Well, that was a cultured 24 hours. I took my dad last night to hear a folk-jazz guitarist and an Irish harper at the Colchester Arts Centre. They are called Chris Newman and Maire ni Chathasaigh, except that there ought to be some accents over the Irish gaelic name that Blogspot's compose a post page won't do. They are very good, and my dad likes them. He had them as visitors to the folk club he used to run in Wales for his seventieth birthday celebration, in lieu of a party. Chris Newman is a great fan of 1930s swing jazz, and Maire is a traditional musician from West Cork, and they play some pure Irish folk, some jazz, and a lot that is somewhere in between. To get the accidentals on the Irish harp you have to flick a lever at the top, and whereas in a traditional folk piece the same settings would probably last you all the way through, to play jazz you have to flick the levers in mid flow. Frequently. As Chris Newman says, it's fun to watch. The harp seems to take a lot of tuning mid-concert, a process that involves various giant allen keys, and leaves Chris with some time to fill in, but he is a genial chap. He comes from Watford, he told us, one of the best towns in England to come from.
Today the Systems Administrator and I went to Cambridge to visit the exhibition Vermeer's Women: Secrets and Silence at the Fitzwilliam Museum. This brings together four pictures by Vermeer of women in a domestic setting with pictures by other Netherlands artists of the same era, and has reviewed very well (Telegraph, Observer, Independent). As I looked at one of the pictures in the first section I heard a woman standing next to me say to her companion 'Oh, I see, they're not all Vermeers'. Well, no, they wouldn't be. Four is pretty good going, and includes one loaned from the Louvre and on display in the UK for the first time ever. They are wonderful paintings. Go and see them. You have until Sunday 15th January. Entrance is free, though you are invited to make a donation, and if only I lived nearer to Cambridge I'd drop in often.
We had lunch first in an excellent side street pub which I'd heard get a plug recently on, of all places, The Today Programme. It is called The Cambridge Blue, and it says something about the organisation of human memory that when I was trying to remember the name of the road I couldn't recall Gwydir Street, but knew that it was something Welsh sounding. It is CAMRA's Cambridgeshire pub of the year for 2011, and why it came to be featured on the Today programme I really can't remember, but the beer was excellent and the food was nice. My carrot and coriander soup had a generous amount of coriander in it, and the SA says the sausage was good. There was no music, and the staff were cheerful. There were two partly used sacks of coal just inside the door, and packs of tonic all over one of the tables in the other front bar, behind which a little old boy was sitting impeturbably reading, but I don't mind an amount of clutter myself (the coal and the mixers. I don't mean the old boy was clutter).
A group of men of mature years were waiting for the last of their party to arrive, then all piled into a large taxi. They were happy and excited, and you could tell they were going somewhere special because they'd put on their tidy trousers (mustard coloured cords etc). The landlord told us they were going to a Michelin two starred restaurant for the £100 a head taster menu. 'They'll be drunk as lords by the time they get back' he proclaimed joyfully. 'A hundred quid a head. They might have put ties on'.
I had made a pencil sketch from Google maps of where the pub was, not having a working printer at the time. It had enough information on it that we would have found it (left hand turning off Mill Road). The SA has a pocket sized Garmin electronic navigator, which I find impossible to use, since by the time you are zoomed in close enough to see the street names, you can't see more than one stretch of about one road at a time, but the SA likes it and seems to understand it. Each to their own.
Showing posts with label folk music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label folk music. Show all posts
Tuesday, 29 November 2011
Thursday, 10 November 2011
bad shepherds
We went to hear Adrian Edmondson and The Bad Shepherds at The Colchester Arts Centre last night. They are a folk-punk band, playing classic punk and new wave songs of the 1970s and early 1980s on folk instruments, intercut with traditional reels. This ticks three of my boxes at once, and sounds like pretty much a dream project. The Jam, The Stranglers, Ian Drury and the Blockheads, The Talking Heads and The Clash provided the soundtrack to my teens and university years. My father got into folk music in the post war revival, and stayed there, so I grew up with traditional Irish music on vinyl (sadly no live gigs to speak of, in 1970s East Devon). And I have had a soft spot for Ade Edmondson since The Young Ones.
It might have proved an odd and unsuccessful mixture. After all, I like olives, fruitcake and baked beans, but that doesn't mean I want them together. The Bad Shepherds, however, have made a triumph out of oddity, and last night's performance was a sell-out, an honour shared with only three other shows between now and Christmas. Their music works because they are good musicians, and because it is actually a good idea. There are three of them in the band, between them covering fiddle, mandolin, vocals, bouzouki, whistles and Uilleann pipes.
The fiddle player won the All-Ireland Fiddle Championship, twice, and has worked with some of the best folk musicians in the business, including American Irish fiddler Martin Hayes. ( Hayes is Irish, lives in the States, and is quite simply a genius. Any other fiddler who dares perform with him is either very good themselves, or so terribly bad they don't realise how bad they are, otherwise they would die of shame.) Adrian Edmondson plays what he calls thrash mandolin, which means strummed rather than fancy tunes picked out with a plectrum, in other words the rhythmn section. He has got a good sense of rhythmn and has discovered where enough chords are, and while no Richard Thompson has learnt to play the mandolin pretty well, given that he bought his first one in a junk shop when he was drunk. He sings lead vocals, and you can hear the words quite a lot of the time, and he is a first-class showman. The third member of the band plays everything else, and sings. His credits on their website include working with Lesley Garrett, Midge Ure, and Status Quo, as well as Maddy Prior and Barbara Dickson, but he plays the Uilleann pipes like a true traditional Irish (which he is) musician. So the three of them are no novelty act, but two highly skilled musicians from the Irish tradition, plus a competent and charismatic front-man.
The fusion of punk and new wave songs with traditional tunes works because they are so similar, under the surface. You could say that punk was a protest movement, folk tunes are the music of the common masses, ergo they go together, but the similarity runs deeper than that. A reel consists of four lines, each with four bars, each with four beats in it, taken fairly fast. Turns out, a lot of new wave songs have the same structure. You can carry on from the song straight into an instrumental break without shifting tempo. New wave and punk didn't have much of a back beat, compared to classic rock, and reels don't have a back beat either, so the rhythmns match up nicely. (I think myself it is a better natural fit than folk-rock, when English dance tunes are put on top of a rock drummer.) Irish reels do have a complicated and beautiful pattern of beats, which I hope one day a friendly musicologist will explain to me. A good piper puts them in using the drone, or a fiddler with the occasional double note, but they sound like low pitched morse code, a complex underpinning. (That is why people who try to clap along to Irish music are a menace.)
If the song and the instrumental don't go at the same speed, you can bridge the gap between them using a drone on pipes or fiddle, to give a break point where noise is still going on (so the audience knows you haven't finished this one yet) but the first tune has stopped. The Bad Shepherds use this, as did Planxty, and everyone from time to time, but a clean shift from one to the other is more exciting. The Uilleann pipes are always exciting anyway, but especially so when they are pumped through a very large speaker.
We even met a couple of friends in the crowd, people I know via beekeeping. They are connected to the world of international music, in that they are the parents of Belle and Sebastian's keyboard player. That's the nearest I get to knowing anybody in rock. Most of the audience were nice and well behaved, and the Arts Centre couldn't have been anticipating trouble in that while pints of beer were served in plastic glasses, they were also selling bottled. My only gripe, and it is a really major gripe, was with the quartet stood near us who talked. Not just the odd comment, but a full running conversation. I thought at first that the band would drown them out, but they responded by talking louder. After the first three and a half songs I worked out that if I stayed where I was I was going to spend the evening thinking about nothing except how annoying they were and how much I hated them, so I went and found myself a corner near the front, where people were taking the music seriously. Why do people do that? I mean, why? Apart from the fact that they have no manners, why shell out seventy quid on tickets if all you are going to do is talk during the act. You might as well just go to the f**cking pub. I managed not to say that to them, but I thought I'd better move before I did.
So that was an evening spent in tribute to the music of my youth. Middle age comes to us all. Adrian Edmondson had to perform most of the gig sitting down, wearing a pair of slippers. He said he had first sprained his ankle, and then broken his toe, and then succumbed to that rock and roll disease, gout. They did all look as though they were enjoying themselves, and I hope they were, as they've got another twelve gigs to get through between tonight and 26th November (Union Chapel, Islington).
It might have proved an odd and unsuccessful mixture. After all, I like olives, fruitcake and baked beans, but that doesn't mean I want them together. The Bad Shepherds, however, have made a triumph out of oddity, and last night's performance was a sell-out, an honour shared with only three other shows between now and Christmas. Their music works because they are good musicians, and because it is actually a good idea. There are three of them in the band, between them covering fiddle, mandolin, vocals, bouzouki, whistles and Uilleann pipes.
The fiddle player won the All-Ireland Fiddle Championship, twice, and has worked with some of the best folk musicians in the business, including American Irish fiddler Martin Hayes. ( Hayes is Irish, lives in the States, and is quite simply a genius. Any other fiddler who dares perform with him is either very good themselves, or so terribly bad they don't realise how bad they are, otherwise they would die of shame.) Adrian Edmondson plays what he calls thrash mandolin, which means strummed rather than fancy tunes picked out with a plectrum, in other words the rhythmn section. He has got a good sense of rhythmn and has discovered where enough chords are, and while no Richard Thompson has learnt to play the mandolin pretty well, given that he bought his first one in a junk shop when he was drunk. He sings lead vocals, and you can hear the words quite a lot of the time, and he is a first-class showman. The third member of the band plays everything else, and sings. His credits on their website include working with Lesley Garrett, Midge Ure, and Status Quo, as well as Maddy Prior and Barbara Dickson, but he plays the Uilleann pipes like a true traditional Irish (which he is) musician. So the three of them are no novelty act, but two highly skilled musicians from the Irish tradition, plus a competent and charismatic front-man.
The fusion of punk and new wave songs with traditional tunes works because they are so similar, under the surface. You could say that punk was a protest movement, folk tunes are the music of the common masses, ergo they go together, but the similarity runs deeper than that. A reel consists of four lines, each with four bars, each with four beats in it, taken fairly fast. Turns out, a lot of new wave songs have the same structure. You can carry on from the song straight into an instrumental break without shifting tempo. New wave and punk didn't have much of a back beat, compared to classic rock, and reels don't have a back beat either, so the rhythmns match up nicely. (I think myself it is a better natural fit than folk-rock, when English dance tunes are put on top of a rock drummer.) Irish reels do have a complicated and beautiful pattern of beats, which I hope one day a friendly musicologist will explain to me. A good piper puts them in using the drone, or a fiddler with the occasional double note, but they sound like low pitched morse code, a complex underpinning. (That is why people who try to clap along to Irish music are a menace.)
If the song and the instrumental don't go at the same speed, you can bridge the gap between them using a drone on pipes or fiddle, to give a break point where noise is still going on (so the audience knows you haven't finished this one yet) but the first tune has stopped. The Bad Shepherds use this, as did Planxty, and everyone from time to time, but a clean shift from one to the other is more exciting. The Uilleann pipes are always exciting anyway, but especially so when they are pumped through a very large speaker.
We even met a couple of friends in the crowd, people I know via beekeeping. They are connected to the world of international music, in that they are the parents of Belle and Sebastian's keyboard player. That's the nearest I get to knowing anybody in rock. Most of the audience were nice and well behaved, and the Arts Centre couldn't have been anticipating trouble in that while pints of beer were served in plastic glasses, they were also selling bottled. My only gripe, and it is a really major gripe, was with the quartet stood near us who talked. Not just the odd comment, but a full running conversation. I thought at first that the band would drown them out, but they responded by talking louder. After the first three and a half songs I worked out that if I stayed where I was I was going to spend the evening thinking about nothing except how annoying they were and how much I hated them, so I went and found myself a corner near the front, where people were taking the music seriously. Why do people do that? I mean, why? Apart from the fact that they have no manners, why shell out seventy quid on tickets if all you are going to do is talk during the act. You might as well just go to the f**cking pub. I managed not to say that to them, but I thought I'd better move before I did.
So that was an evening spent in tribute to the music of my youth. Middle age comes to us all. Adrian Edmondson had to perform most of the gig sitting down, wearing a pair of slippers. He said he had first sprained his ankle, and then broken his toe, and then succumbed to that rock and roll disease, gout. They did all look as though they were enjoying themselves, and I hope they were, as they've got another twelve gigs to get through between tonight and 26th November (Union Chapel, Islington).
Tuesday, 4 October 2011
an evening of Martin Simpson
I went with my dad last night to hear Martin Simpson at the Colchester Arts Centre. I have enthused about Martin Simpson before. He is a sublime guitar player, fair vocalist, and top quality interpreter of songs, British and American, garlanded with folk awards. He is looking a little greyer and grimmer than he used to, and more of his material is overtly political (of the left), but he is still on fine form. The doors opened at 7.45pm, as always, and the tickets said that the concert would start at 8.15pm. There was no support act, just CDs of forthcoming folk guests, and at quarter past eight on the dot Martin Simpson appeared on stage and began to play. It was a generous first set, fully an hour long, and about the same again in the second half, after a slightly longer interval that was strictly necessary, presumably to allow for maximum purchases of CDs and drinks at the bar.
Martin Simpson tuning his guitar contains more rapid flurries of liquid arpeggios than most other people do when they are actually playing it. This has become a jolk among other bands on the folk circuit, and I'm sure that by now there is a self-referential element and he deliberately plays up the tuning. Martin Simpson playing his guitar is a joy.
His new album came out last month. It is called Purpose + Grace, and as he has been getting a lot of media mentions you may have heard of it. It is reviewing brilliantly, but touring presents a logistical difficulty, in that the album features assorted other musicians, all stars of the folk world in their own right, performing on one or two tracks each. A company including June Tabor, Dick Gaughan, Jon Boden, Richard Thompson, Andy Cutting (the Systems Administrator and I have a theory that it is illegal to make a folk album without Andy Cutting on it) and several others would be wonderful, but tickets would not be available for £11 a head (£9 concessions) and the logistics of finding a date when everybody was free would be so complicated it would surely be limited to a one-off performance. I heard Martin Simpson interviewed on the R2 folk programme and he was entirely pragmatic about the current line up, which came about because his producer (the legendary Tony Engles. He must be a hundred and three by now) said that Martin Simpson needed to do something different. You don't maximise album sales by churning out same-old same-old, even if it is good. The answer was to call in the services of friends, and make an ensemble album. I haven't bought it yet, though I will. Demonstrating that the market in folk CDs is anything but perfect, I could get it direct from Martin Simpson's own website for £12, or from Amazon for £8.99 (new) or £12.42 (used). Do I want to support the artist directly enough to pay 30% over the odds, that is the question. We'll leave the used ones out of the equation.
Last night's concert therefore featured some songs from the new album, and revisited several other recent releases. I'm afraid that life is not jolly in the world of Martin Simpson. Sir Patrick Spens was drowned, brave General Wolfe was shot, lovers' minds were altered, returning war veterans were shunned and Lousiana got flooded. He did do a couple of more optimistic songs, with a Mike Waterson number about a young man looking forward to his future working as a north sea fisherman (oh dear) and raising a family, and a fine song from Northumberland by an older man looking fondly back at his life of labouring and playing music. But some of the bleak and murderous ballads had very catchy, up-tempo tunes, so the whole effect was anything but dirge-like.
I was disappointed by the size of the audience. The Arts Centre hadn't bothered to set out seats on the diagonal down the sides of the church, a sign it was not a sell out, and while there were people all the way to the back, the rows weren't full. Instead they were gappy, like badly laid brood frame. Martin Simpson has been a regular visitor to Colchester folk club, so maybe this was a sign that, excellent as he is, people won't necessarily turn out in the same numbers to watch somebody they've alread seen twice in the last couple of years? Or maybe it was a sign of the economy biting. Two tickets at eleven quid, parking, maybe a couple of drinks, versus just buy the album (which has June Tabor et al on it)? Or maybe not everybody is such a massive Martin Simpson fan as I am? It was a wasted opportunity, folks. You missed the chance to see one of the finest guitarists in the world.
Martin Simpson tuning his guitar contains more rapid flurries of liquid arpeggios than most other people do when they are actually playing it. This has become a jolk among other bands on the folk circuit, and I'm sure that by now there is a self-referential element and he deliberately plays up the tuning. Martin Simpson playing his guitar is a joy.
His new album came out last month. It is called Purpose + Grace, and as he has been getting a lot of media mentions you may have heard of it. It is reviewing brilliantly, but touring presents a logistical difficulty, in that the album features assorted other musicians, all stars of the folk world in their own right, performing on one or two tracks each. A company including June Tabor, Dick Gaughan, Jon Boden, Richard Thompson, Andy Cutting (the Systems Administrator and I have a theory that it is illegal to make a folk album without Andy Cutting on it) and several others would be wonderful, but tickets would not be available for £11 a head (£9 concessions) and the logistics of finding a date when everybody was free would be so complicated it would surely be limited to a one-off performance. I heard Martin Simpson interviewed on the R2 folk programme and he was entirely pragmatic about the current line up, which came about because his producer (the legendary Tony Engles. He must be a hundred and three by now) said that Martin Simpson needed to do something different. You don't maximise album sales by churning out same-old same-old, even if it is good. The answer was to call in the services of friends, and make an ensemble album. I haven't bought it yet, though I will. Demonstrating that the market in folk CDs is anything but perfect, I could get it direct from Martin Simpson's own website for £12, or from Amazon for £8.99 (new) or £12.42 (used). Do I want to support the artist directly enough to pay 30% over the odds, that is the question. We'll leave the used ones out of the equation.
Last night's concert therefore featured some songs from the new album, and revisited several other recent releases. I'm afraid that life is not jolly in the world of Martin Simpson. Sir Patrick Spens was drowned, brave General Wolfe was shot, lovers' minds were altered, returning war veterans were shunned and Lousiana got flooded. He did do a couple of more optimistic songs, with a Mike Waterson number about a young man looking forward to his future working as a north sea fisherman (oh dear) and raising a family, and a fine song from Northumberland by an older man looking fondly back at his life of labouring and playing music. But some of the bleak and murderous ballads had very catchy, up-tempo tunes, so the whole effect was anything but dirge-like.
I was disappointed by the size of the audience. The Arts Centre hadn't bothered to set out seats on the diagonal down the sides of the church, a sign it was not a sell out, and while there were people all the way to the back, the rows weren't full. Instead they were gappy, like badly laid brood frame. Martin Simpson has been a regular visitor to Colchester folk club, so maybe this was a sign that, excellent as he is, people won't necessarily turn out in the same numbers to watch somebody they've alread seen twice in the last couple of years? Or maybe it was a sign of the economy biting. Two tickets at eleven quid, parking, maybe a couple of drinks, versus just buy the album (which has June Tabor et al on it)? Or maybe not everybody is such a massive Martin Simpson fan as I am? It was a wasted opportunity, folks. You missed the chance to see one of the finest guitarists in the world.
Tuesday, 19 April 2011
two Scottish musicians
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.
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.
Tuesday, 5 April 2011
top class folk
We went last night to hear Spiers and Boden at the Colchester folk club, which meets in the Colchester Arts Centre. I couldn't define a folk club, but using the elephant test that I know one when I see it, I don't think Colchester's is really a folk club, but a series of folk concerts put on between September and May with a couple of singers' nights thrown in. As a club it has some serious deficiencies, but they get some very good guests.
Spiers and Boden are excellent. They are an English folk duo, and they are on their tenth anniversary tour, so they must have started young as they don't look that old yet. Jon Boden plays the fiddle and the guitar, and sings. As an instrumentalist he doesn't have the showy, melliflous intricacy of a Martin Hayes (fiddle) or Martin Simpson (guitar) but he understands the rythmns of English folk and plays it with great energy and precision. His voice is warm and fairly deep and without the nasal, sheeplike quality of some folk singers, and his diction is fantastic. You can hear the words of songs you don't already know, a rare thing among folk singers, and difficult to achieve in the acoustics of the Colchester Arts Centre, which are rather muddy. Also he is tall with large eyes and a neat brown beard and an engaging grin, which all help, if you are going to be a folk superstar. John Spiers is shorter and rounder but with an equally radiant smile, and plays various squeeze boxes and sings backing vocals. His harmonies on the melodeon and concertina are complicated and unusual enough to be interesting, without leaving me with the distressing feeling that I must have strayed into a jazz club. As a duo they are great. On stage they have an easy line in chat, and come across as being two thoroughly nice blokes, but in the music it is the contained energy and controlled timing that does it for me. Folk music should be full of energy, which is not at all the same thing as playing it too loud and too fast.
I wish the folk club had the same perfect timing. Seats are not bookable, and the doors open at 7.45pm, but then nothing else happens for half an hour, so having arrived in time to bag a good seat you are left to make desultory conversation to your companion, or sit alone if you don't have one. The seats are stackable chairs, and while padded they are not that comfortable. I'm guessing that sitting on a plastic seat drinking beer out of a plastic cup in a converted Victorian church wouldn't be top of most people's lists of really fun things to do on a Monday night. At about 8.15pm there is sometimes a support act. Unfortunately the local folk scene isn't especially good, and I have only rarely heard a support act at the Colchester folk club that was any good either. Some of them are to be avoided at all costs. Sometimes there isn't a support act at all, and you spend the first hour listening to recordings of upcoming acts. At around 8.45pm the act you have come to hear is put on. They do a first set, then there is an interval to buy more beer and CDs and go to the loo, then a second half. It doesn't end much before 11.00pm, which is later than some people might choose for a Monday, with the rest of the working week ahead of them. I was absolutely knackered by the time I got home, given I'd got up at 6.00am and already done a ten hour day at the plant centre, and I would much rather the musicians I had paid to see simply started at 8.00pm, and then with a decent interval we could still all be away by 10.00pm. That would probably suit the performers better too, given that they are on gruelling tour schedules. Enough folk musicians have died or been badly injured over the years in late night car accidents after gigs, when they were driving dog tired and trying to get home, or on to the next gig.
To reduce the amount of tedious hanging about we didn't arrive until 8.15pm. There was a notice on the door saying that it was Sold Out, so it's just as well that after the Cara Dillon non-experience I had bought tickets. The only seats left were right at the outside of the south nave, which left me with a sinking feeling that I was going to spend the evening looking at a pillar, but once seated I found the pillar was safely to my left and I could in fact see perfectly.
Spiers and Boden have won all sorts of folk awards, which are richly deserved. They form two elevenths or thereabouts of folk supergroup Bellowhead, which I have not seen but aim to do so, if only once for the experience and because they are said to be so entertaining live. Bellowhead on the radio and TV go a bit too far down the folk-jazz-klezmer-Latin American fusion path for my comfort. Spiers and Boden play around with those influences in a subtle way, but no so much that they stray from the point. They opened their second set with their version of 'Rolling down to Old Maui', which is one of the best arrangements of a traditional song I have ever heard. They have slighly flattened out the tune into an odd minor key (if I knew any music theory it would help me understand what I'm listening to) and put a catch in the rhythmn. I've spent many hours in small yachts, rolling up and down and across the Thames estuary and southern North Sea, with a light breeze but a big swell, and Spiers and Boden have captured that slow swoop and catch and creak perfectly. I'm not surprised to read that Jon Boden studied compositon for theatre at The London College of Music. (He also has a degree in Medieval Studies from Durham, and John Spiers read genetics at King's College, Cambridge, at least according to Wikipedia. I always suspected that good musicians tended to be extremely bright).
You can find their website here.
Spiers and Boden are excellent. They are an English folk duo, and they are on their tenth anniversary tour, so they must have started young as they don't look that old yet. Jon Boden plays the fiddle and the guitar, and sings. As an instrumentalist he doesn't have the showy, melliflous intricacy of a Martin Hayes (fiddle) or Martin Simpson (guitar) but he understands the rythmns of English folk and plays it with great energy and precision. His voice is warm and fairly deep and without the nasal, sheeplike quality of some folk singers, and his diction is fantastic. You can hear the words of songs you don't already know, a rare thing among folk singers, and difficult to achieve in the acoustics of the Colchester Arts Centre, which are rather muddy. Also he is tall with large eyes and a neat brown beard and an engaging grin, which all help, if you are going to be a folk superstar. John Spiers is shorter and rounder but with an equally radiant smile, and plays various squeeze boxes and sings backing vocals. His harmonies on the melodeon and concertina are complicated and unusual enough to be interesting, without leaving me with the distressing feeling that I must have strayed into a jazz club. As a duo they are great. On stage they have an easy line in chat, and come across as being two thoroughly nice blokes, but in the music it is the contained energy and controlled timing that does it for me. Folk music should be full of energy, which is not at all the same thing as playing it too loud and too fast.
I wish the folk club had the same perfect timing. Seats are not bookable, and the doors open at 7.45pm, but then nothing else happens for half an hour, so having arrived in time to bag a good seat you are left to make desultory conversation to your companion, or sit alone if you don't have one. The seats are stackable chairs, and while padded they are not that comfortable. I'm guessing that sitting on a plastic seat drinking beer out of a plastic cup in a converted Victorian church wouldn't be top of most people's lists of really fun things to do on a Monday night. At about 8.15pm there is sometimes a support act. Unfortunately the local folk scene isn't especially good, and I have only rarely heard a support act at the Colchester folk club that was any good either. Some of them are to be avoided at all costs. Sometimes there isn't a support act at all, and you spend the first hour listening to recordings of upcoming acts. At around 8.45pm the act you have come to hear is put on. They do a first set, then there is an interval to buy more beer and CDs and go to the loo, then a second half. It doesn't end much before 11.00pm, which is later than some people might choose for a Monday, with the rest of the working week ahead of them. I was absolutely knackered by the time I got home, given I'd got up at 6.00am and already done a ten hour day at the plant centre, and I would much rather the musicians I had paid to see simply started at 8.00pm, and then with a decent interval we could still all be away by 10.00pm. That would probably suit the performers better too, given that they are on gruelling tour schedules. Enough folk musicians have died or been badly injured over the years in late night car accidents after gigs, when they were driving dog tired and trying to get home, or on to the next gig.
To reduce the amount of tedious hanging about we didn't arrive until 8.15pm. There was a notice on the door saying that it was Sold Out, so it's just as well that after the Cara Dillon non-experience I had bought tickets. The only seats left were right at the outside of the south nave, which left me with a sinking feeling that I was going to spend the evening looking at a pillar, but once seated I found the pillar was safely to my left and I could in fact see perfectly.
Spiers and Boden have won all sorts of folk awards, which are richly deserved. They form two elevenths or thereabouts of folk supergroup Bellowhead, which I have not seen but aim to do so, if only once for the experience and because they are said to be so entertaining live. Bellowhead on the radio and TV go a bit too far down the folk-jazz-klezmer-Latin American fusion path for my comfort. Spiers and Boden play around with those influences in a subtle way, but no so much that they stray from the point. They opened their second set with their version of 'Rolling down to Old Maui', which is one of the best arrangements of a traditional song I have ever heard. They have slighly flattened out the tune into an odd minor key (if I knew any music theory it would help me understand what I'm listening to) and put a catch in the rhythmn. I've spent many hours in small yachts, rolling up and down and across the Thames estuary and southern North Sea, with a light breeze but a big swell, and Spiers and Boden have captured that slow swoop and catch and creak perfectly. I'm not surprised to read that Jon Boden studied compositon for theatre at The London College of Music. (He also has a degree in Medieval Studies from Durham, and John Spiers read genetics at King's College, Cambridge, at least according to Wikipedia. I always suspected that good musicians tended to be extremely bright).
You can find their website here.
Monday, 7 March 2011
not according to plan
Now that it's March our working day starts at 8.00am instead of a quarter past. I've moved the alarm clock a quarter of an hour earlier, but it takes a bit of getting used to. By now I've got a set of timings for the point at which I need to stop doing whatever else I'm doing and start making my packed lunch, the time by which I need to start eating breakfast, the latest possible time at which it's worth starting a second mug of tea, the time by which I need to have finished breakfast and reading newspapers on-line and start cleaning my teeth, and the time to leave the house. The journey to work is calibrated against the stages of the Today programme. If I haven't got to Little Bromley by the time Thought for the Day starts that's bad. And now all those timings are wrong and have to be relearnt, until the clocks change in the autumn and we revert to the winter 8.15am start. We're finishing later too, 5.00pm instead of 4.15pm as of last month, and come April it will be a six o'clock finish.
A lorry arrived with various bits and pieces for the shop, and the driver, looking worried, disappeared under the cab, muttering about only having braking action on one side. When he started the engine up again and depressed the brake pedal, a jet of liquid shot out of the front off-side brakes. He made telephone calls and sat in his cab, looking resigned. That was a rubbish start to his week. Eventually a commercial-vehicle-roadside-recovery van appeared, and the engineer confirmed that whatever bit it was of the brakes had failed. He could get the component, but didn't carry it with him. The lorry was still there mid-afternoon, but by close of play had managed to get away. I suppose breaking down in a quiet garden is better than by the side of the A12.
Last weekend a customer appeared at the till with a severely nibbled clematis. At the time I couldn't think what might have done it, my mind running upon muntjac and it seeming unlikely that we'd had one of those in a polytunnel inside the plant centre. Today we discovered the culprit, an enormous mouse (or vole). It was running around inside the tunnel cover, having managed to get between two layers of polythene, but it made its escape before we could work out how to catch it. Over the weekend it (or its friends and relations) had stripped almost all the leaves off a dozen Clianthus. Before shutting the tunnel up tonight the manager set up a fearsome array of mousetraps.
(Folk music must be getting trendy. Our plan to go and hear Cara Dillon at the Colchester Arts Centre has been scuppered by the fact that it is sold out. At least I looked at the website before driving into Colchester, but I feel rather a prune. Apart from Martin Carthy and Fairport Convention folk concerts are never sold out. We had better bother to book in advance for Spiers and Boden.)
A lorry arrived with various bits and pieces for the shop, and the driver, looking worried, disappeared under the cab, muttering about only having braking action on one side. When he started the engine up again and depressed the brake pedal, a jet of liquid shot out of the front off-side brakes. He made telephone calls and sat in his cab, looking resigned. That was a rubbish start to his week. Eventually a commercial-vehicle-roadside-recovery van appeared, and the engineer confirmed that whatever bit it was of the brakes had failed. He could get the component, but didn't carry it with him. The lorry was still there mid-afternoon, but by close of play had managed to get away. I suppose breaking down in a quiet garden is better than by the side of the A12.
Last weekend a customer appeared at the till with a severely nibbled clematis. At the time I couldn't think what might have done it, my mind running upon muntjac and it seeming unlikely that we'd had one of those in a polytunnel inside the plant centre. Today we discovered the culprit, an enormous mouse (or vole). It was running around inside the tunnel cover, having managed to get between two layers of polythene, but it made its escape before we could work out how to catch it. Over the weekend it (or its friends and relations) had stripped almost all the leaves off a dozen Clianthus. Before shutting the tunnel up tonight the manager set up a fearsome array of mousetraps.
(Folk music must be getting trendy. Our plan to go and hear Cara Dillon at the Colchester Arts Centre has been scuppered by the fact that it is sold out. At least I looked at the website before driving into Colchester, but I feel rather a prune. Apart from Martin Carthy and Fairport Convention folk concerts are never sold out. We had better bother to book in advance for Spiers and Boden.)
Monday, 14 February 2011
roots and music
A couple of us finished the last of the herbaceous potting that arrived last Thursday. The hardy geraniums and Thalictrum are prototypical plants, with a neat solid central crown and a tuft of roots beneath. You know where you are with them. Aconitum carmichaelii 'Arendsii' has great chunky roots like giant molars. The new leaves are already emerging and it's clear which way up they should go. (I like these autumn flowering monkshoods. They bring an attractive shot of blue to the border usefully late in the season. All parts of the plant are poisonous, but I'm not going to eat them so that's fine). Veronica consists of a tangled mass of wiry roots and things that might be thicker roots or stems, and it is frankly a puzzle with some of them which way up to put them or how deep they should go. Lily of the valley has long brittle-looking white roots, with nodes from which emerge quantities of frizzled white side roots. There are shoots at one end of the long white root, which I kept at the surface. The roots look fragile and as if they could rot at the slightest provocation, and I'm not surprised that the plant has a reputation for being tricky to establish in the garden, or that once it is happy it can run like hell. Hemerocallis roots are neat and chunky like pencils. Hosta roots are funky, brilliant white and crinkly. They make me think vaguely of some deep fried Far Eastern delicacy. The roots of Mertensia, the Virginia cowslip, look like petrified dog turds.
Listening to the car radio on the way home I got exasperated with Eddie Mair and flicked over to Radio 3, where I found the most unearthly, etherial singing which turned out to be Trio Mediaeval, a Scandinavian three voice female polyphonic outfit who do mediaeval music plus Scandinavian folk and recently written material in the same vein. I never heard of them, although having looked them up they have been around for years, tour extensively and have a fair-sized discography. They are singing tonight at the Wigmore Hall and then not again in the UK for the foreseeable future. I rarely manage to get to concerts in London anyway, but I shall certainly add one or two of the discs to my (admittedly over-optimistically long) Amazon wish list.
Listening to the car radio on the way home I got exasperated with Eddie Mair and flicked over to Radio 3, where I found the most unearthly, etherial singing which turned out to be Trio Mediaeval, a Scandinavian three voice female polyphonic outfit who do mediaeval music plus Scandinavian folk and recently written material in the same vein. I never heard of them, although having looked them up they have been around for years, tour extensively and have a fair-sized discography. They are singing tonight at the Wigmore Hall and then not again in the UK for the foreseeable future. I rarely manage to get to concerts in London anyway, but I shall certainly add one or two of the discs to my (admittedly over-optimistically long) Amazon wish list.
Tuesday, 8 February 2011
folk music old and new
We watched the Radio 2 folk awards last night. The BBC televised the whole ceremony for the first time this year. I was brought up on folk music, my father being one of the first wave of revivalists in the 1950s, and a pretty fair unaccompanied singer. As a teenager I never had any problem with simultaneously adoring Blondie and The Police, and Planxty and Paddy Tunney. My father's tastes were purist in the extreme. Irish traditional music was his favourite, with some English trad and a little Appalachian. He disliked Scottish music, English dance music unless played strictly in the correct tempo for morris dancing, and anything involving an electric bass, drums or a brass section.
As a lifelong fan I'm disconcerted that the media have recently pronounced that folk music is now fashionable. It's as bad as with the beekeeping. I don't want to be fashionable, then in a couple of years become unfashionable. Folk music's new fashionability is apparently due to the refreshing wave of new talented young artists that are reinvigorating this faded musical scene. Really good musicians like, er, Laura Marling and Mumford and Sons. I did once think about buying Sigh No More, after hearing their first hit single, until I heard some more of their songs and realised that I only liked the first one. I suppose it would be too much to expect journalists to go away and actually listen to the folk music that has been going on over the past thirty years that led us to a dark sad place from which we needed to be rescued by, er, Laura Marling and Mumford and Sons.
One of the best guitarists on the planet, and from the 1970s to the 1990s one of the best and most original songwriters, is generally considered to be a folk musician. He is of course Richard Thompson. An utterly mellifluous guitar player is Martin Simpson. He has an accurate feel for British and American traditional music, and has written some songs that will enter the tradition in the truest sense, which is that they will still be sung in a hundred years time by people who have forgotten who wrote them. His musical career stretches back about four decades. June Tabor has been declared by Elvis Costello to have the finest female voice in Britain. She can make the big Scottish ballads sound as immediate and relevant as if the events (mostly ghastly) happened last week, and she has been recording since the 1970s. Katherine Tickell is a Northumbrian piper and fiddler of genius and total authenticity who released her first record in 1984 and has been performing live ever since. And so on and so on. Great singers and instrumentalists continued to emerge in the 1990s and beyond (Julie Murphy and Fernhill, Julie Fowlis, Tim Van Eyken, the Vass twins). My CD racks, and the cupboard where the pre CD era vinyl still lives, are weighed down with really fine music, some traditional and some recently written, that has been made over the past forty years by musicians who have worked very hard touring around the UK (and the world) and been supported by people who have noticed and valued what they were doing. If good musicians can play to bigger audiences and find it easier to make a decent living that's great (as long as they don't get too exclusive. There aren't many art forms where you can see a world class practitioner close up and live for twelve quid a ticket!). But please spare us the myth that the moribund folk scene is being saved by, er, Laura Marling and Mumford and Sons. They're OK. They're just not nearly as good as a lot of the musicians who were occupying the scene already.
As a lifelong fan I'm disconcerted that the media have recently pronounced that folk music is now fashionable. It's as bad as with the beekeeping. I don't want to be fashionable, then in a couple of years become unfashionable. Folk music's new fashionability is apparently due to the refreshing wave of new talented young artists that are reinvigorating this faded musical scene. Really good musicians like, er, Laura Marling and Mumford and Sons. I did once think about buying Sigh No More, after hearing their first hit single, until I heard some more of their songs and realised that I only liked the first one. I suppose it would be too much to expect journalists to go away and actually listen to the folk music that has been going on over the past thirty years that led us to a dark sad place from which we needed to be rescued by, er, Laura Marling and Mumford and Sons.
One of the best guitarists on the planet, and from the 1970s to the 1990s one of the best and most original songwriters, is generally considered to be a folk musician. He is of course Richard Thompson. An utterly mellifluous guitar player is Martin Simpson. He has an accurate feel for British and American traditional music, and has written some songs that will enter the tradition in the truest sense, which is that they will still be sung in a hundred years time by people who have forgotten who wrote them. His musical career stretches back about four decades. June Tabor has been declared by Elvis Costello to have the finest female voice in Britain. She can make the big Scottish ballads sound as immediate and relevant as if the events (mostly ghastly) happened last week, and she has been recording since the 1970s. Katherine Tickell is a Northumbrian piper and fiddler of genius and total authenticity who released her first record in 1984 and has been performing live ever since. And so on and so on. Great singers and instrumentalists continued to emerge in the 1990s and beyond (Julie Murphy and Fernhill, Julie Fowlis, Tim Van Eyken, the Vass twins). My CD racks, and the cupboard where the pre CD era vinyl still lives, are weighed down with really fine music, some traditional and some recently written, that has been made over the past forty years by musicians who have worked very hard touring around the UK (and the world) and been supported by people who have noticed and valued what they were doing. If good musicians can play to bigger audiences and find it easier to make a decent living that's great (as long as they don't get too exclusive. There aren't many art forms where you can see a world class practitioner close up and live for twelve quid a ticket!). But please spare us the myth that the moribund folk scene is being saved by, er, Laura Marling and Mumford and Sons. They're OK. They're just not nearly as good as a lot of the musicians who were occupying the scene already.
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