ROB ADAMS tracked down the two band-leaders presenting projects in this months An Tobar Commissions tour

FIDDLER Aidan O’Rourke and pianist Dave Milligan have crossed paths many times before, not least in the folk big band the Unusual Suspects, and in the summer of 2008, although not working simultaneously, they both found themselves on Mull. There, at the invitation of Gordon Maclean, the visionary director of Tobermory’s An Tobar arts centre, they were to create startling new music in often quite startling circumstances.

Aidan O'Rourke (photo - Craig McKay)

The results, respectively O’Rourke’s An Tobar suite and Shops by the Dave Milligan Trio, have been available on CD for some time. Now they’re about to begin a tour for the Scottish Arts Council’s Tune Up series in a double bill that will see the separate projects reprised, and the eight musicians involved converge in a new piece that O’Rourke and Milligan are co-writing – even as you read this – through the means of modern communications technology.

I caught up with them as O’Rourke toured England with acclaimed folk adventurers Lau and Milligan criss-crossed Sweden with international fiddle team The String Sisters, and began by asking O’Rourke, an islander himself from Easdale Island near Oban, about his feelings towards Mull and the An Tobar project.

AIDAN O’ROURKE: Mull itself is an inspiring place just to travel to, but once you get there, it’s so welcoming. And An Tobar is the same, very welcoming, great location up there on the hill, good coffee. I’m sure that’s part of the arts centre’s success. But what’s really special is Gordon, the energy he puts into the place and the ideas he has. He’s one of these catalysts that makes a lot of things happen right across the board – folk, jazz, classical – and a lot of what he champions is quite left-field, which lends itself to new music.

ROB ADAMS: Did the commission have an actual brief or were you left to your own devices?

AIDAN O’ROURKE: I was asked to compose an hour’s worth of music and the original idea was to write about the wells that are dotted round the island. An Tobar itself means the well in Gaelic, and Martyn Bennett had his studio in the arts centre which he called The Well. Unlike Dave, who had quite a challenging experience [see below], I could have gone off and written this music anywhere, but I chose to hang around An Tobar for a week.

It was actually too hot to work – I found that every time I was in Mull, they were having this Mediterranean weather, with the sun splitting the rocks. So I’d go off and see various locations during the day and write music into the night when it was cooler. In the end, while some of what I wrote was inspired by these places, I found An Tobar itself, its ethos and the people who passed through it were the real inspiration.

RON ADAMS: How did you go about writing the music; did you have a set group of musicians in mind from the start?

AIDAN O’ROURKE: Well, composing for me isn’t a magical thing where inspiration comes and I jot it down. In fact, until I started work on the new piece Dave and I are writing for the Tune Up tour, I hadn’t written anything in about a year because I’ve been out touring so much with Lau and other projects. With me, composing music is graft. I have to make time for it and then sit down and the ideas will flow. Little things occasionally come to me when I’m travelling and I’ll put them on my dictaphone but it’s mainly about sitting and putting pen to paper or jamming on the fiddle and recording what I play.

I didn’t have a set personnel or even a set number of musicians in mind when I began writing, but I did have a pool of musicians that I wanted to work with at some point and Catriona McKay was one of them. She’s such an open-minded musician, as well as being a real virtuoso on the harp. So once the melodies started to come – and my stuff is generally very much melodically driven, one riff at a time – the musicians started to come to mind, too. And once I compiled what I had written I began to firm up the line-up.

Catriona McKay (photo - Louis de Carlo)

I already had Catriona on the list. Phil Bancroft seemed an obvious choice to play the melodies I had on saxophone, and getting Martin [Green] to play accordion, more from an electronics and effects point of view than the way he plays in Lau, appealed to me. I hadn’t thought about a collaboration with Dave’s trio but I steered clear of bass and drums and brought in Martin O’Neill on bodhran and percussion which has proved quite prescient given the circumstances of the tour.

ROB ADAMS: You actually worked in the room that housed Martyn Bennett’s studio in An Tobar; as an old friend of his, how did this affect you?

AIDAN O’ROURKE: It was really inspiring. But then, Martyn was a really inspiring guy as well as musician. He was a year or two older than me and he helped me through some awkward teenage years mainly because I was quite shy in those days and he wasn’t. He was so enthusiastic and so unguarded about what he played and what he knew. He never held back, he’d just be straight in there, saying “D’you know this tune; d’you know that tune?”, and if you didn’t know them, he’d show you them – and he could play them all on fiddle, pipes, whistle, all brilliantly.

So, I knew this room was where Martyn had put together his Grit album, which I thought was an amazing piece of work, and although the music I was working on was nothing like Grit, a few of the melodies I wrote were inspired by Martyn. More than that, though, just the philosophy that Martyn had, the idea that there are no boundaries in music, really helped me. Working in that room made me feel free to go anywhere musically.

I knew from speaking to Gordon as a commissioner that I could make the music as extreme as I wanted, although equally, if I’d come up with something straight down the line folky, he’d have been just as supportive. The more composing I do, though, the more I realise that this isn’t about me. It’s about who’s commissioned the music, who’s playing it, who’s listening to it. Having no limits sounds great: total freedom, but actually that’s quite scary, too, in a way.

ROB ADAMS: Can you tell us about the piece that you and Dave are co-writing?

AIDAN O’ROURKE: Ah, co-writing from afar, you mean. It’s interesting, and like everything you do as a composer, whether it’s finding out the capabilities of the harp – which I had to do to write for Catriona – or whatever, it’s all part of the learning curve. We’re both working on the Sibelius computer programme, which means that we can email ideas back and forth. It’s like Sibelius ping pong. I come up with a melody and send it to Dave to develop it or add his own take on it.

Basically, this is going to be the finale on the tour and it’ll involve all eight musicians. I’m sure it’ll develop as we play it because the common thread between the two bands is the improvising element. Dave has a foot in the folk camp and there are jazz elements in my band. Getting everyone together to rehearse is going to be a bit of a nightmare but that’s good because it means everyone’s busy. It just makes you think, though: how did people manage to put bands together in the days before mobiles and emails?

OVER to Dave Milligan, then, and I began by asking him how his connection with An Tobar come about?

DAVE MILLIGAN: I’ve spent a lot of time in Mull, and in particular in Tobermory. I think I did my first gig at An Tobar around ten years ago, and just fell in love with the place. Gordon Maclean has always been a great supporter of the projects that myself and Corrina [Dave’s life and musical partner, harpist Corrina Hewat] have been involved in, and we’ve always loved working there.

Tom Bancroft, Dave Milligan and Tom Lyne (photo - Lieve Boussauw)

ROB ADAMS: In his liner note on the album Shops, Gordon admits to sensing doubt when he spoke to the trio about the idea; what were your initial impressions about writing music about the shops in Tobermory?

DAVE MILLIGAN: To be honest, I thought at first that it sounded a bit daft. But I’ve known Gordon a long time and I trust his judgement – so I had to hear him out at least! But knowing his fondness for an unusual project, and then realising its context – this was the last of a few pieces he had commissioned various musicians to write to celebrate different aspects of life on Mull – it suddenly seemed like something we had to do.

We’ve kind of made a joke about the fact that the performing-in-the-shops part of the project was what sold it to us, but it’s true. When Gordon first talked to us about it, he was pretty low-key and matter-of-fact about the whole thing. We initially thought that we were getting involved in a bit of light-hearted quirkiness, but after we got there, we soon realised it wasn’t so much about the shops, but more about the identity and survival of a community’s way of life, and that was a pretty powerful thing to be involved in.”

ROB ADAMS: Having a deadline no doubt always helps when you’re composing but in this case, you had a week to compose, rehearse and record a whole album’s worth of music with a concert at the end of that week. What are your thoughts on this?

DAVE MILLIGAN: The timescale was a factor, but it always is. If we’d been given two weeks, we would have taken two weeks. But we only had one, and we had to write the music and record it before the concert at the end of the week, as well as working with some local musicians and youngsters who took part in the performance.

The music was all written within a couple of days – when we arrived, the first thing we did was go round the shops and meet the owners and folk who worked there. [Drummer] Tom Bancroft did some recordings of interviews and sampled some sounds, and then we just got started on the writing.

ROB ADAMS: All three of you [Dave Milligan (piano), Tom Lyne (Bass), Tom Bancroft (drums] wrote pieces; was that always the plan, and as the bandleader what are your feelings on spreading the work in this way?

DAVE MILLIGAN: The plan was always that it would be a joint writing project, but I don’t think any of us really knew how that would work. When it came to it, we all just started writing individually without really talking about it – I think somewhere in my head I imagined we would eventually get together and try and contribute something to each other’s pieces, but it just didn’t really happen that way. It’s hard to know where inspiration really comes from, but for some reason we each were naturally drawn to different shops, so it worked out perfectly.

ROB ADAMS: Did you delegate in any way or is the album’s running order – three tunes by you followed by three each by the Toms – a happy accident? The album does seem to flow and work naturally towards a very logical, satisfying conclusion.

DAVE MILLIGAN: A bit of both really. Tom Lyne’s ‘Closing’ was what we finished the first concert with and it was a very powerful conclusion to the project, so it felt very natural to finish the album with it too. The order that the different shops appear in on the CD is geographical; if you start at the south end of Tobermory Main St. and walk north, you’ll come to each shop in the same order. It was just a coincidence that the first two were mine, the second two were Tom B’s and the last one Tom L’s.

ROB ADAMS: What are your feelings looking back on the project now? Is it still quite fresh two years or so on?

DAVE MILLIGAN: It’s strange to think that we basically recorded the music within a day or two, and in some cases within hours of having written it. That’s very unusual for any musician and I don’t imagine anyone would choose to record a normal album in that way, but that was the way the project was supposed to work.

I think our most powerful memory of the week was the concert, because that’s when the music really made sense in the context of it being a community-based experience. When we recorded the music we basically did a couple of takes of each piece, and then just kind of stopped thinking about the CD – there wasn’t really time with all the workshops and songs we were working on with the local kids and musicians.

So after the week was over, the next time we heard the music was a good few months later when it came time to mix the tracks. It was interesting to hear our own music as it was at the point of conception because even at that point the material had already developed from a live point of view. And even now, in some ways, it’s moved on a bit more, so when I hear the album, those particular versions of the tunes transport me right back to that week and to Browns hardware store, or wherever… But the thing I love about performing this material still is to try and keep it fresh without losing that connection to the people and places that inspired it.

ROB ADAMS: You’re writing a piece with Aidan for the tour. Aidan describes the process as Sibelius ping pong. Are you enjoying this?

DAVE MILLIGAN: Yeah, it’s a pretty interesting way to write music, but Corrina and I have written a fair bit of music together, and that’s generally the way we work too. I can’t really imagine sitting down with another musician in the same room with a blank piece of manuscript and starting from scratch: “OK, let’s start with an F-sharp… you pick the next note.”

It’s never going to work, is it? I think when you get inspired to roll with an idea then you have to give yourself the space to complete it somehow. Even if you only end up with a short melody, it’s still a pure creative statement that you can pass on to someone else and they can respond to it. Maybe they’ll change the harmony, or embellish the melody in some way. The interesting part is that they’ll certainly come up with something that you won’t.

ROB ADAMS: Are you writing with the instrumentation and personalities involved in mind, or do you prefer to shape the music the way you hear it in your head then find a way of playing it?

DAVE MILLIGAN: I guess I start with the latter, then try and modify it to suit the instruments. But I suppose that’s where the joint writing comes in – Aidan will have different ideas about textures and arrangement. It’s a good line-up so I’m looking forward to the sound we’ll all make together!

© Rob Adams, 2010

Links

• An Tobar
• Tune Up An Tobar Page (Tour Dates)
• Aidan O’Rourke
• Dave Milligan
• Rob Adams