Mother Earth Music 
Saffron Summerfield : Who's Land is it anyway ? (UK,1994)**°'
With the last Breton spoken word song accompanied by pipes, called “Settlers”, Saffron wonders about the reasons for claiming land. Once we were settlers, not inhabitants, it says. I prefer to add that once we were family bound and cared for the land we were living on. In Africa they still are mostly tribe or family minded. We could eventually expand this fundament by trying to gather together likeminded people, even when surrounded by people with other aspects. In real life there are also other, like economic, reasons that make people go to some area, not having respect or bonds with that land and with all that has been fertilized on it. I personally believe there are people who feel this very well and they should be mobilized and able to protect this, while being open for eventual further development when circumstances change, while being able to take care and respect what has been helpful before. All this can lead to many further discussions on how we are able to develop positively. The farmers who fertilized the land have developed different human principles and feelings for what is important or not compared to urban citizens who developed different things (look what happened in Cambodia). You have to participate with all that to understand its evolutions.
Various songs are about human tendencies to grow independently (“my father was a carpenter”), about not feeling enough the importance of caring for the earth (“small song for the world”), about taking care more of certain tradititions than about human circumstances and choices (with the traditional “the cruel mother”), about certain myths (“the man on the clapham omnibus”), and about the importance of friendship beyond borders (“farewell friends”). There’s an attempt of a more English styled rearrangement of an old Hungarian ballad, once adapted by Bartók, pushing the rhythms in 7/4 for bodhran. The songs are arranged nicely with guitar mostly, and cello (Kathryn Locke) besides a few other instruments, like pipes (twice) (Stefan Hannigan) and alto sax (Peter Lockwood). George Norris supplied second guitar on one track. Saffron voice sound attractive, and her songs sound like a logical follow-up to her previous repertoire. Two times she tried a bit more jazzy approach, of which “The man on the clapham omnibus”, because of its unfocused and too soft and loosely played percussion and strange focus on the singing, appealed less to me, but luckily that song isn’t too long.
