PROVENANCE
(ABC)
8/10
Paul Grabowsky was Vince Jones’s musical director way back in the 1980s, and this sumptuously recorded reunion shows the rapport never went away. A joint willingness to take risks hovers in the air, disguised by a concentration on gentle songs. Jones’s voice has an inbuilt vulnerability in two senses. Partly you fear for the security of his pitch, despite the fact that even in the face of some of his daring re-harmonisations of a melody line it is a misplaced fear, and partly it is that the fragility of some notes load a line with a particular poignancy.
Grabowsky instinctively compounds this edgy beauty, so the listener is drawn into a world in which the improbable may unfold at any moment, and this somehow increases the weight of the words. Among the highlights they revisit the delightful Rainbow Cake they jointly penned in the ’80s (with attractive trumpet from Jones) and unlock the brittle loveliness of John Lennon’s Oh My Love, although We’ve Only Just Begun was a more questionable choice, and doesn’t quite work.