Kings Place, London, Fri 5th May
Put together two existing folk outfits, the trio Gigspanner with the duo Edgelarks, and you come away with the Big Band. Ex-Steeleye Span member Peter Knight is their founder. But their chief asset is the voice of Hannah Martin.
It’s unassuming, at times barely pitched above the level of the instruments, but has something mesmerising to it. It feels like its being sung straight at you, like a child sung a lullabye, rather than addressed to the room. It is, in short, the ideal voice for British folk. Knight sings numbers too, in fact two other members get a go, and none do badly. But Martin’s is the voice.
They also, at times, have a harmonica. Which drives the tracks its on, as much as it worked on Sixties beat numbers. A feeling perhaps accentuated by their having a bongo player rather than a full drummer. It feels like the track’s being propelled from the front, not pushed along form behind, and so is more spirited. True, this is possibly not the most authentic folk instrument. But then most things we think of as ‘authentic’ folk actually aren’t.
While their chief drawback is a tendency to muso-ness. My general attitude to solos is that they’re okay for consenting adults, but should really be done within the privacy of the home. Here, they’re relay soloing by the third number. And it never seems a good sign when the audience applaud at the end of a solo, as if tacitly agreeing that it’s been inserted into a track rather than rising out of it. By the time we’ve had a… yes, really… a bongo solo, it does feel like the path of wisdom has been abandoned for the road to excess.
And these two things, the folky voice and the endless soloing, seem entirely at odds with one another. Perhaps best demonstrated when the opening lyrics “I’ll tell you a story and it won’t take long” did indeed turn out to take long. Leaving me feeling like this was a gig constantly flipping between heads and tails.
The opening number, ’Awake, Awake’. Though, if Kings Place looks to have been redecorated, this is not from the gig…
RIOT ENSEMBLE
All Saints Church, Hove, Wed 11th May
(Part of the Brighton Festival)
Contemporary composers, I continue to dabble, though I do sometimes feel I’m just looking for the soft centres to suck. I find this music runs the whole range from enthralling to endurance test, with little to tell you which you’re getting until you’re actually getting it.
This programme was a sampler of six short pieces. (Down from the original seven, after one was found on closer inspection to not be short enough.) Which in one way is handy. If it’s just sandpaper for the ears, at least it won’t be rubbing against them for too long. But on the other hand sometimes you need to get thoroughly soaked in a piece before it starts to make sense to you.
It was Iannis Xenakis’ name which most attracted me… okay then, his was the only name I’d previously heard of! I had found myself enjoying his work before. I was to find out, however, that his piece (‘Paille In the Wind’) was shortest of all, less than five minutes.
A sonorous cello was interspersed with a rather harsh piano, plonking notes like heavy droplets of rain, with the two never playing at the same time. The programme noted that Iannis the Greek “is not known as a miniaturist”, but more for “granite monoliths”. And I’m not sure he’s done one now, as it seemed to me to stop without really starting. (The programme also spoke as if parallels between the instruments would reveal themselves, while my cloth ears only found distinctions.)
When you hear Kaija Sarriaho composed ’Light And Matter’ after watching the play of light across the park from her apartment window, into might sound more like something from the Romantic era than the granite monoliths of the Contemporary world. And low and behold it did seem like an interchange between the two. Never too syurpy, never too austere, it proved a good place to hang out.
Peter Copley ’Scherzos And Arias’, at about twenty minutes, was the monolith of the night. But to me it occupied the same interchange, lifted up by some lively clarinet. In short, it was the two ‘inbetweenish’ works who served up porridge just right form me.
So not a high hit rate for me. But the engaging nature of the Riot Ensemble was refreshing, not at all serious and austere, even offering to meet everyone down the pub after!
But did Philip Henry do his beat-box mouth-harp steam-train impression? That's usually worth the price of admission....
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