About

Described in The Living Tradition as "captivating, bold and striking", Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne is at the forefront of his generation of English folk musicians as both a powerful and commanding singer and a masterful player of the Anglo concertina and melodeon. He burst onto the folk scene in his teens with the energetic and much-loved trio Granny’s Attic, along with schoolmates George Sansome and Lewis Wood, and in recent years has embarked on a solo career alongside this.

Cohen is going to premiere a special show for us on this date.

"The show is focused primarily on English folk songs that entered the African-American and Caribbean musical traditions, exploring a little known offshoot of the English folk tradition.

“The subject is something I’ve been interested in for years. A research project in 2020 and 2021 supported by the EFDSS allowed me to explore this subject in some detail for the first time. The final product of that research was an educational resource aimed at secondary school teachers to incorporate in their curriculum. While the educational resource was well received it has a fairly limited audience, so the idea for this show is to present some of the material I discovered in my research project (much of which didn’t end up in the final resource) along with material that I’ve discovered since.

"Of the songs I’ve discovered, I’ve probably performed half already, and these have been very well received, with many audience members asking more about the subject, which has made me consider the idea of putting them into a full show more seriously.

"In terms of the format, I envisage it taking the form of two sets of around 40-45 minutes. Really it will follow the format of my usual folk club sets, just with quite a different repertoire and possibly slightly more speaking to outline some of the contextual details of the music (although these days I tend to do quite a bit of chat between songs about musical history anyway…)"