London Viola Player, Violinist & Arranger For Hire

Martin Ash LTCL

Monthly Archives: January 2017

Some things old, some things new

So gigging year 2017 finally gets under way! I say finally, but to be honest getting any gigs in January, even the last Saturday, is more than many bands hope to achieve, so no real grounds for complaint.

The Music Mill in Plumstead has hosted the Filthy Spectacula twice and earned extensive description in these pages, which I shan’t repeat now. This was the first time I’d persuaded them to book Kindred Spirit on the strength of the connection though (and, by the same token, the first time I’d persuaded the band to accept the booking!). I can confidently say all our gambles paid off.

January’s fabled tendency to no cash, righteous resolutions, miserable weather and miserable behaviour didn’t prevent the Mill having almost as full and equally as appreciative a crowd as usual for another, to them, unknown quantity.

There might not have been all that much new about our set to a KS regular, though it’s hitherto been unusual for us to play a full evening by ourselves with such a high proportion of original material (something that is changing this year, looking ahead). However, with that line-up, Elaine’s generally extended-form songs, the highlighted improvised solos and duets and lots of other touches that have led to us adopting the ‘prog’ label, our business as usual is generally a crowd’s journey of discovery. Luckily they like something new and something off the beaten track at the Mill!

We did also have a new face, in now-inducted ongoing dep drummer Aleem Saleh, doing a great job on his first Kindred Spirit gig – and keeping me pushed towards the audience with the seven cymbals plus tambourine of what is apparently his smallest normal gigging kit (the full rig runs to five toms rather than three, just for starters … ).

I was also going wireless for the first time with an audience, and in somewhere like the Mill with no actual stage edge, a smallish venue and a crowd that I know appreciate a certain amount (all right, almost any amount) of putting on a show this was a gift for finding extra space, dancing in other people’s solos (or my own), touring the crowd and converging for a close-up on the people filming parts of the set on their phones …

All in all a good night for all parties. We’ll be back, though there’s such a long queue of acts wanting to play the Mill that it won’t be until the summer at least. I’ll be back a lot sooner, as the Filthy Spectacula play there on the 18th of February. Though we have Diskollective‘s freak-out oriented Funeral Party in north London to launch our gigging year the previous weekend, on the 10th. Kindred Spirit are back in action on the 24th in Weybridge. It’s all picking up speed again, so catch you soon!

Notice anything different around here?

In fact, notice how everything seems a little different around here?

Over the last few months, the wonderfully creative, patient and thorough Helen Lesley (contact details on request) has been working through redesigning my website. The gradual shifts in content grouping, deleting and adding pages and making corresponding changes to what text, links and media are where, have been visible as they go along, but the new design as such (theme, colour scheme, the homepage which is completely different) had to hide in backroom test versions until we were ready to move the whole new thing to my domain name. Which we have now done, so please have a dig around and enjoy my new web home.

Of course, one of the beauties of the digital sphere is that instead of a major redesign refresh being an end product that you’re stuck with until you do the next one, it’s more setting a baseline to which you can make innumerable continuous-improvement tweaks based on feedback (or, less advisably, random whims). So let me know what you think of the new e-threads; the whole site is still built in a platform that allows me (without much technical knowledge, certainly nothing specialist) to adjust almost any detail within the whole.

And if anyone I know is seeking a web designer, I would certainly recommend Helen as being very good to work with and having that sought-after ability to get inside the client’s image of themselves – even if you don’t understand that so clearly yourself at the start of the process – and pick on the things that will communicate that identity effectively online.

Unleashed

Now, who can tell me what this is?

wireless kit.JPG

There’s a technical answer of course (that’s a Trantec Systems S3500, plus a couple of extra leads). And there happens to be a social one too (that’s my Christmas present from my brother. Thank you Richard!).

But from a musician or rather performer perspective, as first employed in a fully amplified rehearsal Saturday gone, this is freedom.

Freedom having to be attached to a 30-foot leash whenever I’m playing amplified – a dog-lead that is very inextendible and rather given to getting and staying wrapped around every obstacle it can possibly find, and that will yank my instrument out of my hands rather than pull out (the socket on my electric violin is surprisingly tight).

Freedom not just to go further from where I’m connected to the PA, but perhaps more importantly to simply move freely without cables snarling up my ankles, and like as not getting tied up with the cable of another instrumentalist so we end up doing something between a maypole dance and musical Twister.

All of this can seem very techie and modern – using a belt pack and a radio receiver that needs mains power essentially to replace a piece of wire. It might even smack (as perhaps the most tongue-in-cheek of my wandering through the crowd soloing antics have done, and will do) of classic rock-n-roll excess, a somewhat Spinal Tap desire to push the kit ever further whether or not there is any musical substance behind it (and I do remember that wireless kits are discussed (in context of lead guitar gear) in one scene of Spinal Tap).

But actually I think this is a step forward that takes me back towards my roots.

Whatever else you might dispute about where my roots lie, they definitely sit with acoustic music and playing acoustically. I didn’t start using amplified instruments on a regular basis until I’d been playing for a good 15 years or more. And one of the things I miss about that when I’m playing amped up gigs is freedom of movement. Having to play into a microphone is probably the worst, because even when sat down in an orchestral concert I will move the instrument around quite a lot (and a lot more if I’m leading a section, as is fairly conventional). But unless balance and the acoustics of the space are a really significant issue, you can also play acoustically from anywhere in the room – and while moving around it. To date, my most elaborately mobile performances have been true acoustic ones, in a folk or gigging context without sheet music, where I could use the whole room uninhibited if I wanted.

To this day, I rarely pay much practical heed to the need to stay in front of ‘my’ monitor to get the right foldback mix in a setup with wedges. I’m more likely to use my position on the stage plan as a starting point, and the place where I change effects (in Kindred Spirit gigs where I use them significantly) and do backing vocals (and, at Filthy Spectacula gigs, stage banter). (I think a Britney mike and another belt pack might genuinely be too much, especially as many Kindred Spirit gigs also involve in-ear monitors with a wireless belt pack receiver of their own.)

In that sense then, ditching the wire is a move back towards pre-1950s performance modes and traditions (though there will be the disjunction that wherever I play from, the sound will come out of the front of house speakers. Something which big gig crowds seem remarkably used to). However, I think we can still assume that the most-noticed and most memorable consequence of it will be even freer roaming around and off stage during solos, jams and playouts, even if I think it’s as much about not worrying about tripping over …

[insert turn of year cliché here]

I did try to think of a witty title for this post in my usual vein. Really I did. But, nah. Nothing forthcoming.

For most musicians, New Year’s Eve is less a question of ‘have you got a gig?’ and more of ‘what’s your gig this year?’. Some of the booking agents have been sounding increasingly desperate on Facebook in the last few weeks, trying to fill gigs at two or three times the usual function rates.

I played out the old year and ushered in the new with Kindred Spirit duo, expanding to trio on some numbers with assistance from my talented and wonderful girlfriend Stevie. The interesting part of the experience for me was that we were at a restaurant – namely the Michelin-listed Fish in Sutton Courtenay – and our first set was during pre-meal drinks and dinner service. (By our second, people were lingering over dessert and coffee, drinks orders were starting to transfer from the floor staff to the bar, and dancing was becoming an acceptable idea.)

Now I have a moderate amount of background music experience. But I would place it firmly under two headings. One is chamber music – well, in a generous sense: acoustic string groups from a quartet downwards, playing fully scored instrumental pieces, even if that includes jazz, Latin and pop transcriptions. The other is acoustic instrumental jazz small groups.

So providing background music as an amplified duo with vocals on every number was a bit of a shift of gear. And it was certainly a shift from the bar gigs that have been the backbone of the Kindred Spirit duo diary for the last 9 months or so. From tending to turn up over hubbub and chatter, and do almost as many up-tempo numbers as possible to make an impression, we were turning down (and down again, after feedback from the nearest tables) and picking all the most mellow songs that we could remember we knew for the first hour. Since Elaine and I both use solid-body instruments (albeit with acoustic-like end result sounds) whenever we’re plugged in, and Elaine’s smaller speakers feed almost no sound backwards, I don’t think I have ever played a gig that was so quiet ‘on stage’ – there was very little for the monitor to overcome, and playing an acoustic violin would certainly have been louder.

None of this is a complaint (and I would rather have gigs that are very quiet on stage than the all too common ones which are very loud and involve a juggling act of using earplugs and then sometimes having to get myself turned up even louder in monitors so I can hear myself clearly afterwards!) – but it was an unusual experience and a learning one.

The second set, terminating with countdown and ‘Auld Lang Syne’, was somewhat a return to business as usual, at least concerning slightly more evident and sustained audience engagement (arguably background music doesn’t really have an audience unless you’re doing it wrong, although there are usually some people who would otherwise be staring into space and so are giving the music most of their attention) – the volume didn’t go up except in the monitor! We were sorry not to find time for a response to the request (inspired by Stevie’s sax playing) for some Latin jazz, but I was intrigued by one gentleman commenting on our having slanted the set towards 60s pop and inquiring whether that had been a decision based on demographic. We responded perfectly honestly that we hadn’t planned for a demographic, had simply turned up with a fairly well-distributed core set list and followed what got a good response! Largely proof of the enduring status of 60s guitar groups as common cultural currency …

January is usually a very quiet time for professional musicians, and I’m no real exception. However, Kindred Spirit (all five of us) and the Mill are hoping that four weeks will be long enough for any resolutions about spending more time at the gym / with the kids and less in the pub / at gigs to be quietly abandoned by the people of Plumstead and wider south-east London, as 28 January sees my first gig to take place entirely in 2017. Kindred Spirit already have one gig in the diary for February too.

The Filthy Spectacula won’t be out in public in January, but we will be busy trying out new songs and getting ourselves together for no less than three gigs next month (one of them a semi-private event doubling as a live video shoot), plus making our first 360 video. And the work of musically building up the Downtown Funk goes on, with booking enquiries already in discussion.

I nearly called this post (in tribute to ‘Steampunk Revolution’) ‘Out with the old, in with the old’, but actually I get the feeling 2017 is going to be anything but business as usual for me. The times they are still a-changing.