English folk artist June Tabor debuted in 1976 with the album Airs & Graces [Shanachie]. Since then, there have been few folk performers who have garnered more critical praise, or engendered such loyal fan followings.

Tabor has enjoyed this level of success for a quarter-century, not only because she is a vastly gifted vocalist, but also because she has never ceased pushing herself. Her artistic growth has been a continual process. She has moved from traditional folk to modern folk to covering pop standards, always expanding her range and building a repertoire that reflects her depth and breadth as an interpreter of songs.

Every style Tabor has mastered, she has retained. Her most recent album, A Quiet Eye [Green Linnet], is thoroughly indicative of Tabor's virtuosity and the scope of her ability as a stylist. She can still embrace a traditional ballad with an uncanny knack for finding the soul of this timeless material. She is just as capable of putting her unique spin on pop standards like "I'll Be Seeing You," or endowing topical songs like Bill Caddick's "The Writing of Tipperary/It's a Long Way to Tipperary" with an incredible emotional weight. Throughout her career, come what may, Tabor's ear for a great song and her illustrative gift have never failed her.

One of the most appealing things about A Quiet Eye is Tabor's collaboration with the Creative Jazz Orchestra. "In this particular case, the proposal was to team the Creative Jazz Orchestra with me – they don't often work with a singer," she noted. "It was Nick Purnell's idea; Nick's the creative genius behind this orchestra. He'd worked on another project with me and Huw [pianist Huw Warren] some years ago, and he'd always wanted to do something else with us.

"It was initially his thought that we should merely rearrange existing material from my repertoire for this particular configuration of musicians, which was distinctly weighted toward brass and reeds," she explained. "But I thought, well, if we're going to put so much effort into doing the work for this, then it should be new material, or unrecorded material. That way, if this permutation of voice, musicians and instruments did work, we'd have the basis for my next album. And that's exactly what happened."

Tabor and the Creative Jazz Orchestra performed a series of four concerts in the fall of 1998 as a sort of run-up to the studio sessions, which took place in a church in April of '99. Their effort paid off with a marvelously performed album. "So much of it is a result of Huw's wonderful arrangements and the way in which the individual musicians really put their hearts into what they were playing," Tabor said.

This is an excerpt. Read the full article in Dirty Linen #89 (Aug/Sept '00).