Andy Thorburn

1 Feb 2005 in Highland, Music

Andy’s Long Strange Trip

ANDY THORBURN tells the Arts Journal about the long journey that took him to the making of his first album of solo piano music

WHY a solo piano album? It’s about time, that’s why. I’ve been playing the instrument, after all, for almost five decades, covering just about every musical genre imaginable (and a few that weren’t). Having worked the circuit from classical to country, jazz to folk, easy listening to rock’n’roll, on both sides of the Atlantic, I’ve latterly carved out a niche on the contemporary Celtic scene.

On the new album, however, simply entitled Piano, I wanted to look beyond my usual accompanying role, and step into the spotlight with a solo set of my own compositions. It’s something I’d been thinking about for a while, and I’d got to the point where I’d accumulated a body of material that worked well on piano, and worked together as a collection. I suppose the album as a whole is an answer to all those times I’ve been asked, ‘What kind of music do you play?’

It’s taken a long time to get round to it, but then I have been busy with a few other things. . . .

In addition to playing (on accordion as well as piano) with bands like Blazin’ Fiddles and the Ghillies, I’ve been doing a lot of composing, taking in traditional-style tunes, extended ensemble works, and music for theatre and dance productions. I’ve served as musical director on a string of high-profile projects, featuring anything from seven to 250 participants, and I do a lot of teaching as well as advising the government on music curriculum development in schools. I’ve also been in demand as a creative manuscript typesetter, not to mention my annual stint as an official inspector of seed potatoes – but that’s another story.


“It was the whole social side of that culture which was the real magic for me”


You could call me a keen student of new things. A lot of these different aspects of what I do originally came about just through someone asking me to get involved with a particular project, and me being willing to try things I’d not done before. I also love working with other people; I get a lot of drive from that whole collaborative dynamic.

I was born in London but brought up in Lancashire, and started on piano when I was five. I was a boy chorister in Oxford, then my parents moved us to Los Angeles. I joined my first band in Vail, Colorado, where I was skiing all day and playing music every night – just heaven, really. The musical side, especially, was a real revelation. I’d done the hothouse classical thing, working with high-powered teachers and played all sorts of difficult stuff, so there was an element of simple rebellion from that. But it was also the discovery of that whole social dimension to playing music, the sheer fun you could have with it, that really got me hooked.

I came back to the UK when my Vietnam draft papers arrived one day, and terminated my idyll in abrupt fashion. I studied a Bachelor of Education degree in Leeds, specialising in music and linguistics. Then I moved to Scotland, to Banffshire, where I qualified as a ski instructor, and worked as a gardener on an estate.

That was where I first discovered Scottish music – I made friends with some people in the area who played traditional tunes, and they started inviting me along to pub sessions. Again, it was the whole social side of that culture which was the real magic for me; the way people just joined in together, the lack of protocol – that’s very important for me in music. I like music that’s rhythmic and fun and exciting, and not over-complicated, whether it’s trad or rock’n’roll: I like accessibility.

I spent time in Austria, Norway and Canada after that playing in a whole rake of bands, mostly country, blues and rock’n’roll. It was a hectic, mighty, life-changing time; very wide-ranging in terms of both music and experience. I came back to Scotland in 1987, this time settling in Edinburgh, and ran my own music services business for five years, meanwhile getting stuck into the city’s lively pub session scene, before the siren song of the Highlands drew me north again, to his current home outside Inverness.

That time in Edinburgh was really the start of a lot of the things I do now, besides playing. All the new electronic and computer technology was hitting the music scene in a big way, and I’d studied that side of the business when I was in Canada. I had one of the first Apple Macs in Scotland, and ended up doing everything from advertising jingles to CDs for people’s weddings.


“It’s a particularly nice piano, and perfect for one of the things I wanted to do with the album”


I’ve worked a lot with Grey Coast Theatre Company up in Thurso composing music for a series of their touring productions. Blazin’ Fiddles have been running since 1998, and I’ve played with bands like Mouth Music, Wolfstone and Salsa Celtica.

I wrote Tuath gu Deas, a choral work for twelve voices in Scots, Gaelic, English and Latin, which was a New Voices commission from Celtic Connections in 1999. Other big projects include being musical director for Highland Wedding, featuring 250 Scottish schoolchildren and performed in London’s Millennium Dome in 2000, and Gluaseachd an Chuain Siar, working with seven top Gaelic singers to create the opening concert of the 2003 Hebridean Celtic Festival on the Isle of Lewis. The Song of Wick was another grand-scale community production, staged in Caithness.

It was during that that I stumbled across the Steinway grand I used for the new CD. It’s housed at Ackergill Tower, a 15th century cliff top mansion perched precipitously on Scotland’s northeast coast, which is also home to a private musical society. It’s a particularly nice piano, and perfect for one of the things I wanted to do with the album, which was really to capture that live sound and texture of the hammer hitting the string – and then all the different things that a piano can do with that basic mechanism.

There’s a real atmosphere at Ackergill, too: all sorts of horrible things happened there hundreds of years ago, when the local clans were fighting each other. We recorded there in December, when it was all dark and stormy, so it really got quite spooky sometimes.

The material on Piano has been drawn from a variety of sources. Several pieces were originally composed for theatre or dance productions, including ‘Marni Swanson of the Grey Coast’, which is becoming a bit of a contemporary folk standard. There are melodies lifted from both Highland Wedding and The Song of Wick; others I wrote in tribute to a particular person or favourite landscape, ranging widely from lively dance tunes to lyrical slow airs.

A lot of them are tunes that had somehow taken on a life of their own, often through other artists having played them. The way it’s worked out, there’s roughly one tune from each of the last ten years, so that feels quite apt, and satisfying. I’m not one for making great statements, but to me the album feels like an expression of where I am today as a musician, and how I’ve got here.
 

© Andy Thorburn, 2005

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