Traveller'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  Prayerfinds 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