The Horse’s Ha was formed in 2002, when British ex-patriot James Elkington and just South of the Mason Dixon ex-patriot, Janet Beveridge Bean met at a Chicago concert and started discussing the concept of playing other people’s songs in expensive wine bars for money. A set-list of roughly 20 standards was drawn up and then gradually abandoned over the course of a year as James started to write original songs for Janet to sing. They soon joined forces with stellar Chicago musicians Fred Lonberg-Holm, Nick Macri and Charles Rumback to create a sophisticated and compelling musical hybrid between jazz and folk. Their sound is infused with echoes of the English folk revival, that morph into lulling Bossa Nova rhythms and find their way right back to pure pop, giving the Horse’s Ha a uniquely enduring edge. The band’s lineage has deep Chicago roots. Janet Bean is a member Chicago’s Eleventh Dream Day in addition to her continuing country music partnership with Catherine Irwin, forming the duo, Freakwater. James Elkington was leader of The Zincs and performs solo. Fred Lonberg-Holm, Chicago’s premier improvisational cello player, has richly contributed to forging the vibrant improvisational jazz scene in Chicago as well as working on recordings by Wilco, Jim O’Rourke and countless others. His masterful playing is underpinned by the rhythm section of bass player Nick Macri, an ex-Zincs member whose wide-ranging history has seen him go from his own band, Euphone, to playing with Mark Eitzel and Jeremy Enigk, and Charles Rumback, a jazz drummer relocated from Kansas who performs with his own band Leaves as well as Chicago groups L’Altra and Via Tania. These three set the stage for James and Janet’s voices, that harmonize throughout, to bring you the first album by the Horse’s Ha: ‘Of the Cathmawr Yards’. Work began on ‘Of the Cathmawr Yards’ in January of 2008 and was recorded and mixed by Griffin Rodriguez (who has recorded albums by Beirut and Akron/Family under the name Blue Hawaii) at his south-side Chicago studio, Shape Shoppe. The band recorded in bits and pieces over the next few weeks, surviving parking tickets and foul weather, with additional recording and common sense provided by Mark Greenberg (from the Coctails and 100 varied Chicago bands) at his studio, Mayfair. ‘Of the Cathmawr Yards’ captures The Horse’s Ha in an almost live setting, with all the intimacy and invention of their shows still intact: In ‘Liberation’, Fred Lonberg-Holm plays a two-minute solo that arcs from plaintive single notes to a fiery frenzy and recalls John Cale’s viola-playing at its most possessed. Macri and Rumback remain fluid and responsive throughout, and manage to keep the beat steady while taking the group into uncharted territory in “Asleep In A Waterfall’ and the album’s closer, ‘Map Of Stars’. Elkington’s deft guitar playing shows a strong English folk influence, but steps out to take a ringing solo worthy of Johnny Marr in ‘The Piss Choir’, while the massed voices of Janet Bean stop the show in ‘Heiress’. Martin Wenk, Janet’s friend from Calexico, generously recorded some trumpet parts from his home in Germany for the song ‘Left Hand’, and the album was finished. ‘The Cathmawr Yards’ is the name of a fictitious graveyard in Wales and is the setting for the Dylan Thomas short story about zombies, entitled ‘The Horse’s Ha’. Although no reference to Thomas or the story are made in the songs, the lyrics themselves resonate with similarly dark and fantastical themes: Talking woodcuts, walking skeletons, and at least 11 references to the moon, merge together to form an unsettling yet familiar feeling that forces other than our own are at work in the physical world. A diva digs her own grave in ‘Asleep In A Waterfall’ and modern-day witches are offered a friendly warning in the album’s opening lullaby, ‘Plumb’: “So hold on to old hands, starting with yours / They’re softer than leather and harder than oars / And row your rivers of temperance and toil / If you won’t float in water, you’re bound for the soil”. Elsewhere, mankind is under attack from nature in ‘The Piss Choir’, and ‘Map Of Stars’ celebrates being lost in the wilderness as being set free from all timely constraints, both real and imagined: “Make kindling from clocks and cinders you watch / You have you no place to be / You’re ripped at the roots and willed by the winds / A cloud with four limbs of fire”. These songs, driven by Bean’s swooning voice, Elkington’s finger-picked acoustic guitar, Lonberg-Holm’s inspired cello playing and the artful rhythm section of Macri and Rumback, reconcile the new and old to form a unified debut that is ‘Of the Cathmawr Yards’.
