Jersey Bob seems to have made an album every year since I’ve known him. His new 17-track album Tongue and Groove is being released with a launch party at the Trafalgar pub in St. Aubin, Jersey, on Friday, 4 November 2011. The ticket price includes entrance and a copy of the album. Bob will be performing a solo set and another with his excellent band. The main supporting artist is singer and songwriter Marcus Harley. I’ll be doing something new with video and sound.
While Tongue and Groove is the main attraction, three of Bob’s CDs will be available on the night. As well as the new album will be the Mandolin EP, limited to just one hundred copies, produced by James Underwood of Crowne. A third CD of songs and interludes, Contradictions: Land of Extremes, that I produced in 2007, will also be available in a limited edition. It’s Bob’s story in songs about travelling with his brother Barry in India and Nepal. Barry contributed beautiful photos taken along their journey, and lots of them are reproduced in the twenty-page CD booklet.
Contradictions is a collaboration of us three: Bob, Barry, and me. There’s a tender nostalgia in the music. I coloured it sympathetically by amplifying and treating harmonic resonances of the guitar strings and folding them back into the simple recordings of voice and guitar. The result is delicate and high; an evocation of the sensations of altitude adjustment well suited to the mountainous regions that the dreaming songs inhabit.
Bob was in New Zealand while I worked on it in Jersey. To receive an email from him after he’d heard my mix for the first time was a delight with his praise and enthusiasm for the strangeness of it. I was doubtful of my work, as is often the case, and Bob made me see it was successful. He has never stopped being enthusiastic about this personal, deep, poetic piece of work. I’m proud of it.
Jersey Bob and Chris Almond photo by Niall Mac of Stoked Music
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