Strathclyde Suite, Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow, 27 January 2009

Laura MacDonald (photo - Jim Pollock)

THE FIRST time I heard Martyn Bennett’s Grit, some five years or so ago, it was the music I had been waiting for all my life. At once inspiringly danceable and deeply felt, full of musical vitamins, minerals and fibre, it was and still is a satisfying meal for the ears and the soul.

Very few albums since have come close. After his tragically early death, his friends formed the Martyn Bennett Trust to celebrate what he left them, and to encourage the making of music that continued the richness of his legacy, whether in Uist or Bolivia, Argentina or Edinburgh. The Trust commissions pieces from across all musical genres, and this celebration contained a jewelled handful of them.

The opening work was by the Princess of Kidsamonium, that very fine jazz saxophonist Laura Macdonald, who had composed a beautiful work featuring Fraser Fifield on uillean pipes, Phil Bancroft’s smooth creamy sax playing, Greg Lawson playing at times almost beyond the range of human hearing, so far up the neck of the fiddle was he (“Greg doesn’t have a dusty end to his fingerboard”, said Adam Sutherland in the interval), some superbly lyrical piano from David Milligan, and the composer herself playing elegaically over the drums, piano, and strings of Mr McFall’s Chamber, augmented by some friends, including fiddler Anna-Wendy Stevenson.

The second piece was even lovelier, starting with an arrangement of ‘Peewits’, composed by Bennett for a stage production of Kidnapped. This was lump in the throat music that broke the heart with its poignant beauty, a delicate Scots riposte to Vaughan Williams ‘The Lark Ascending’. It led into two Fifield compositions, ‘Kilchourn Ferry’and a piece for Highland pipes which, as yet untitled, is becoming known as ‘The Beast’, rich string layers cushioning the pipes’ wail.

After a brief interval kilted DJ Dolphin Boy came on with a box of wires to add his synthesised sequences to a piece which he had made with Phil Bancroft, reflecting the Bothy Culture era when Bennett’s fusion of electronic dance music and traditional instruments took Scotland’s music scene by storm.

Next we were treated to a Bill Wells composition called ‘The Howl’, which opened with recorder balanced achingly against Kevin Mackenzie’s pure and simple guitarwork. If that restless sprite had lived long enough to age as his friends have, his music might now be sounding like this, which is a large part of the Trust’s aims, to keep that flame alive.

And then it was the final thrust, as compere and percussionist Tom Bancroft opened with extracts from interviews with Martyn Bennett shortly before his death. Tears were surreptitiously wiped from many a cheek. Another DJ Dolphin/Phil Bancroft work being aired for the first time, it insinuated itself deep into the groove for total, surroundsound danceability.

This show, like A Highland Fiddler, was a shining example of what music can be when it is played from the uttermost depths of the heart with total commitment and passion; this is a much rarer phenomenon than you might think; it should not be confused with technique or professionalism, and is always, always worth seeking out.

© Jennie Macfie, 2009

Links

• Celtic Connections
• Martyn Bennett Trust