Retrospective
Mar. 12th, 2006 09:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustHappy birthday, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
durham_rambler!
And happy birthday this LJ - time to sum up a few thoughts that have been forming under the surface about it.
But not tonight. Having lunched well, with friends and with open bottles of the wines of Navarre, tonight I want to talk about the wonderful Martin Simpson, who was playing last night at the Davy Lamp Folk Club in Washington. Martin Simpson is never less than a brilliant musician and an entertaining performer, but the last couple of times I've seen him his performance lacked the intensity, that spark of excitement, which makes his live appearances something truly extraordinary. Last night, whether because it was a small venue and we were very close to the stage, or because he was obviously having fun, or because of something genuinely and objectively there, he was on top form.
He threw in one remark, almost in passing, about repertoire: to the effect that the traditional singers from whom many great songs have been collected had surprisingly small repertoires - they weren't obliged to bring out a new album every other year. "I love learning new songs," he said, but some of these songs, you could carry on finding something new in them forever.
So today I was playing the album that introduced me to Martin Simpson, Nobody's Fault But Mine recorded twenty years ago, and thinking about how one of the things I love about this musician is his repertoire, the way he obviously lives with the music, and thinks about it, and how it might be played, so that the same pieces reappear in different arrangements and combinations. The album includes The Granemore Hare as an instrumental; and the first time I saw Martin Simpson live, he explained how it was that rare thing among songs about hunting, a song told from the point of view of the hare. He didn't sing the words, he said, but he was thinking them as he played. Last night he told us how he had been approached by the BBC to play on their new Radio Ballads, on the program about hunting. He didn't want to sing the song they had chosen, as he was on the side of the hare, but this was not a problem, as they only wanted him to play guitar (they were planning to get a good singer to sing, he said). And then he sang us The Granemore Hare.
durham_rambler!And happy birthday this LJ - time to sum up a few thoughts that have been forming under the surface about it.
But not tonight. Having lunched well, with friends and with open bottles of the wines of Navarre, tonight I want to talk about the wonderful Martin Simpson, who was playing last night at the Davy Lamp Folk Club in Washington. Martin Simpson is never less than a brilliant musician and an entertaining performer, but the last couple of times I've seen him his performance lacked the intensity, that spark of excitement, which makes his live appearances something truly extraordinary. Last night, whether because it was a small venue and we were very close to the stage, or because he was obviously having fun, or because of something genuinely and objectively there, he was on top form.
He threw in one remark, almost in passing, about repertoire: to the effect that the traditional singers from whom many great songs have been collected had surprisingly small repertoires - they weren't obliged to bring out a new album every other year. "I love learning new songs," he said, but some of these songs, you could carry on finding something new in them forever.
So today I was playing the album that introduced me to Martin Simpson, Nobody's Fault But Mine recorded twenty years ago, and thinking about how one of the things I love about this musician is his repertoire, the way he obviously lives with the music, and thinks about it, and how it might be played, so that the same pieces reappear in different arrangements and combinations. The album includes The Granemore Hare as an instrumental; and the first time I saw Martin Simpson live, he explained how it was that rare thing among songs about hunting, a song told from the point of view of the hare. He didn't sing the words, he said, but he was thinking them as he played. Last night he told us how he had been approached by the BBC to play on their new Radio Ballads, on the program about hunting. He didn't want to sing the song they had chosen, as he was on the side of the hare, but this was not a problem, as they only wanted him to play guitar (they were planning to get a good singer to sing, he said). And then he sang us The Granemore Hare.
