Scottish folk farewell to a mercurial spirit
By JIM GILCHRIST
Scotsman, UK
Mon 4 Apr 2005
Martyn Bennett coupled piping and fiddling with electronic beats.
Picture: Donald Macleod
HOW DO you capture the mercurial spirit of someone like Martyn Bennett,
the formidably musical piper, fiddler, composer and mixing magician,
who died of cancer at a tragically early age at the beginning of
the year?
Next week’s memorial concert in the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, will
have a fair crack at meeting the challenge, with a suitably eclectic
programme encompassing traditional singing and electronica, jazz and
ceilidh music, Highland piping and a large-scale orchestral work.
It will be a celebration of the man rather than a memorial, insists
Bennett’s wife and fellow musician, Kirsten. She is currently in
the throes of organising the event, which will feature performers
who influenced or were influenced by Bennett. There are no shortage
of these – Bennett’s extrovert marriage of fiery piping and fiddling
with the electronic beats and samples of clubland was widely hailed as
the first truly Scottish hardcore dance music. He also created lush
soundscapes for the spoken word, as well some characterful works for
orchestral forces.
Bennett died at the end of January, less than three weeks before his
34th birthday, following a long battle with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The
loss was widely felt throughout the Scottish music community. Next
Friday, a spectacularly wide-ranging programme will reflect the musical
adventurousness and sheer zest of the man, with proceeds going to the
Marie Curie Hospice in Edinburgh, the Bethesda Hospice on the Isle of
Lewis and the Martyn Bennett Trust, a new commemorative fund aimed
at helping young musicians who share Bennett’s vision of music as a
vital cross-cultural medium.
Guests will include Fred Morrison, an extrovert performer who was one
of Bennett’s favourite pipers, singer Karen Matheson and Donald Shaw
of Capercaillie, the energetic folk-fusion outfit Croft No 5 and the
powerfully voiced traditional singer Sheila Stewart, who featured
on Bennett’s last album, Grit. Also singing will be his mother,
folklorist and Gaelic singer Margaret Bennett, with whom he made the
album Glen Lyon.
Kirsten Bennett herself, who was a member of her husband’s Cuillin
touring project, will be playing alongside Martin Swan and Michaela
Rowan of Mouth Music, while from the vibrant Edinburgh jazz scene
come Trio AAB, joined by singer Gina Rae and flautist Brian Finnegan
for Tom Bancroft’s Multistorey Karma Park (Bennett guested in its
premiere in 1997).
The concert will open in grand style as young musicians of Bennett’s
alma mater, the City of Edinburgh Music School at Broughton High,
perform Mackay’s Memoirs, a spectacular work for strings, clarsach,
pipes and percussion which Bennett composed for Broughton’s centenary
and which also helped fuel 1999’s celebrations for the opening of the
Scottish Parliament (a newly recorded CD of it should be available
on the night, including an additional re-mix by DJ Dolphin Boy).
Jillian Thomson of Dance Base will perform her interpretation of Nae
Regrets, from Grit, which featured in last year’s acclaimed ballet,
Off Kilter, while, in a Bennett-ish collision of styles and cultures,
Greg Lawson, violinist with McFall’s Chamber, and piper Rory Campbell,
accompanied by sundry percussionists and electronic samples, will
perform Karabakh, a piece which Bennett wove around a recording
of a young girl from the beleaguered Armenian enclave of Karabakh
in Azerbaijan.
“That piece says so much about what Martyn was all about,” says
Kirsten. “We wanted to have as much of his own music as possible, so
we’re delighted to have Mackay’s Memoirs and Karabakh. Unfortunately
Su-a Lee [cellist with McFall’s Chamber] can’t be there, so we can’t
do the string quartet with small pipes and percussion, although it
will be on a later recording.”
The musician’s untimely death left surprisingly little unfinished
musical business, given his creative output, although, says Kirsten,
there were certain things he entrusted Martin Swan, with whom he
had worked in the past, to finish for him, such as the recording of
Mackay’s Memoirs to which Swan has indeed been giving the final re-mix,
and the quartet.
There are a few other things pending, she adds: Bennett was thinking
about a new album, setting old recordings of traditional music to DJ
dance beats, and she is currently sifting through all that. There
remain a few other unrecorded items, and she is hoping that Peter
Gabriel’s RealWorld label, which released Grit, might include them
in a possible anthology.
In the meantime, her first preoccupation is next Friday’s concert,
which will be MC’d by the Gaelic singer and BBC broadcaster Mary Ann
Kennedy – on whose Celtic Connections programme Bennett was much in
demand – and Annie Reed from RealWorld.
“I just wanted to get the spirit of Martin across,” continues
Kirsten. “We didn’t want it just to be a night of famous people, but
musicians who were connected with Martyn and understood what he was
about. He was so ill, and there were so few people in contact with him
for the last year or two of his life… I wanted them to be involved.”
Further guests are bound to swell the list, and Kirsten’s only
regret is that she’s been unable to enlist anyone to play the ney –
the Middle-Eastern flute which, as played by Omar Faruk, was a big
influence on Bennet’s music. However, the evening’s musical horizons
seem mind-bogglingly, if appropriately, broad as it is.
The memorial concert is on 15 April at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh,
tel: 0131-668 2019). Donations to the Martyn Bennett Trust can be
sent to: c/o Active Events, 60 Love Street, Paisley, PA3 2EQ.