evans. We are soon transported into a world of faery kings, hobgoblins, mysterious woods and running hares.

Evans has a strong and distinctive yet really beautiful voice and one of the things I particularly liked is her lovely flat northern vowel sounds. If you are singing about Cheshire farmers’ daughters or gruesome 18th century northern folklore tales you don’t really want to be doing it in BBC English do you?

Rutter, too, is an extremely talented multi-instrumentalist (playing guitar, bouzouki and concertina this evening) and provides wonderfully atmospheric musical accompaniment to Evans’ vocals. There is also something rather special about performing material of this type in a beautiful cavernous old church. When Rutter puts his guitar down and picks up his accordion the sound from it absolutely fills the building in quite a spectacular way.

For Jack in the Green weekend you could hardly have asked for more suitably evocative material from two really talented performers.

https://www.facebook.com/MollyEvansMusic/

Related review:

Moore Moss Rutter at Cecil Sharp House