Carwyn Ellis: The Open Fund for Music Creators
Go west and you’ll find a land of melodious joy. The music there is bold and beautiful, the language round and ripe. But Wales is not as sunny as Brazil, despite its odd bouts of tywydd hufen iâ – that’s “ice cream weather” to you and to Carwyn Ellis. The man behind Colorama, and more recently collaborations with Saint Etienne, Edwyn Collins and keyboardist with The Pretenders (whose Chrissie Hynde first planted the seed and made the introduction to Alexandre Kassin which led to this collaboration), has gone off-piste with his new album, the glorious Joia! It takes his Welsh language to Rio, where it found a happy home with a Brazilian band, who we now call Rio 18.
“I’ve never made a record being so unprepared before,” Carwyn boggles. “I didn’t have any songs so I had to write them there and then.” It’s a record about identity in some ways, he says – he’s someone whose Welsh language but upbringing on the English borders has always made him feel he slips and slides between places. It’s also about how people from very different places achieve an easy musical communion. “When I went over, I gave the musicians only rough shapes, and we played – and somehow it worked.” And work gorgeously it does, on a record full of life, spontaneity and the spirit of its title writ large.