" data-original-title="" title="">J.J. Cale. The show ends up as a rolling and rambling odyssey, the closely gathered audience able to bask in Chapman's narrative glow, as he negotiates songs that are made up with parts of folk, blues, country and purely individualist singer-songwriter craft.

Mike Heron & Trembling Bells/Ed Askew
The Hare & Hounds
August 9, 2017

Two nights later, just across the street in this larger multi-room pub, another folk master came to town. The Edinburgh singer and multi-instrumentalist Mike Heron was a key founder member of The Incredible String Band, one of the most creative folk-bending crew in the entire globe. While Fairport Convention were rocking up the tradition, in 1966 and '67, the Incredibles were floating around the misty boles of twisted faerie-filled trees, looking Eastward, as well as inwards. For this show, Heron renewed an ongoing teaming (active during the last four years) with Trembling Bells, a younger folk-prog combo who also ferret around in free jazz and psychedelic realms. Opening the evening was veteran New York outsider-folk troubadour Ed Askew, who is also familiar with some of these other zones. Leafing through his notes, he played in an apologetically abstract fashion, but actually kept hold of a focused delivery, spreading a sense of an intimate living room performance around the venue, his voice gently floating, naturally relaxed.

The night's dynamic was quite odd, as the Bells next delivered an edited set, emphasising their most powerful songs, and therefore picking out the dramatic high points of their usually longer performance. Loaded with jagged theme- changes and duelling guitar freak-outs, they had to calm down later, when Heron joined them for a more mystically thoughtful, entrancing journey back to some of his classic late '60s and early '70s material. It wasn't the complete Bells, and the band was augmented by Heron's daughter Georgia Seddon on vocals, keyboard and tambourine, plus fiddler John 'Frog Pocket' Wilson.

Heron has the twinkling visage of a mischievous forest creature, his voice casually forming narrative threads, and lightly skipping through the songs. He emanates a magical charisma, coaxing out a completely different aspect of these now mostly acoustic Bells, not rocking, but rather joyously rambling, making up a folksier, more introverted procession. In the most positive sense, they help recreate the vibration of a hippy happening, of the most fey and fabled kind.

Matt Woosey
The Kitchen Garden Caf��
August 14, 2017

Back across the street again, a few days later, another solo singer/guitarist was telling tales, this time descended from a bluesy background. Matt Woosey is Cornish, but something of an itinerant touring artist, when he's not at home in Malvern. Woosey fills his set with amusing tales of his travels, possessing a fast line in self-deprecating humour, laced with absurdist observations. "Nowhere Is Home To Me" recollects a period in a van, with his wife and two pooches, steadily strummed into "Same Old Blues," a vigorous number that finds Woosey humming and soloing simultaneously. Notes are bent, quavering, vocals are hoarsely powered, the pauses between lines filled with micro-solo bursts. Another highlight is "When I Was A Cowboy," as sung by