We went last night to hear Mike and Ali Vass play at the Colchester Arts Centre. They are twins, young folk musicians from Nairn in north east Scotland. We heard them before in 2008, and liked them enough that as soon as I got the Arts Centre programme for this spring and saw they were coming round again I ringed the date on the calender. Sadly not a great number of others did likewise, and it was a salutory reminder how sharply the audience for folk falls off below the top-level established acts, like Cara Dillon and Sam Lakeman or Spiers and Boden, both recent sell-outs at Colchester. It was a great waste, as the Vass twins are good and it would be nice if lots more people heard them. Still, everyone has to start somewhere. We once heard Kate Rusby playing in the upstairs room of the Red Lion in Manningtree, and I don't suppose she'd do that nowadays. The Arts Centre manages to make the smaller audience look as though it is more or less filling the space by setting out tables and chairs, cafe style, and just having a couple of rows of seats at the back, which is where we were, having aimed to miss the support act. My dad, who has sung at the Arts Centre on one of their occassional singers nights, said that due to the lights he couldn't see the audience from the stage anyway, so the arrangement of the furniture must be to reassure the listeners that they are not too few, rather than the performers.
Mike and Ali Vass are both excellent musicians. Mike Vass plays the fiddle, very well, and the guitar, not at the level of Martin Simpson or Richard Thompson, but bread-and-butter guitar is fine when underpinned by enormous musicality and feel for the material, which he has in spades. He writes his own tunes, as well as playing trad ones, and I liked them enough to buy his new CD, freshly released this month. I don't often buy any CDs on the night, as my Amazon wishlist always stretches to at least ten pages, and I'd rather think about what I'm going to get and ponder track listings at leisure, but apart from the fact that I like the Vass twins I was pleased they'd come to Colchester and wanted to support them.
Ali Vass plays the piano with energy and verve. You get a few piano players in folk, but it's not common nowadays, and carries slightly scary connotations to my generation of country dancing at school on days when it was too wet for sport. In my dad's compendious vinyl collection there are recordings of first and second generation American Irish fiddlers in New York who are almost always accompanied by a piano, but the pianos of the 1950s and 60s went boom-chick boom-chick using about three chords all the way through. That was swept away in the 70s as groups like Planxty showed what could be achieved with a bouzouki, and guitar accompanists like Paul Brady soared beyond boom-chick. Ali Vass is following in their footsteps, but on a piano. In fact, usually keyboards, which is what she used the first time we saw them, but last night there was an actual grand piano, large and rather battered. I didn't know the Arts Centre possessed a grand piano. Have they had it for years lurking behind the curtains, but last time she didn't ask to use it, or have they recently bought it or been given it? Anyway, Ali Vass seemed thrilled with it. I would love to know how she arrived at her style, whether she has done her grade 8 but went down the folk route, and what role jazz has played in her musical education. In the Vass treatment the piano is not confined to accompaniment, but at times takes the tune from the fiddle, which with a fast reel is quite something.
They do some traditional Scottish songs as well. I was pondering today what defines a folk song, and of course there is no definition, but traditional songs almost always tell a story. Lovers depart and come back, their fortunes made or not, and are joyously reunited with their sweethearts or murdered by cruel parents. There is a narrative in which things happen, generally reaching a conclusion. The same song-writing model, in fact, that was used most of the time by The Jam, Elvis Costello and other favourite non-folk bands of my youth. Ali Vass has a good voice for folk, deep, strong, melodic and truthful. She was breaking up a bit on the high notes last night, and I said then that she was struggling. Looking for their website just now I saw that their gig tomorrow at Loughborough has been cancelled, so we were very lucky to see them yesterday. Lucky also in that she got married earlier this year, and will be making her home in the States, so touring the UK with her brother seems likely to be curtailed.
As a duo the nearest they seem to having a website is a page on their agent's website. They are sharing an agent with some very famous and seriously good names in the world of Scottish and Irish music, which is encouraging. Mike Vass has his own site, and works with other partners as well as his sister, and teaches tradditional fiddle. If you get the chance to hear either or both I'd grab it. Assuming you like traditional Scottish music, that is.
(I should like to make a small modification to Bill Gates' domestic arrangements. When he is in the middle of cooking, or telling a really good story to friends, or shaving, or showering, I should like his cooker, or his dinner party, or his razor, or water supply, to arbitrarily shut down for ten minutes while it instals updates. In that ten minutes he can watch his souffle collapse, his friends lose interest in the punchline, and feel his face congeal and his skin chill. Then he will know how it feels to be a person of modest technical abilities trying to communicate using Windows 7. I must speak to the Systems Administrator about this and see if the blasted thing can't be programmed to at least ask me first if this is a convenient moment. But I would still like Bill Gates to suffer the unscheduled shutdowns, in defence of all those people who don't have a Systems Administrator).
My other gripe is still about the folk club's awful timing. The Vass twins came on at 8.45pm, and there was a half hour interval, which the people sitting next to us grumbled was too long. Even though I loved the music, by the last couple of sets I could feel my eyeballs prickling under my eyelids with tiredness. We got home at 11.30pm, I'd done a ten hour working day before I went out for the evening, and it was only Monday. That's not good.
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