Birds & Beasts: music by Martyn Bennett and Fraser Fifield by Delphian Records

Beasts Birds &

Music by Martyn Bennett & Fraser Fifield

Mr McFall's Chamber

2 Bennett arr. McFall The Miller

3 trad./Bennett, arr. McFall Swallowtail

4 Bennett arr. McFall Aye

5 Bennett arr. McFall Peewits –

6 Fraser Fifield Kilchoan Ferry

7 Fraser Fifield The Beast

8 Bennett arr. McFall Knives in Hens

9 Martyn Bennett Piece for string quartet, percussion [14:35] and Scottish smallpipes in C

It is five years since Martyn Bennett died. Before he fell ill we had planned a project together which never happened. This album is an attempt to come to grips with that unfinished business.

Recorded on 28–30 October 2009

at Castlesound Studios, Pencaitland

Session Engineer: Stuart Hamilton

Session production by Mr McFall’s Chamber

24-bit digital editing: Fraser Fifield, Stuart Hamilton & Robert McFall

Mixing assistants: Tom Bancroft & Ben Seal

Track 4 mixed by Tom Bancroft

Producer: Paul Baxter

Cover/traycard images: Bj Stewart Design: John Christ www.johnchristdesign.com

Booklet editor: John Fallas Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.co.uk

Some time during 1994 my teenage children introduced a CD to our kitchen (which is where we tend to listen to music) called Shorelife, by a Scottish band called Mouth Music. This was my own personal first exposure to a genre of which Martyn Bennett became grand master and high priest in the years that followed. The electronic music scene with its programmed beats and samples had been flourishing since the so-called ‘second summer of love’ at the end of the 1980s. I’d been around for the first summer of love in 1967 and remember lying on a beach at Frinton-on-Sea on a family holiday with The Beatles’ ‘All You Need is Love’ coursing around in my head while the pirate radio ship Radio Caroline, anchored defiantly in view but just outside British waters, dared to disseminate to us a new teenage aesthetic which drifted discreetly around the beach from secreted transistor sets. The revolutions of ’68 were perhaps a little more robust in Paris or Prague, but even in Frinton-on-Sea we got a whiff of the coming whirlwind. The second summer of love, on the other hand, and its cultural aftermath in the early nineties, was more

my children’s affair than mine. The drum machines and synthesisers of 80s pop were giving way to a darker and more powerful electronic dance music created by DJs out of sequencers and samplers. This coincided not only with new narcotics, in particular ecstasy, as well as a revival of the quintessential sixties drug LSD, but also with a reinvigorated collective counter-culturalism of new age travellers, anti-poll tax riots, raves and eco protest camps. It was a revolutionary period as 1968 had been, but whereas French ’68ers had thrown cobbles to a mental soundtrack of the Rolling Stones, the beats that drove these disruptions were electronically generated. Again, a kitchen in Edinburgh’s affluent Morningside, like the beach at Frinton, was a safe place from which to spectate and, like most middle-aged parents, I was only vaguely aware of the rumble of cultural tectonic plates moving beneath our feet.

Mouth Music used these DJ techniques but applied them to a Scottish context, creating a contemporary, almost ‘trip-hop’ sound evocative of sparsely populated landscapes. A young Martyn Bennett had been a member of Mouth Music while still a student, and learnt many of his sequencing and sampling skills from its prime mover Martin Swan, though his involvement was curtailed and restricted by his ever-protective teachers at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and

Birds & Beasts: music by Martyn Bennett and Fraser Fifield

Drama. The same dilemma faced a young Fraser Fifield when, later, he too was a student at the RSAMD. The opportunity to play with Scottish folk/rock bands Wolfstone and Old Blind Dogs similarly took him away from his college timetable – though I should add that both musicians completed their degrees successfully.

Martyn had grown up in Gaelic-speaking communities in the Canadian province of Newfoundland, steeped in Scottish folk-music traditions. His father, Ian Knight, was a fiddle player and his mother, Margaret Bennett, is a well-known singer and researcher into traditional Gaelic song. The Irish reel Swallowtail, which Martyn later arranged for his first album, was current in the 70s and is likely to have been one of the tunes he heard played in his early years. After a move to the Highlands of Scotland it was natural to Martyn that he should take up the pipes – and, somewhat later, follow in his father’s footsteps and learn the fiddle. Just like Aberdeenshire-born Fraser Fifield a few years later, in a short time he was winning prizes for his piping and, at a young age, became active at music festivals and was frequently smuggled (under-age) into local pub sessions. At fifteen a further move, this time to Edinburgh, took him to Broughton High School Music Unit, a specialist music school within a school, and this, in turn, put him in touch

with the classical tradition and gave him the opportunity for violin, piano and composition lessons. He later rated those years at Broughton as the most important of his life in terms of musical development. Subsequent studies at the RSAMD took him deeper into classical violin study. His much-loved teacher there, Miles Baster, was at that time leader of Scotland’s leading classical string quartet, the Edinburgh Quartet. Another influence at this time came from recordings of jazz violinist Joe Venuti, of whom Martyn made a special study as part of his degree. This jazz violin style is particularly in evidence in Aye, a track from his second album Bothy Culture

Martyn Bennett, then, entered the world of techno beats equipped as an extremely accomplished musician in both folk and classical traditions and with an interest in jazz. Carrying forward the techniques learnt from Martin Swan, incorporating samples of Harry Lauder, Scottish poetry, field recordings, snatches of Scottish song – even, in ‘Aye’, his own one-sided, one-worded telephone conversation – he created an exuberant dance music with an unmistakably Scottish accent. In his turn, he has been hugely influential on a younger generation of Scottish musicians. Fraser Fifield, two of whose original compositions feature on this album, is another master of sampled beats as well as a multiinstrumentalist (saxophone, pipes, low whistle, Birds

kaval) spanning a number of musical traditions – jazz, Scottish traditional, Balkan, salsa.

I didn’t meet Martyn until the summer of 1998, when Mr McFall’s Chamber were booked to play a double bill with Martyn’s group, Cuillin Music, in the Highland Festival. Cuillin Music was at that time a four-piece group with Martyn’s wife, Kirsten, on keyboards and samples, Deirdre Morrison on fiddle and vocals and Rory Pierce on Irish pipes, flutes and percussion. Our first gig in Wick was, it seemed, more or less unadvertised, and was almost completely unattended. It was a great opportunity, however, to hear each other. The following evening we performed at the Cairngorm Ski Centre. This time Martyn’s fans were there, obviously knew the music inside out and leapt energetically up and down for the whole set. I too was intoxicated by what I heard, and from that time on Martyn and I kept in sporadic touch. He came to hear us at Edinburgh’s Bongo Club on various occasions. He accepted a commission to write a piece for us – though his intention was that it should be more collaboration than commission. Then he got ill with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and our plans kept getting shelved as he went from treatment to treatment. Some of the ideas which we had discussed ended up surfacing in his last album, Grit. In a way this was a studio version of the project he had originally

proposed to me. Even the strings on the album were supposed to have been us – but the timescale was too short and our diaries too full to organise sessions, so the string parts were recorded elsewhere.

During the period in which Martyn and I were in discussion about the ‘project’, Martyn mentioned one day that he had in fact composed a piece some years before which would be ideal for us to perform together. This was Piece for String Quartet, Percussion and Scottish Smallpipes in C, which he had written in 1995 for his teacher’s string quartet, the Edinburgh Quartet. It hadn’t been played since the original tour in 1996. Subsequent enquiries established that no one knew what had become of the parts, so we had to abandon plans to revive it. It was only a few months before Martyn’s death that a photocopy of the score came to light at the offices of the Scottish Arts Council. From that score we were able to re-copy parts. Martyn conceived a plan to record the piece with himself as producer: he was too ill by that stage to play. From his sickbed he suggested a line-up of Fraser Fifield on pipes, Tom Bancroft and James Mackintosh on percussion (Tom had played on the original tour of the piece, and James was an old colleague of Martyn’s from Mouth Music days), and the usual McFall’s string quartet. Time passed, Martyn’s health further

& Beasts: music by Martyn Bennett and Fraser Fifield

Martyn Bennett and Fraser Fifield

deteriorated, and his place as producer was taken by his old mentor, Martin Swan. We met to rehearse the piece, and were busy working on the day prior to the first recording session when news came through of Martyn’s death early that morning. Martin Swan had been at his bedside for much of the night. Circumstances were against us. The recording we made on that occasion was laid aside. Only another piece by Martyn, Mackay’s Memoirs, which we recorded in collaboration with the school orchestra from Broughton, was issued from those sessions. But we couldn’t leave it there. The following year at Celtic Connections we were given the opportunity to perform the piece live, and subsequently we have toured it and performed it many times. Now finally, five years later, we have recorded it.

The rest of this album is, in a way, an attempt to accomplish the project we originally planned to undertake with Martyn himself. Shortly after his death the Martyn Bennett Trust, also motivated by a desire to continue what Martyn had started, sent a photocopied pile of manuscript sketches of his to a few composers and arrangers, such as myself, and commissioned us to make something of them – either arrangements of the music, or new music inspired by it. Amongst the manuscript there were a number of tunes which Martyn had composed for theatre

productions. I chose a sequence which he had composed for a production of David Harrower’s play Knives in Hens. One of these tunes, The Miller, seemed to fit well as a hushed ending to Cuillin Part Two, which in its original context on Martyn’s first album Martyn Bennett segues straight into ‘Deoch an Dorus Part One’ and so was in need of a new ending. The tune of ‘The Miller’ is Martyn’s and is entirely unchanged; the harmonisation is entirely mine. A number of other tunes written for the same production I simply arranged and joined together as a medley, Knives in Hens (Intro / Mill Theme / Slip Jig / Woman / What Am I Doing Here? / Outro). I like to think that the Bartokian harmonies, the cross-rhythms, the improvisatory accompaniment to the slow whistle solo ‘Woman’, are there by suggestion in the original solo line.

The following year the Martyn Bennett Trust came back to us again and once more commissioned new material. This time I took a violin solo from another manuscript sheet, somewhat in the mould of Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, which was titled Peewits – more or less an extended variation of ‘The Miller’. This, I later gathered, was originally written for an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, a favourite book of Martyn’s and, as it happens, of mine. I left the melody line absolutely untouched, but

created an accompaniment for string quartet, to which I later added double bass. Meanwhile Fraser Fifield took the opportunity to compose an original piece for low whistle and strings called Kilchoan Ferry. The title refers to the small ferry which links the island of Mull to the Ardnamurchan peninsula and on which Martyn travelled every day for nine months at the time when he and Kirsten were living on the mainland in Kilchoan and he had his studio in Tobermory. These two pieces, ‘Peewits’ and ‘Kilchoan Ferry’, seemed to sit well together – and once together they seemed to stay that way (the short unaccompanied solo improvisation on low whistle which links the two pieces was originally there simply to give us time to turn the pages of our music!). Subsequently we have added to our set another original piece of Fraser Fifield’s –The Beast, a nickname which became a title.

This disc is an attempt to make up for the project we never managed, but also an attempt to take music created in the studio and play it live. Martyn Bennett was a consummate performer. The studio purdah of his latter years was forced on him by ill health. Getting it all out on to live instruments, including the ‘backing tracks’ themselves, is surely a project of which he would have approved.

Biographies

Martyn Bennett was born in 1971 in St John’s, Newfoundland, Canada. He moved to Scotland aged 6 where he was to be introduced to his first instrument – the Great Highland Bagpipe – in Kingussie by David Taylor, his ‘most important mentor’. At 15, Martyn was the first traditional musician to win a scholarship at the Edinburgh City School of Music, where he received lessons in composition, violin and piano. He went on to the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, where he studied the violin with Miles Baster, graduating in 1993. Martyn was simultaneously immersing himself in electronica and, from 1994, rediscovering traditional music. He began the studio work that was to establish him as the prime mover in the evolution of modern Celtic fusion.

In 1996 the eponymous album Martyn Bennett was released. This was followed in 1997 by Bothy Culture. Martyn then formed his band Cuillin Music, with his future wife Kirsten on keyboards, Deirdre Morrison on fiddle and vocals and Rory Pierce on Irish pipes, flutes and percussion. In 1999 Martyn’s piece Mackay’s Memoirs was played at the opening of the new Scottish Parliament. Following international tours he began work with Martin Low on Hardland, released in 2000 to critical acclaim. Martyn was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma later that year.

While undergoing intensive treatment, Martyn set up his studio to write Grit, his final and most remarkable work. Due to his illness he was often confined and unable to play most of his instruments. Instead he combined hard electronic beats, sampling technology and arrangements for other musicians. It was a great boost when news broke that Peter Gabriel had heard the demos of Grit and wanted to release it on his Real World label. Gabriel also invited Martyn to remix the track ‘Sky Blue’ from his album Up. Over this same period, Martyn recorded what he called his ‘gentler album’, Glen Lyon, featuring his mother, Margaret Bennett, on vocals.

Martyn died on the evening of 30 January 2005 in the Marie Curie Hospice in Edinburgh.

Discography

Martyn Bennett (1996)

Eclectic Records

Bothy Culture (1997)

Rykodisc

Hardland (2000) with Martin Low Cuillin Recordings

Glen Lyon (2002) with Margaret Bennett

Footstompin Records

Grit (2003)

Real World Records

Mackay’s Memoirs (2005) performed by the City of Edinburgh Music School

Photo © Bj Stewart

A piper and low whistle player who improvises like a jazz musician, a soprano sax player who plays the traditional music of his native Scotland as if it had always been played on that instrument, Fraser Fifield is an unusually versatile composer and musician, moving with ease through a number of musical styles and traditions.

Fraser released his first solo album Honest Water on his own label in 2002 to critical acclaim. Shortly afterwards he formed The Fraser Fifield Trio with two other musicians from north-east Scotland, guitarist Graeme Stephen and drummer Stuart Ritchie. The trio played across Scotland and Europe and in 2005 released the album Slow Stream.

Fraser grew up in Aberdeenshire in north-east Scotland. He learnt the Highland bagpipes from the age of nine and went on to win many prizes at piping competitions. Subsequently he also took up the saxophone, and continued to study that instrument throughout school and during his time at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow. He also plays the low whistle and the kaval.

At the age of eighteen, and while still a student at the RSAMD, Fraser joined the Scottish folk/rock group Wolfstone for a tour of California. During his fourth year at the RSAMD he joined Old Blind Dogs, a folk band from the north east of Scotland, with whom he played for two and a half years. Subsequently, moving down to central Scotland, Fraser started playing with and composing for Salsa Celtica, a group that fused salsa with Celtic music and which has toured widely.

In 2008 Fraser’s fascination with the Bulgarian kaval led to a collaboration between Fifield’s band and one of the most respected kaval players in the world, Nedyalko Nedyalkov, with Georgi Petrov on gadulka. The album which they recorded together, Traces of Thrace, reached the European World Music Chart Top 20 in the summer of 2008. Fraser’s fourth album, Stereocanto, released in October 2009 on Tanar Records, features Fifield on low whistle and kaval alongside Alyn Cosker on drums and Graeme Stephen on guitars.

In addition to his own projects, Fraser Fifield has played with a large number of musicians and groups including Chris Stout, Mick West, Alyth McCormack, Donnie Munro, Kathleen MacInnes, Gavin Marwick, Jim Sutherland, La Banda Europe, the Unusual Suspects and the Graeme Stephen Sextet.

Photo © Douglas Robertson

In 1996 a string quartet made up of musicians from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra played together for the first time at the Legends venue in Edinburgh’s Cowgate for a weekly event called The Transporter Rooms. Thus was born Mr McFall’s Chamber, a name which was used in publicity for that first appearance for want of a ‘proper’ name. The ensemble subsequently recruited a bass player and pianist and, later still, a percussionist and a regular vocalist, the English folk singer Dave Brady. Later that year Edinburgh’s newlyfounded Bongo Club collaborated with Mr McFall’s Chamber in setting up a monthly event, None of the Above, which aimed to present at least three acts from different musical walks of life during the one evening. The three acts were, furthermore, encouraged to get together and collaborate for at least a part of the evening. In this way a number of relationships were forged which, in some cases, led on to musical projects in their own right. Mr McFall’s Chamber was, in a sense, the house band for that event.

Subsequently Mr McFall’s Chamber took its bohemian approach and some, at least, of its bohemian audience back into the concert hall and created music events which contained both contemporary classical pieces and other genres – jazz, folk, tango, progressive rock, cabaret. Its style of presentation was more informal than that of the usual

classical concert, with announcements and explanations taking the place of printed programmes.

The group has commissioned works from many composers including James MacMillan, Eddie McGuire, Gavin Bryars, Kenneth Dempster, Cecilia MacDowall, Chick Lyall, Phil Bancroft, Fraser Fifield, Matilda Brown and many more. It has collaborated with artists and animators in multimedia projects, is involved in a number of educational projects working with young composers, and tours widely every year.

Discography

Like The Milk (1999)

Discipline Global Music DGM 9809

Revolucionario (2001)

Mr McFall’s Chamber MMCC 002

Upstart Jugglers (2001)

MMCC 003

Live at the Queens Hall (2005)

MMCC 004 (DVD)

Music From Newcastle (2008)

International Centre for Music Studies, University of Newcastle ICMUSCD001

Gavin Bryars: Epilogue from Wonderlawn/ Eight Irish Madrigals/The Church Closest to the Sea (2009)

Delphian DCD34058

Fraser Fifield

Border pipes (track 1)

low whistle and Border pipes (track 3)

low whistle (tracks 6 & 8)

Highland pipes (track 7)

Scottish smallpipes (track 9)

Greg Lawson violin; electric violin (track 4)

Robert McFall violin

Brian Schiele viola

Su-a Lee cello

Rick Standley

double bass (tracks 5 & 6)

bass guitar (all others except track 9)

Phil Alexander keyboard (track 1); piano (tracks 3, 4, 7 & 8)

Tom Bancroft drums, percussion (tracks 1, 3, 4 & 6–9)

James Mackintosh drums, percussion (tracks 1, 3, 4 & 6–9)

Birds and Beasts is an important step forward in the celebration of Martyn Bennett’s musical legacy, and the Martyn Bennett Trust is delighted to have been able to help make this a reality. The Trust aims to reflect Martyn’s vision of music through supporting performances, commissions, new recordings and educational projects in Scotland and overseas. This project captures the mercurial spirit of Martyn, ‘the formidably musical piper, fiddler, composer and mixing magician’.

Fraser Fifield’s piece ‘Kilchoan Ferry’ and Robert McFall’s arrangement of Martyn’s ‘Peewits’ were both part of a series of new pieces commissioned by the Trust with the support of the Scottish Arts Council. The live performances of this music were electrifying and moving in equal measure and were testament to the fact that Martyn remains a deeply inspiring figure to both musicians and audiences. The Martyn Bennett Trust would like to thank everyone involved in this project, particularly Robert McFall without whom this could not have happened.

www.martynbennett.com

Gavin Bryars: The Church Closest to the Sea

Mr McFall’s Chamber; Susan Hamilton soprano, Nicholas Mulroy tenor

DCD34058

The double bass has always been close to Gavin Bryars’ heart. His own instrument, it has also featured strongly in his music for other players –as in The Church Closest to the Sea, written for Mr McFall’s Chamber and their bassist Rick Standley. Bryars’ music straddles worlds: classical and jazz, composition and improvisation, the works on this disc moving between the lushly sensuous and the coolly laid-back as they meditate on geographical and emotional borderlands.

‘the very antithesis of Celtic sentimentalism … works jazz riffs on the double-bass against a distinctly Caledonian drone, hypnotic and insistent. Whenever I hear Bryars’ music, I want to hear more.’

— Norman Lebrecht, scena.org, November 2009

Miracles: The music of Edward Harper

Scottish Chamber Orchestra & Chorus / Garry Walker; Edinburgh Quartet

DCD34069

Delphian’s first orchestral recording presents a richly imagined new choral symphony by Edward Harper, setting it alongside chamber works by this inventive and limpidly expressive composer. Harper’s music takes its place firmly within the British symphonic tradition, yet ranges wider still in its deeply felt response to human experience, from the nineteenth-century Dorset of William Barnes to a message of hope and reconciliation from the present-day Middle East.

‘a stunningly powerful performance’ — Sunday Herald, May 2008

‘The Three Folk Settings for string quartet are quite masterly in the way their allusions to familiar folk materials are framed’ — Gramophone, July 2008

The Red Red Rose Concerto Caledonia / David McGuinness; David Greenberg violin

DCD34014

Concerto Caledonia bring their exuberant flair for early Scottish music to love songs from the time of Robert Burns, and baroque/Cape Breton virtuoso David Greenberg brings along some wild fiddling from the Golden Age of the Scots violin. The original version of Robert Burns’ most famous song The Red Red Rose appears here in its first ever recording.

‘The funkiest album of Burns songs I’ve ever heard’ — CD Review, BBC Radio 3

Scotland at Night Laudibus / Mike Brewer

DCD34060

Two collaborations between noted Edinburghians Alexander McCall Smith and Tom Cunningham appear on disc for the first time, in a programme of Scottish poetry set by some of today’s leading composers. From the ethereal tenderness of Cunningham’s ‘Lullaby’ to the muscular angularity of Ronald Stevenson’s A Medieval Scottish Triptych, Laudibus responds with affection and athleticism to the expert direction of UK choral doyen Mike Brewer.

‘… burnished performances of Burns texts set by James MacMillan, Howard Skempton, Brewer himself and even that holiest of minimalists, Arvo Pärt. The throbbing intensity of So Deep, a setting of ‘My Luve’s like a red, red rose’, and the mystical resonances in The Gallant Weaver are surely among the most treasured and most heartfelt of MacMillan’s works’ — The Scotsman, May 2009