Review: Laura Cortese and Friends, The Folk House – ‘Cortese injects pure sunshine’

“This is a lovely idea”, says Nick Hart, about three songs into Laura Cortese & Friends at the Folk House. The idea, as all the best ones are, is a simple one – choose a musician from the town in which you’re touring and collaborate with them throughout the evening.

Laura Cortese is a fiddle player, singer and songwriter from California (although currently living in Ghent, Belgium) and Hart is her “friend” tonight.

Last seen at the Bristol Folk Festival he is a brilliant interpreter of the English Folk canon and the perfect host of this informal, rolling, magical evening.

Hart performs the first three songs of the night solo. Just him and his guitar. His voice is redolent of heavy bumble bees, buzzing sleepily through ancient English wildflower meadows.

May Song is, appropriately, a carol for May (they’re not just for Christmas). It is earthy and honest; if God is in here, it’s not some golden one, it’s one made of greenery and mud.

Jack Hall, too, is very definitely “real”. For a start, this story of a chimney sweep turned highwayman, is about a real bloke and was written as a Broadside as Hall mounted the gallows somewhere in the eighteenth century.

Some versions of this song sound defiant and cocksure, Hart’s is defeated and annoyed. It also features Cortese providing harmonies from the bar.

And then she’s on stage, fiddle in hand, joined by Valerie Thompson on brilliant Cello, accompanying Hart on The Rakish Young Fellow and then Yellow Handkerchief.

Their singing is a little tentative but the instruments beautifully complement the warm buzz of Hart’s voice.

As Hart exits stage left, Cortese launches into From the Ashes, taken from her latest album Bitter Better, and the mood immediately changes.

No longer a sleepy English heaviness, Cortese injects pure sunshine into the evening. Beginning with her strummed violin the song really catches fire when she takes out her bow and plays the fiddle.

There is a mesmeric swing and sway, a lightness that heralds a lovely slice of Americana.

Often Cortese is described as having a voice that is “smokey” but that conjures images of dark rooms and late-night blues. It’s not really like that at all.

She makes you think, much more, of wide-open spaces, of sweet, sun-drenched prairies, of dust rising after a long, hot day. It’s high and lovely with a rough edge.

On Treat You Better she is an alt-pop Taylor Swift, on Where the Fox Hides it’s magical and lush. There are times when she displays a very big voice for a pretty small room and on California Calling the chorus is almost a joyful shout.

As the evening progresses, Cortese is sometimes alone on the stage – Hush Now Child is wonderfully gentle and comforting – sometimes just joined by Thompson, sometimes by Hart too.

It is a free-wheeling celebration of song and collaboration. When all three play on Jean Ritchie’s Swing and Turn, Jubilee Appalachian fiddle meets intricate English finger picking, America and English voices join to make something simply glorious.

The evening ended with the Shaker hymn Lay Me Low, all of the lights off, Cortese and Thompson standing in the audience, entirely unamplified. Nick Hart looked around, grinned, took a sip from his beer and muttered “delightful”.

Main photo: Charlotte @ The Folk House

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• Review: Boiler Room, Propyard – ‘Bassy synths and groovy beats’

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