Tom Bancroft’s In Common: Love & Stillness

Interrupto Music

This fusion of jazz, Indian and occasional Scots traditional music follows through a collaboration between two well-known Scots jazz figures – drummer Tom Bancroft and guitarist Graeme Stephen – and Delhi violinist Sharat Chandra Srivastava and tabla player Gyan Singh, with vocals from Sophie Bancroft, Gina Rae and Inge Thomson. At times reminiscent of Sixties Indo-rock fusioneers Quintessence or the later Indian Ocean, this is vividly colourful music, the opening Somehow

Something somewhere between Indian chant and nursery rhyme, while the 9/8 pipe tune Donald Willie

and His Dog is scarcely recognisable, subsumed into rich, Shakti-like guitar and violin deliberations over bodhran flurries. Monotone chanting does nothing for Burnin o Auchindoon ,but a highlight is Flower Child ,withits guitar and violin prelude shifting into Bancroft-beaty mode and powerful guitar work from Stephen.