THE Urban Folk Quartet – four musicians who have played with many of the biggest names on the contemporary folk scene – come to Bridport Arts Centre on Saturday 13th April.

Known to their many fans as UFQ, this exciting group has a repertoire which has much less to do with the traditional idea of genre than an open arms attitude to the many musical influences they encounter.

With two outstanding fiddlers in the line-up, their music is fiddle-led and draws heavily on Celtic dance forms and traditional song – but from there on in it is unlike any folk band you have ever heard.

The UFQ’s approach to the folk ethos is to embrace any and every influence that genuinely makes sense of their time and place and makes sense in their music. From funk grooves to middle-eastern melodies, Afrobeat to north Indian rhythms.

The quartet is Galician fiddler Paloma Trigás, who has played with The Chieftains, Sharon Shannon and Altan, fiddler Joe Broughton (Albion Band, Bellowhead), Dan Walsh, one of the country’s finest banjo players and a gifted singer and guitarist, who has played with the Seth Lakeman Band, and The Levellers, percussionist Tom Chapman, (Jacqui McShee’s Circle, While & Matthews, Russell & Algar) who is widely considered to be the most accomplished and innovative player of the South American percussion instrument, the cajon.