Karine Polwart and Dave Milligan: Still As Your Sleeping — a sense of community

The Scottish singer Karine Polwart has been beating the bounds of the tight parish of folk music: her recent albums include A Pocket of Wind Resistance, the score for an immersive theatre piece that meditated on grief, migration and the inheritances of generations; her Scottish Songbook summoned together a disparate range of Scottish popular music under one banner and made a case for its kinship. Still As Your Sleeping is another departure, an entire album on which her voice is accompanied by the jazz pianist Dave Milligan. Voice-and-piano duets are not unknown in folk music — June Tabor has worked in this territory, and indeed Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears played English folk songs in precisely this formation. But the piano remains a relative rarity in the genre.

Polwart and Milligan both live in the Midlothian village of Pathhead (the album’s artwork was created by a third neighbour, Jenni Douglas) and the album was recorded in nearby Pencaitland. The lockdowns of the last two years are a constant theme, contrasted with the rhythms of geological deep time. In the notes, Polwart looks back on “a year of flux and standing still in equal measure.”

The village clearly offered community rather than claustrophobia. On “The Path That Winds Before Us”, she sings “don’t worry, don’t hurry/sit here and rest your mind,” to piano that tolls like a slow bell as she remembers the neighbours who organised vegetable deliveries and made new park benches. There is more community building on “Travel These Ways”, written for a songbook for people with dementia to sing at home. “When the storm has blown away,” Polwart sings as the music quietens, “and the night is as still as your sleeping/I’ll pluck out the skelf [splinter] of the moon from the sky/and I’ll give it to you for safekeeping.”

The bulk of the songs are covers, including the McGarrigles’ “Talk to Me of Mendocino”, a musical map of the geology of the US, the music cresting as it crosses the Rocky Mountains. Milligan plucks away at the innards of his piano on “The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood”, Polwart’s voice rolling and swooping like Sandy Denny. Perhaps most potent is the traditional farewell “The Parting Glass”. Polwart performed it on Radio 4 to memorialise Margaret Atwood’s husband, and even amid the album’s run of songs that pay tribute to the dead, the performance here stands out, hushed, delicate and immense.

★★★★☆

‘Still As Your Sleeping’ is released by Hudson Records