Michael Weston King and Michael Cosgrave (Songs of Jackie Leven and Townes Van Zandt) – Kitchen Garden Cafe, Kings Heath, Birmingham. Sunday 12th July 2015

The blog post of 13 July 2015 opens with thoughts on the immortality of song when “the great architects” are taken too soon. Jackie Leven and Townes Van Zandt at least lived in the era of multi-dimensional recording; Van Zandt’s presence has thrived since his death in 1997, and Leven too left “a massive vault of legacy-laden songs” that will keep the spark going for many years. The personal link between them is Michael Weston King, one of the UK’s most sincere and scholarly practitioners of roots music, who has teamed up with the multi-instrumentalist Michael Cosgrave, a long-time associate of Leven.

At the show on Sunday 12 July 2015 at the Kitchen Garden Café in Kings Heath, Birmingham, the first hour was devoted to Leven. Weston King’s vocals worked “in divine cohesion” with Cosgrave’s guitar, piano and accordion, and Cosgrave chipped in with occasional comment. Leven had played the venue many times before his death in 2011, and the well-attended show was clearly frequented by many of his fans. The songs ranged from the popular ‘Main Travelled Roads’ to slightly hidden album tracks such as ‘Ireland for Losers’. In his usual slightly dry delivery Weston King paid many humble personal respects to his late friend, including a stark reference to his style as ‘Celtic soul’. The first half closed with the song Leven wrote for a Townes tribute album, ‘Townes at the Borderline’ – ironically a project in which the invited practice was to cover one of his songs, but the true songwriting maverick had other ideas.

The second hour was Van Zandt, with whom Weston King worked and played in the early 1990s: ‘Tecumseh Valley’, ‘White Freight Liner Blues’, ‘A Song For’ and ‘Lover’s Lullaby’ from No Deeper Blue (1994), King’s own ‘Riding the Range’, covered by Townes, and the morbidly sad ‘Maria’. The writer admits being far more familiar with Van Zandt and therefore felt the shorter liaison with Townes was the evening’s greater legacy; yet two hours after the pair left the stage his awareness of Leven had been “lifted tenfold”. He apologises for the piece being a little Townes-heavy and closes with full respect for Leven’s body of work: with this marker down, you never know where your own musical adventure heads next.