Live Music

There's more to folk music than Val Doonican, chunky knitted jumpers and rocking chairs, however cosy that image may be (to some). Tomorrow, the Hong Kong Folk Society presents celebrated British singer-songwriter and guitarist Jez Lowe at the Fringe Club. Big reputation in tow, Lowe is returning to Hong Kong after six years largely spent touring an adoring (folk) world.

Lowe's trademark stagewear is a hooped blue and white shirt rather than a Fair Isle sweater, but apart from his having studied the language with a view to teaching it, there's no French connection: he's from Durham in the 'gritty' northeast of England, as it is often tiresomely described. Durham usually implies an association with coal-mining, and the characters who saw that traditional British industry through boom and bust populate Lowe's songs.

Doing his bit to protest against the widespread closure of British pits by former prime minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, and the unemployment which subsequently hit towns and villages like his, Lowe wrote the siren song These Coal Town Days in 50 minutes flat after answering an emergency call from the BBC, which needed the music for a television special.

As with many other Lowe standards, the song has been so exhaustively covered that its origins have become obscure: in January, one British concert reviewer complained that Lowe had no original material and played only cover versions of folk classics. Many of the songs he had heard that night, of course, turned out to have been Lowe creations.

He's worked with Mark Knopfler and Lindisfarne, among other marquee names, and even has a fan-club outpost in Kentucky . . . where he's never been. Last year, the state's own Celtic band, Galloglas, staged a tribute concert to the man and his music - music which will take him back to Australia and New Zealand after his stopover here.

The week's other big attraction makes for an unfortunate clash with Lowe's one-off show. Tomorrow, the Macau Cultural Centre hosts jazz giant James Moody (above), accompanied by the Jeremy Monteiro Trio. A towering presence in the annals of saxophone playing, Moody featured in Dizzy Gillespie's seminal bepop big band in the 40s, and later worked with all the stellar figures on the burgeoning American and European jazz scenes. Now 75, Moody continues to record and tour with gusto.