Upstate Fiddle Finds a Home on Frith Street

Frith Street has a habit of keeping its best music below ground. Ronnie Scott's has been playing to a cellar crowd since the mid-sixties, and on Thursday 29 October another room under the same pavements will fill with the sound of a fiddle from upstate New York, when Soho Folk and Blues welcomes Sara Milonovich and the guitarist Greg Anderson to the basement of Cuts.

The format is deliberately small: an acoustic concert, two players, and an audience seated close enough to watch the bow work the strings. Nights like this have always been the lifeblood of the folk circuit, and they survive in Soho because promoters such as Folkandroots keep finding rooms for them.

A songwriter from the north-east

Milonovich is a singer, songwriter and fiddler whose work sits where alt-country meets the older roots traditions of the American north-east. Her songs are built on storytelling — atmospheric, often personal pieces in which the lyric sketches a scene and the tune stays with you well after the final chorus. Her most recent album, Northeast, takes its title from the region that shaped her, and it supplies much of Thursday's programme. The pair will also give London an early hearing of material from her forthcoming record.

Her reputation at home rests on more than her own catalogue. In 2023 she was named a Bluebird Golden Pick Winner, the songwriting honour run by Nashville's Bluebird Cafe with Taylor Guitars; the year before, the Capital District Thomas Edison Music Awards made her their Americana Artist of the Year.

She is also much in demand behind other artists, having played for Richard Shindell and Jim Gaudet, and she was a featured musician in Come From Away, the Broadway hit about the planes diverted to Gander, Newfoundland, in the days after 11 September 2001. Anyone who caught the production's long London run at the Phoenix will remember how much of its lift came from the band.

A guitarist who has played with everyone

Anderson arrives with a CV that reads like an index to the folk and world-music scenes of the past few decades. A multi-instrumentalist and producer from New York City's musical melting pot, he was for many years guitarist with Eileen Ivers & Immigrant Soul, the group led by the Bronx-born virtuoso, and spent nine years touring with the celebrated Irish vocalist Cathie Ryan. His roll of collaborators also takes in Dar Williams, Tommy Sands, Susan McKeown, Jeff Wilkinson and Dave Moore — and Shindell, a connection he shares with Milonovich.

British audiences may be most intrigued by the instrumentalists he has accompanied: Peter Knight, fiddler with Steeleye Span; the Irish accordion great James Keane; and L. Shankar, the violinist from Shakti. That range - English folk-rock, Irish traditional, Indian fusion — says something about the kind of guitarist he is: one who hears first and plays second, and who knows how to frame a lead voice without crowding it.

Two players, one sound

Together they make a compact and complete unit. Milonovich's fiddle carries both the melodies and the emotional weight of the songs; Anderson's guitar supplies the ground beneath them, rhythmic and harmonic at once. It is a format as old as the music itself, and one that suits a subterranean room far better than a festival field, where so much of the detail — a slide into a note, a half-spoken line — would simply blow away.

That is the real argument for Thursday. Americana is a genre that travels well on record, but its finest moments are small ones, and small moments need a small room. Soho has a good many of those, though fewer than it once did, and fewer still where a visiting songwriter can be heard without competition from a bar till or a sound system next door.

The clocks went back at the weekend and the evenings are drawing in. For the last Thursday of October, it is hard to think of a more warming prospect than a good song, well told, a few feet away.

Sara Milonovich & Greg Anderson — Soho Folk and Blues 

When: Thursday 29 October

Where: The basement of Cuts, Frith Street, Soho

Tickets: £15 in advance via folkandroots.co.uk