Jackie Oates & John Spiers - A Midwinter’s Night

With instrumentation that variously includes melodeon, Anglo concertina, viola, recorder, claviola, stomp box, cajon and, naturally, bells, this, as you’ll gather, is a seasonal celebration featuring a mix of carols and traditional tunes, both songs and instrumentals, that sound so festive you wouldn’t know they were recorded in June.

It opens, sung by Jackie, with the wheezing Lo! He Comes With Clouds Descending, a John Wesley advent hymn sung to the tune Helmsley, associated with Welsh hymnist Thomas Oliver and here closing out with Las Moutique as used as a Morris Off by Oxford’s Headington Quarry Morris Dancers.

Things pick up a lilting sway and go waltzing with The Gloucestershire Wassail that shades into Julivisa från Älvdalen, a traditional Swedish Christmas hymn. It’s one of two wassails, the other coming with John’s six-minute arrangement of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen / The Somerset Wassail, his vocals and her harmonies not arriving until the second half, the two tunes sharing melodic commonality.

Moving back up the running order, Jackie provides a lullaby resetting of the 14th century hymn As I Lay On Yoolis Night, the tune, featuring treble and bass recorders and cajon, derived from D’ après Enfant, a Breton carol from 1688, with the mazurka Boules Et Guirlandes from Brittany. Mummers and Morris dancers are also the fountainhead of the gently lolloping instrumental Twelve Joys Of Mary, performed again by the Headington Quarry Morris Dancers, and segueing into The Sussex Carol, rolled out every Cotswolds Boxing Day by the Ditchling Morris.

Another familiar carol, the musically sparse, late advent O Come, O Come, Emmanuel has a suitably winter’s night feel, giving way to a brace of nursery rhymes, the jaunty Welcome Noble Winter, which welcomes the coming of Yule and is set to the children’s Welsh tune Deryn y Bwn o’r Banna, twinned with Harvey Darvey, an old Cornish playground game learnt from the singing of Cyril Tawney. A somewhat less well-known carol is The Halsway Carol, where Iain Frisk provides the words to fellow hurdy gurdy player Nigel Eaton’s Halsway Schottishe. Sadly, no hurdy gurdy here, but John’s melodeon ably compensates.

Arranged by the duo, the swayalong The Broomsquire’s Bird Song comes from Ruth Tongue’s The Chime Child, a broomsquire being a besom broom maker from the Quantock
Hills. Things take a geographical shift for the melodeon wheezing sway of Bergers, Écoutez La Musique, a Breton carol, twinned with Chagford-based accordionist Steve Turner’s 3/8 Bouree No. 1. Then, John on claviola, it’s off to Iceland for Sofðu Unga Ástin Mín / Sjóferðabæn, the first by 19th century playwright Jóhann Sigurjónsson as part of The Outlaw And His Wife and the second a traditional Icelandic tune that serves as a prayer for fishermen.

They then head home to Wales for the instrumental Y Ceiliog Llwyd, a simple frostily atmospheric lightly fiddle dancing setting of the tune learnt from Anglo-Welsh outfit Saint Rhyfeddod, and paired with To Drive The Cold Winter Away, an Elizabethan carol published as a broadside in 1625.

They end, sung by Jackie, with the melancholic melodeon strains and pulsing melody of The Trees Are All Bare, the tune originating from Sussex and the words from a poem by Thomas Brerewood of Cheshire with previous recordings including The Copper Family, Magpie Lane, Shirley Collins, John Fitzpatrick and Chris Foster (from whence Jackie learnt it) and sometimes known as The Christmas Song.

Definitely an album for those who like their Christmas music to come in traditional wrappings, to be opened next to a crackling fire while chestnuts roast and mulled wine is at hand.