Jim Moray
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Of course this was just what the folk scene needed, he pricked the balloon of worthy self importance that had grown up around the scene and opened the doors to a whole wave of experimentation. And the thing is, what he was doing was as true to the spirit of folk music as any one of the archetypal characrters that Cecil Sharpe or Vaughan Williams collected. He was making relevant contemporary music with the instruments and tools that came to hand, just so happened that one of them was an Apple Mac, he also paid for it with his student grant and submitted the album as part of his degree.
Since then Jim has gone from performing in local folk clubs to playing the main stage at Cambridge Folk Festival, Sidmouth Folk Festival, WOMAD and beyond. He has been featured in The Independent, Guardian, Mojo, The Telegraph, Uncut and The Times and reviewed in countless other publications here and abroad. He has performed radio sessions and been interviewed on BBC Radio 2, 3. 4 and 6Music and been featured on TV several times including on the landmark BBC4 Folk Britannia series. He has also had his music featured on the trailer for ITV’s drama Murder City. He has toured in the UK, Benelux, Australia and Canada.
In February 2004 Jim received both the Horizon Award as best newcomer and the prestigious Album Of The Year Award for Sweet England at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. He has followed Sweet England with two further album Jim Moray (2006) and Low Culture (2008) which went on to win the fRoots Critics’ Poll Album of the Year Award, Mojo’s Folk Album of the Year and gain him three nominations in the BBC Folk Awards 2009.
Pictures from Cambridge Folk Festival 2009. Click to launch gallery...
Low Culture marked the re-emergence of Jim on the critical landscape. The critics who had deserted him or just not got 2004's Jim Moray album flocked back to him.Whether this was down to Jim doing anything fundamentally different, or the folk scene catching up with him with the emergence of acts such as the Imagined Village and the Demon Barbers, who laid down elements of drum and bass into their more contemporary folk sounds, is an interesting point to ponder.
Low Culture does get it exactly right however and was rightly praised with awards and the critics loving it. The significant element of this album is it seamlessness, none of the disparate elements jar, Moray has delivered on the promise of Sweet England and re-defined what folk music can mean in the 21st century.
With his second eponymously titled album Jim leant more on his classical and rock influences than folk. The resulting feel of the album was of a departure, rather than a development, from Sweet England.Looking back on it now it's more its reliance on the studio environment rather than a 'live' sound that sets it apart. Moray admits that he happier working in the studio than performing live, something that has changed since the release of Low Culture.
"A thrilling classic. Boldly discordant and unnerving Lord Willoughby wields the knife savagely and the arrangements of old warhorses Barbara Allen and Who's The Fool? are startlingly fresh...It ain't always lovable but it's impressively fearless. Flawed brilliance.'"
Colin Irwin, Mojo
Released whilst still a student, Sweet England caused a huge stir on the music scene. Original and daring in it's interpretation of traditional song it won both the Horizon Award as best newcomer and the prestigious Album Of The Year Award at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards.Moray had simply hanessed the technology within his reach and fused the new with the old.
'Moray's inventive rearrangement of such familiar ballads as Early One Morning and Raggle Taggle Gypsies may just be the most significant new development in English folk music since Fairport Convention's Liege and Leif.'
Nigel Williamson, Uncut
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