TRAVELER'S PRAYER

A lion of British folk music, guitarist John Renbourn has journeyed further back into his Renaissance and pre-industrial roots since his late '60s tenure as one of the driving forces behind the adventurously jazz-inflected Pentangle. Traveller's Prayer finds Renbourn on busman's holiday, casting the album reportorial net west toward Ireland. Chamber-folk settings marry his reliably elegant, lyrical guitar with gentle tattoos of hand percussion, lovely skeins of fiddle, and stately yet concise blooms of wind instruments including clarinets, recorder, uilleann pipes, and whistles. By now, Renbourn can make his underlying erudition sound offhand, mingling Irish planxties, folk songs from both edges of the Irish Sea, Scottish airs, and his own chameleon originals into a seamless, timeless fabric by turns earthy, courtly, and always lovely. Two haunting vocal interludes ("Wexford Lullaby" and the title song) arranged for a lovely mixed quartet, yield a gently haunting whole that will appeal as much to new age and Celtic music fans as his own hardy cadre of British folk loyalists. --Sam Sutherland