Traditional Music Instruments In Uk
Actually, for the country that invented the Christmas carol, you’d expect there to be a pretty wide range of choices, and you wouldn’t be disappointed, but still, you’d expect more. That’s probably because the folks who would be making these albums are perfectly happy down at the church caroling away. Why hasn’t June Tabor put out Christmas albums? Thankfully, Kate Rusby did one last year, and it’s a treat. But the clear winner here is the Albion Band, or The Albion Christmas Band. They have several albums out, and they’re all very English and very folky, including the brand new one this year, Traditional. Which means simple songs simply presented, with a modicum of accompaniment, but with great gusto.
The Albion band has been trundling along for over thirty years now. It was founded by Ashley Hutchings, who was the original bass player for Fairport Convention, including the fabulous Liege and Lief album. Anyway, they do more English folky stuff than Fairport does these days. In fact, Hutchings has been involved in multiple projects over this past decade, one of which was based on Cecil Sharpe. Sharpe was the guy who went around England and America at the turn of the century collecting folk songs, thousands of them, in fact, and they are all lodged in the Cecil Sharpe Center for Folk Dance and Song, not too far from where I live. Well, the collection is still used extensively by singers and dancers (he also collected dances!). Kate Rusby goes there two or three times a year to look up Yorkshire songs, for example. Anyway, the point here is that Hutchings, who is now in his early sixties and is also a pretty good actor, was touring the country a couple of years ago with a Cecil Sharpe show, along with several other musicians, doing some of the songs (and the occasional dance), and Hutchings reciting selections from Sharpe’s journals. Just delightful. If he should come your way at some point, go–it’s great fun. Actually, this year’s tour was fun too—Hutchings revisited the Larkrise Revisted program he originally developed in 1978, a collection of local English village songs at the end of the 19th century, when the world was changing. A marvelous show.
Now, when the English talk folk, they mean it. This means lots of traditional instruments—not just the fiddle, but also accordions—often lots of them—and whatever else may be laying around. You rarely here accordions in American folk music—you often hear them here. So the music right away sounds a bit different just because of that. In fact, on one of the Albion Christmas albums you find a polka. And when you listen to this music, it’s clear where so much of American folk music came from—it’s the same musical tradition. And the other thing to keep in mind is the locality of the songs. Americans are used to regional difference across great distances—New England to Mississippi, for example, represents a dramatic difference in musical temperaments and styles. In England you can find that in villages forty miles apart.
The other point is this—as was mentioned earlier, carols are simply folk songs that have been adapted to a religious or celebratory occasion. And in the case of Christmas carols, these were often carols for some other occasion before they became Christmas carols. There is a long tradition, especially in Northern Europe and England, of this process. It shows up dramatically in a marvelous album by Waterson/Carthy, the venerable old family of English folk (and Eliza Carthy as well) called Holy Heathens and the Old Green Man, a collection of traditional carols, some for Christmas, some not. In fact, for the real deal, Topic Records (which brings us The Watersons, June Tabor and a whole slew of other greats) has issued a 5-CD set called MidWinter, which is an amazing collection of all sorts of English songs and poems for the solstice, Christmas, the turning of the year, and the those long winter nights. The long list of artists is impressive (too many to mention), and the music is interspersed with various readings, some of which you will be familiar with, some not. How about Robert Frost reading Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, John Fahey playing a waltz, Jen Ritchie, Ledbelly singing one of his own Christmas songs, lots of Watersons, Shirley Collins, and Ewan McColl—and that’s just part of the first CD. Delightful, although much of it is pretty raw, so it may take some getting used to.
There are others that come to mind as well–Maddy Prior Prior and Steeley Span have some holiday albums that are worth tracking down, and some less familiar groups with great names–Magpie Lane and Sneake’s Noyse—have recently put out a couple of CDs worth a listen. It’s Christmas music, not as we know it perhaps, but you’ll hear quite a few roots in all this.
I am deliberately excluding that weird category know as “Celtic Christmas”, by the way. This is that awful category dreamed up by record companies once they discovered that Windham Hill records had hit a gold mine with their first two Celtic Christmas albums. Most of this stuff is noodling and soporific, although Windham Hill’s second one (which actually had some singing on it, as opposed to all the others) was actually pretty good. Still, that’s no excuse for the dozens and dozens of Celtic Christmas albums that now clutter the Christmas music bins in music stores, with generally dreadful noodly new age musicbabble. If you want to hear some real Celtic Christmas music, check out the real thing–Noels Celtiques, on the Green Linnet label. It’s music from Brittany, sung by the Ensemble Choral du Bout du Monde (what a great name!), and sung in Breton, which is, unsurprisingly, a Celtic language.
There’s something of a Celtic revival going on again, by the way. These crop up every couple of decades. The recent one, it must be said, is partly in response to the book by an English (of course) historian a while ago who claimed that the entire Celtic thing is a myth dreamed up by the Victorians, and latched on to by rabid Scottish nationalists. But there were real Celts, who started out in what is now Switzerland, and noodled around Europe until they ended up in places like Northern France and Western Britain, where they still are. Except for the ones in Northern France, who got pushed out to the edges of Brittany by the Normans, who were Vikings who thought they were French. Anyway, there’s a big annual Celtic festival in Brittany, which I keep meaning to go to, because it sound like fun. Lots of fiddle music.
Speaking of France, how’s the French-bashing going? Is that still going on? It’s hard to keep track of who Americans hate, aside from each other, these days. People here are still confused by this. Especially now, since the French turned out to be right about the whole thing. So are people mad at them now because they were right, or what? No one there seems particularly mad at Bush, even though it’s fairly clear that he lied through his teeth, although the level of disgust with Tony Blair keeps rising, especially with the more recent testimony coming out of the Chilcot commission. I note that Congressman Walter Jones, the guy responsible for changing the names of the fries sold in the Congressional cafeteria from “French fries” to “Freedom fries”, later came out in favor of a withdrawal of US troops, and co-sponsored legislation to that effect. Times change.
Blair might actually be in some trouble here. You may have noticed he spends a lot of time in the US these days, far more than he does here. Well, he may have to. We are now into our third inquiry into what led up to the invasion of Iraq. (I notice the US does not actually appear to have had any yet. Just sayin’ is all). And the first two infuriated people so much because of their whitewash nature that this one looks like it may actually get somewhere. So far what has come out pretty clearly implicates Blair and his government in at least one key area—preventing the UK military from preparing for an occupation. The Blair government was so intent on camouflaging its intent to support the US invasion that it prevented the UK military from stocking up, as it were. Which was one of he principal reason why the first couple of years of the Iraq occupation was such a disaster. So while the US was unprepared for an occupation because of the willfulness, arrogance and stupidity of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith and Wolfowitz, the UK was unprepared by design. It’s hard to know which is worse, actually. This is apparently a potential war crime under the Geneva conventions, I am told in the UK press, according to testimony from senior UK military figures. And while the US is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court, the UK is. There is a perfectly plausible scenario her where what comes out of this inquiry could implicate Tony Blair as a war criminal. Of course, if he stays in the US, he’s not likely to be arrested.
Blair’s fascination with, and obeisance to, Bush was always something of a mystery here. There were the large marches of course, in which yours truly participated as a veteran. But the oddest episode of all came in 2004 with Bush’s state visit. This was a complete disaster, although I suspect it wasn’t played that way in the US media. They had to keep canceling events that he was supposed to do. Like a joint address to the House of Commons and the House of Lords, because too many people would have been yelling at him. And then there was the meeting with the families of British soldiers who have died in Iraq–they had to work really hard to find some who were prepared to be civil. Most families simply refused to meet him (although quite a few of them would still really like to sit down with Mr. Blair for what would undoubtedly be a lively discussion). Actually, a few weeks before he showed up there was this spirited dispute between the palace and the foreign office over who had actually invited Bush–each denied it. So that’s still a little mystery. Actually, it looks like it was set up between Bush’s first ambassador, who was referred to as “The Invisible Man” in diplomatic and press circles since no one had ever seen him (hint–he usually wasn’t even here, but back in Kentucky), and the Queen, since they’re apparently friends from being horse people.
It’s not clear what the Queen thought of all this, but some hint was provided by the seating at the State dinner, which was frankly bizarre–she seated Karl Rove next to Charles Kennedy, the former head of the Liberal Democrats, whose opposition to the war was long, loud, and, as events have borne out, quite justified. They must have had quite a conversation. Much was made, by the way, of the size of the entourage Sparky brought with him–three jumbo jets, 700 people, both his limos (he always travels in a group of limos so that no one knows which one he’s in–that will certainly fool those wily terrorists), and an extraordinarily large secret service detail, who astonished the Brits by requesting diplomatic immunity for shooting demonstrators, and who wanted to set up missile launchers for crowd control. And who wanted to close the London underground for the days Bush was here in the area Bush was going to be, and all the main shopping streets. No wonder people here think Americans have lost their minds.
Then there was the £5 million cost to the city of London, which then-Mayor Ken Livingstone requested the national government help out on, only to be turned down by Tony “suddenly there’s no money” Blair. Ken’s comment was that it was costing every Londoner £2 for Bush to come (his math isn’t too good), but that they would probably all pay £4 for him to stay away. There was indeed a considerably beefed-up police presence around the places where Bush was hanging out–so much so that crime rose 20% everywhere else in London while Bush was here. There was also some lively discussion in the press of the last time Sparky met the Queen–at a White House reception in 1991 or thereabouts, when Pop was president, and Sparky showed up drunk in cowboy boots, and started chatting up the Queen with that great line, “So, do you have any black sheep in your family?” before Barbara stormed over and dragged him out of the room. True story.
Bush’s more recent visits weren’t any better, really. There was July, 2005, of course, for the G-7 (or G-8–I get confused) summit of world leaders, hosted at Gleneagles (where I have been known to get a very occasional par) by Mr. Blair. And, of course, that was the time of the London underground bombings. Tony looked pained, as well he damn well should. Bush just looked like, well, Bush. He waited until he got back to Washington to go to the British embassy there to sign the condolence book. What a putz. No one here (even Blair, I suspect) wanted him back. But come back he did, although he was pretty much ignored in subsequent visits.
Actually, maybe I’m a little hard on Bush. It is Christmas, after all. Just because I thought he was an unelected draft dodging chickenhawk insider trading convicted drunk driving ex-cokehead willfully (and boastfully) ignorant rich boy adolescent bully who will turn out to be the most destructive president in American history doesn’t mean he hasn’t done some good things. Or one, anyway.
This was the proposal to make fund-raising for terrorist organizations a capital offence. Punishable by the death penalty. Personally, as someone who has no philosophic objection to the death penalty, I think this is a splendid idea. Obviously, the thinking here is probably concerned with, you know, dark-skinned people with funny headgear. But this is much too limiting. The problem with this proposal is that it wouldn’t be enforced broadly enough. If you raise money for people who you know are going to use it to blow up innocent women and children (among others), you should be prepared to face the consequences.
Consider representative Peter King, of Long Island, who is, by pure chance, a Republican. King has enjoyed a reputation as a maverick–he voted against Clinton’s impeachment, and ran John McCain’s campaign in New York in 2000. He’s one of those really stupid American politicos that the BBC invariably finds when they want a comment on something. But King, who appears to be in the “not the sharpest tool in the box” category of politicians, spent much of the early part of the decade in vigorous French-bashing, actually accusing France of supporting terrorism because of its lack of support for Sparky’s well-thought-out plan in Iraq. You know, kind of like Fox news, which when it first showed up here delighted everyone because the English all thought it was a brilliant satire—a version of The Daily Show in the daytime. More recently, King has shown alarming signs of being consumed by an unhealthy interest in Michael Jackson. King was also responsible for accusing President Bush of wanting US ports to be exposed to terrorists, and during the 2008 presidential campaign agreed with John McCain when McCain called New Yorkers elitists, indicating that age has not diminished his facilities one bit.
King is less well known for his support of various Irish organizations since the early 1970s, and he has spent quite a lot of time and effort during the past two decades decade bashing the English for their history of human rights abuses in Ireland (a claim that is not without historical foundation, frankly, but since England is the only real ally the US has at the moment, this seems a little ungenerous on King’s part). However, King also has some dodgier connections. He has regularly received money from a group named the “Friends of Sinn Fein”, a well-known IRA front organization, and has been a strong supporter of a group called Noraid. Noraid claims to raise funds for families of victims killed in “the struggle”, and is surprisingly still quite active in fund-raising. Check out their website. One might think that “the struggle” was mostly over at this point, but one would apparently be wrong. In fact, the Department of Justice required Noraid to register as an agent of the Provisional IRA. Now, Noraid has denied raising funds for the IRA or, more recently, the Real IRA (those gents responsible for bombing Omagh in 1998, killing 30 or so, mostly women and children, on a crowded Market Saturday). But the FBI is apparently not convinced, and, you know, these guys get their money from somewhere. A couple of years ago, King decided that he no longer wants to be associated with the IRA. What are King’s views on the Bush proposal, one wonders?
So, my fellow Americans, the next time you’re in some Irish pub on the east coast, like Boston or New York, listening to some nice Irish fiddle band (or a Celtic Christmas show!), and someone passes the hat for “the country” or “the struggle”, think again.
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Elliott School is a struggling comprehensive in south London. But it has an astonishing record in nurturing a diverse range of avant-garde pop stars. Jonathan Brown and Lucy Kinnear report
They have of course forgotten Peter Green amongst many others..
For a long time, it seemed the most famous musician likely to emerge from the Elliott School in the unromantic London suburb of Putney Heath was the late Matt Monro, the quintessential British crooner.
He enjoyed fleeting fame in the 1950s as “The Singing Bus Driver”, a nickname bestowed on him because of his pre-celebrity stewardship of the No 27 from Highgate to Teddington. He was undoubtedly talented, but he died in 1985, and was hardly regarded as a role model for today’s wannabe musical stars.
Yet in recent years, Elliott has been busy churning out a dizzying array of musical talent at the street-credible end of the music industry, despite its being a large, urban, multi-ethnic comprehensive in Wandsworth with more than its fair share of challenges.
Thus far, the school has largely escaped the media’s attention, unlike the scrutiny received by the Brit School for Performing Arts and Technology, a few miles down the A23 in Croydon, which has Amy Winehouse, Kate Nash, Leona Lewis and Adele among its old girls.
Chief among the music stars to have passed through Elliott are Hot Chip, the Mercury Prize-shortlisted electropop combo which was formed by the former Elliott pupils Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard in 2000. They have since gone on to produce three albums to enthusiastic critical acclaim. Now signed to EMI, they are being tipped to be one of the hottest acts of 2008.
Another former student is William Bevan, aka Burial, a dubstar artist who enjoys a cult dancefloor following and who likes to retain a Banksy-like anonymity. Then there is the Folktronica pioneer Kieran Hebden, who records as Four Tet and has worked with artists including Radiohead and Bloc Party, the respected nu-folk singer Adem Ihan and the Mercury Prize-nominated jazz and classical musician Emma Smith.
Throw in a smattering of former members of the So Solid Crew, two musicians from the indie band The Maccabees, and Herman Li, guitarist with the million-selling power metal outfit DragonForce, and you have an emerging stable of stars that can trace much of its inspiration back to the days of the old south London schoolyard.
Yet, if the critics are to be believed, it is something of a minor miracle that schools are able to generate any level of talent at all. Despite a series of much vaunted Government initiatives and high-profile support for the creative industries, some 26,000 children are on waiting lists to learn a musical instrument with their local authority. ]
Recent research suggested some councils are spending as little as £1.15 per child on music, putting yet more pressure on already hard-pressed schools to keep up the nation’s musical education. And to those not in the know, Elliott School might appear an unpromising place to start a musical career. The school’s recent Ofsted report judged the school to be “performing significantly less well than in all the circumstances it could reasonably be expected to perform,” before issuing a notice to improve. It is running a budget deficit and the music department is suffering a severe shortage of instruments.
Frank Marshall, the school’s head of music, is engaged in rounds of fundraising and efforts to encourage artists to come into the classroom to work alongside his talented teachers. And yet the irrepressible desire to make music continues to pulse through the school.
According to Mr Marshall, who is a classically trained church organist who taught himself guitar and drums to survive the rigours of teaching in a tough urban comprehensive, it is the positive peer pressure all around coupled with officially sanctioned use of school space to simply make a noise that provides the recipe for success.
“At the time that Hot Chip were here, there were a number of highly talented musicians who already had their own bands in school. They played in local clubs from an early age,” he recalls. “There was a drive from my perspective towards originality – towards doing something different, towards creativity. I would say, ‘Don’t use that old chord pattern which has been hacked out a thousand times before – try throwing in a seventh chord or something unexpected’.”
It is a piece of advice which he happily observes in “Ready For The Floor”, Hot Chip’s latest single, with its multiple key changes and compelling chord progressions. Like all schools, music is compulsory only until year nine, but there remain vibrant GCSE and A-level groups. A significant number of pupils also go on to study music at university. Mr Marshall says he teaches traditional techniques in lessons, but also sees himself as a facilitator.
“When you get enough people making music, they start feeding off each other. It just snowballs. We put on a lot of concerts both in and out of school, with other schools. We played festivals bringing together other musicians from other schools with different characters. Here you could get a lot of ideas swapped between musicians,” he says.
Adem Ihan, whose new album, Takes, is released in the summer, recalls being surrounded by “truly inspirational teachers and students” during his time at Elliott. And because there were so many students into the same kind of music, they didn’t get singled out for their “skinny jeans and weird taste in music”.
“There was a sense that you weren’t alone if you were different. It just so happened that there was a whole bunch of us. We’d push the tables aside and make a racket, until the neighbours came and complained,” he remembers.
“Sometimes there weren’t even enough cables or the drums would be shabby, but we were never denied the use of anything. They just let us get on with it and encouraged us to be creative.
“There were enough teachers there who were really fantastic at making students feel that they could be independent and do things for themselves. They picked up on the excitement of us all.”
Herman Li recalls being allowed to just get on with his passion, free from any interference from teachers or pupils.
“At lunchtime I used to just grab my guitar and play. I never bothered with football or anything like that. Elliott School was the beginning of an endless journey for me. You learn something new everyday. I’m still learning now.”
Joe Goddard describes the same culture of tolerance. “There was a spirit: if you want to do something just go and do it. You didn’t need permission.”
For Mr Marshall, the suggestion that music should remain somehow a middle-class preserve is absurdly prejudiced, though he did admit to watching with a certain empathy the heroic efforts of the TV choirmaster Gareth Malone as he sought to overcome the powerful reluctance of teenage lads to break into song in his BBC 2 series, The Choir: Boys Don’t Sing. “If you have a good student and a good teacher, it doesn’t matter where you are from,” he says. “If you have someone who wants to learn and someone who wants to teach, you will be successful. I don’t think that because a student goes to a London comprehensive, rather than a private school, they cannot make really good music. It doesn’t have to have a negative effect on their education.”
Not that teaching music is always easy. The key to successful music teaching is “patience and having the right personality – how much you insist on certain things, how much you can enthuse kids.
“It can be very difficult when you have students sitting in front of 30 books so it is certainly going to be challenge when they are sitting in front of 30 xylophones,” he says. The school is now in the middle of rehearsals for the annual production. This year it is the classic 1970s orphan tear jerker Annie – hardly the kind of thing you might expect to inspire a new generation of electro-poppers, metalheads or nu-ravers.
But Mr Marshall is unapologetic. “If you are a musician, you should be able to play anything – especially if it is how you are going to make your living,” he says. As a result, the musical culture of the school will this term range from the ragtime composer Scott Joplin, to Sting, to a GCSE class that is engaged in the process of sampling how to play the recorder, that humble music-lesson staple.
It seems to be a winning formula. Adem Ihan looks back on his school days as the passport to his current status as a professional musician.
“When I first arrived at the school, I remember seeing people in the years above who were still only 13 years old but who were already in bands. It got me thinking, ‘God I can so do that. I’m just like that’.”
Like many of his peers he was. And he did.
