The Harper’s Tale

Harpist and singer CORRINA HEWAT will be touring in July with Bachué, the band she co-leads with pianist David Milligan. Corrina tells the Arts Journal about her start in music, and their bands Bachué and The Unusual Suspects.

ARTS JOURNAL: We’ll talk about Bachué in a moment, but tell us first of all how you came to take up the harp?

CORRINA HEWAT: It was through a woman called Christine Martin, who is now a music publisher in Skye, and has done lots of traditional music. She lived in Tain when we were on the Black Isle, and she gave me lessons. I actually came across her in a youth hostel, and she let me have a shot of the harp then, and it felt so natural.

AJ: What age were you at that point?

CH: I was 12, and had been playing piano since I was 8. I had also being playing a little bit of fiddle, but the fiddle was immediately dropped when I had a go at harp. I knew it was the instrument for me, and I had a bit of a natural talent for it – by comparison the fiddle was so hard! If you have a grounding in piano, I think the harp feels like a natural step.

AJ: You live near Edinburgh these days, but how did you come to the Black Isle originally?

CH: I was born in Edinburgh, but my father was a teacher and got a job at Alness Academy, and we moved up there. It was the saving of us, in fact, because we were living in Muirhouse in Edinburgh, which isn’t exactly a desirable district. I was eight and my sister Jade, who works for Celtic Connections, was under three. We moved into the schoolhouse, and I grew up on the Black Isle. We moved just in time to give me a reasonable local accent!

AJ: You then went off to Leeds to study music, where you met David Milligan?

CH: Yes, although there was a step in between. I’d gone to the RSAMD in Glasgow originally, and had started a BA in performance on the pedal harp, but after a year they asked me to take a year out and get my history of music together. In that year I came across the Leeds course, which was a jazz course.

It was hard work keeping up, and everybody else had instruments that were more suited to jazz than the pedal harp!

AJ: What was the appeal of that?

CH: I got really excited at the prospect of doing something that wasn’t classical music. I was already interested in traditional music, but it was all around me, really, and there were no formal courses like there are now at that time. The jazz thing was something that I had to get my head round quickly – I didn’t really know much about it. Leeds was actually the closest place to Inverness that did jazz at that time, and I was able to get a grant from the local council to go there.

AJ: And you presumably took to it when you got there?

CH: It was really an attempt to move away from the classical side of things, but not move away from learning. Once I was there I realised that this was something I really wanted to learn about, and when I got Moira McCaffrey as my tutor in my second year, it really took off for me. She came out of the Irish small-harp tradition, and there were a lot of different styles going on in that course – it was hard work keeping up, and everybody else had instruments that were more suited to jazz than the pedal harp!

AJ: So you were still trying to adapt it to the classical concert instrument at that stage?

CH: Yes, and it was only really afterwards that I concluded the pedal harp wasn’t the instrument for jazz, or for traditional music either! I was hiring one at the time and had to give it back, so I went back to small harp again, and have been playing it ever since.

AJ: Did that combination of folk, jazz and classical give you a good base to work from?

CH: It did, and maybe the disadvantage is that I have too much going on all the time!

AJ: Okay, let’s talk a bit about Bachué, which is basically you and your partner, the jazz pianist David Milligan – when did you form that band?

CH: We came back to Edinburgh in 1994 or so, and we formed the band originally as Bachué Café, and released our first album in 1996 at Celtic Connections.

AJ: You have done two more since then, the latest last year, which isn’t exactly flooding the marketplace.

CH: It’s not, no! We have our own label, so we don’t have a record company pressuring us to do it. Because it is just David and me, and sometimes Donald Hay on percussion, it means we don’t work on it enough because we are together all the time, and it’s always easy to say no, we’ll leave that till later, let’s focus on something else more pressing and come back to it. But it is something we really love doing, and it is really a case of finding blocks of time when we can really put our energies into it, and not be trying to juggle umpteen things at once all the time.

We have been playing together for so long now that we can pretty much feel what each of us is going to play, and we can keep out of each other’s way.

AJ: You concentrate on electroharp in that setting – why is that?

CH: In a practical sense it makes the sound balance much easier if we are working with a grand piano, which tends to obscure the acoustic harp, especially if we have the drums as well. Camac, the harp makers, sponsored me with the electroharp – it arrived through the post one day. They were pushing to get the instrument out there and let people hear it.

AJ: What are its qualities?

CH: The tone is different, so there is a bit more difference in sound between the electroharp and piano than with the harp and piano. That similarity can work to our advantage as well as being a disadvantage, but the electroharp helps to establish a distinctive sound in that context.

AJ: How do you make use of those sounds?

CH: Sometimes we arrange the music so that we are deliberately right on top of each other and filling the same space, and other times we keep the two registers well apart. We have been playing together for so long now that we can pretty much feel what each of us is going to play, and we can keep out of each other’s way.

AJ: Presumably that gets even more complicated when you add Donald’s drums, or Colin Steele’s trumpet, as on ‘The Butterfly’ album?

CH: It is even more complicated with drums, because that essentially means we have three sets of percussion instruments playing together. One of our thoughts in asking Colin to get involved in the album was to have a different sound altogether, the sound of a blown instrument, and the way he plays fits in really well too. He is up for doing gigs with us as well, but he’s a very busy man, so we’ll see how that works out.

AJ: You are a singer as well as a harpist, not only in Bachué, but also with Shine and The Unusual Suspects, to mention just two of your other regulars – how did you get into that side of it?

CH: I didn’t really think of myself as a singer until I came back to Scotland from Leeds. I had always sung, and I did a little bit of singing at Leeds as an extra, but it was never something I was going to do. It was Colin Hynd at Celtic Connections who said to us that we really wanted to have some singing in the band – if it was all instrumental, he reckoned we were going to cut our audience by half.

AJ: And you took him up on that?

CH: I knew I could sing a bit, so I said okay, let’s do it, and I gradually grew more confident. I still think of myself as a harper first and a singer afterwards, but I sing in virtually everything I do now, and I’m occasionally hired to sing and not play the harp at all, which I still find a bit strange. My mum [Caroline Hewat of Balnain House and TMSA fame] and dad always sing, so that is very much part of my family background.

I had never had the experience of audiences responding so enthusiastically before. Even the ‘Scots Women’ project didn’t have that same sense of raw energy coming from the audience response

AJ: We should say a word about The Unusual Suspects here – I imagine you two have your work cut out directing that band?

CH: What I find most difficult is David and I running the band jointly! Neither of us had ever run a big band before The Unusual Suspects, and we had never tried to share that kind of responsibility as musical directors, and that made it very hard. We both want to be in charge and get on with it, basically, and to direct the band and also be on top of your own part in it is also hard – I realised at the start of the last tour that I knew what everybody else was doing inside out, but didn’t have a clue what I was supposed to be doing myself!

AJ: The musical logistics must be complicated?

CH: We have a huge rhythm section as well as all the rest of the band, and it is a delicate business trying to work out who should play what and when, and all of that is very difficult.

AJ: Does it involve a lot of work off the stage as well?

CH: Huge. There is a huge amount of admin and promotion and so on to deal with as well, and we are learning to step back from that and bring in other people who know those jobs better than we do. I think a lot of musicians are increasingly having to deal with all of that because there is no support agency to take it off their hands, and most of us aren’t good business people and administrators. We are lucky to have a good agent in John Barrow at Stoneyport, but they can only do so much, and the agent route doesn’t work for all musicians anyway. It’s a big problem for many musicians, and it’s also a huge drain on their energy and creativity.

AJ: It must be very satisfying when it all comes together on stage, though?

CH: Absolutely – I had never had the experience of audiences responding so enthusiastically before. Even the ‘Scots Women’ project didn’t have that same sense of raw energy coming from the audience response, and that was actually a wee bit scary as well as very exciting, because it leaves the big question of how do we keep that level up.

AJ: You released a live album earlier this year, mainly recorded at Eden Court – was that a practical decision?

CH: Yes. It was great gig, and right at the end of the tour, so it was all really played in by then, but there are things that would have been different if we had been able to do it in a studio. But there was no way we could get these musicians together in a studio, and I think we have captured the energy of the live show.

AJ: Is a studio recording an ambition?

CH: We would love to do a studio album, and we will be looking at that at some point. The other thing that has happened is that we have had approaches from festivals abroad to go and do an Unusual Suspects with local musicians in their countries, rather than the Scottish band. If that is the only way they can afford to do it, and we’ll look at that. We are really keen on pushing the Scottish band, but if it’s the only way to get the music out is to do it locally, that might be worth doing as well. It’s good that festivals are interested – they want that sound we have.

AJ: Thanks, Corrina.

Bachué’s tour dates in July:

• Invershin Hotel, Invershin, Sutherland, Saturday 2 July 2005
• Lyth Arts Centre, Lyth, Caithness, Sunday 3 July 2005
• The Ceilidh Place, Ullapool, Ross-shire, Tuesday 5 July 2005
• An Tarbeart Heritage Centre, Tarbert, Argyll, Friday 8 July 2005
• Ardkinglas House, Cairndow, Argyll, Saturday 9 July 2005
• An Tobar Arts Centre, Tobermory, Isle of Mull Friday 15 July-Saturday 16 July 2005
• Bunessan Hall, Bunessan, Isle of Mull, Sunday 17 July 2005
• Sabhal mor Ostaig, Sleat, Isle of Skye, Tuesday 19 July 2005
• Lochcarron Village Hall, Lochcarron, Ross-shire, Wednesday 2005

© Kenny Mathieson, 2005

Related Links

• Corrina Hewat website
• Bachué website
• The Unusual Suspects website