Meet the artist Saturday afternoon and Saturday evening concert
There is no doubt that after 35 years as a professional musician Martin is,
right now, better than ever. Widely acknowledged as one of the finest acoustic
and slide guitar players in the world, his interpretations of traditional
songs are masterpieces of storytelling.
His solo shows are intense, eclectic, spellbinding and deeply moving
Twice-winner Musician Of The Year BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards & Album of the
Year in 2002
Martin Simpson is one of the finest acoustic finger-style and slide guitar
players in the world. Winner of 3 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, an Indie Award
for his album Cool & Unusual, and the 2006 Lifetime Achievement Award
from the Ards Guitar Festival, he is a superb interpreter of traditional music
and song from Europe and from the American South. Growing up in Lincolnshire
he was inspired by the likes of Martin Carthy, Davey Graham and Richard Thompson
during the folk revival of the 60s. He was also hugely influenced by the recordings
of Big Joe Williams, the Reverend Gary Davies, Blind Willie Johnson and Doc
Watson, which has led to an eclectic style of playing and repertoire that
is all his own. He has worked with the likes of Jackson Browne, David Lindley,
June Tabor, Martin Carthy, Martin Taylor and Eric Bibb and is a popular and
much loved solo performer. Both spell-binding, and highly entertaining, he
is a master of his craft.
Extracts from :An appreciation and biography of Martin Simpson by
Ken Hunt
Martin Simpson presents a world-class paradox. Whether as
a soloist or accompanist, he is a guitarist that breathes the rare air that
only an Olympian pantheon of guitarists get to breathe, yet, figuratively
speaking, he has the Lincolnshire soil and Mississippi mud beneath those well-kept
nails. What needs no equivocation is what he does on the metal-strung acoustic
guitar. He has a command of the instrument and the imaginative powers to do
it justice. Regardless of whose instrument he plays, the voice that emerges
from the guitar could be nobody else's.
Martin was born in May 1953 in Scunthorpe in Lincolnshire.
By the age of 12 he was playing guitar, by 13 banjo and at 14 he made his
first paid appearance. After leaving school in 1970 and abandoning a half-hearted
stab at further education, he threw it all in to become a professional musician
in 1971. Like his friend and fellow Martin, Martin Carthy, he still plays
the British folk club circuit as eagerly as the grandest music rooms that
the world of music can offer.
It was back in 1975 that the singer Barbara Dickson (another
so-called 'graduate' of the folk club scene) recommended Martin to Bill Leader
who went to see Martin perform. It led to Martin's first solo album, Golden
Vanity, (1976) for Bill Leader's Trailer label. Word got out quickly. Within
the year, he was supporting Steeleye Span and, by 1977, he was accompanying
that magisterial song-interpreter, June Tabor, whose previous principal guitar
accompanist had been Nic Jones no easy size 10s to fill. Their remarkable
decade-long partnership produced a triptych of highly influential albums in
A Cut Above (1980), Abyssinians (1983) and Aqaba (1988) and a body of performance
pieces that never received commercial release. Martin moved to the United
States in 1987 but it was not to be the end of their partnership. He guested
as her accompanist on her An Echo of Hooves (2003) and in her television special
in the BBC4 Sessions concert performance series (2004).
Martin has continually added new colours to his palette,
expanding on his primary musical interests in British, Anglo-American and
Afro-American traditional forms and building on the foundations and expressiveness
laid down by Harry Cox, Blind Willie Johnson, Big Joe Williams, Percy Webb
and Blind Willie McTell. Gradually,hesitantly at first with the full
flush of 20:20 hindsight he found a singing voice to complement his
voice on the guitar. An influx of songs from Bob Dylan, Bob Franke, John B
Spencer, John Tams and Richard Thompson, not to mention his own compositions
on albums such as Bootleg USA (1999) and Righteousness & Humidity (2003),
showed other sides of his musical character. Still, the basic rule of engagement
remains: that of balancing the traditional and the contemporary. That said,
with The Bramble Briar (2001), he concentrated on British story-telling of
traditional kinds, whether derived from the tradition or tradition-based material
from the likes of Peter Bellamy, Cecilia Costello, Louis Killen and Cyril
Tawney. Much of Martin's music reflects the places
where he has lived. Time spent in England and the United States underpins
his art, yet years ago he learned to apply the artistry of experience in different
contexts. .
Martin has released several albums with words like 'Live'
in or near their titles. The reason for that is simple. Simpson's magic can
only be totally experienced in concert. His live performances illuminate the
creative process beyond the one dimensionality of an audio recording. Concerts
furnish those moments of spontaneous 'insight' in which we, the audience,
see what he is doing first-hand, even if comprehending how he did it lags
far behind.
Martin's playing deploys a control of pace and dynamics that
touches the heart, like the best music, irrespective of whether the listener
has a bit of Lincolnshire, Mississippi or Ganges beneath their manicured or
careworn nails. In his playing he focuses upon economy and how to make each
note pay. Listen to him playing now and you will hear how he measures not
only the impact and length of each note, but, tellingly how he delivers the
space that frames each note. In early 2004, seasoned Simpson-watchers noted
him attaining hitherto unsuspected artistic heights with new levels of intensity
and economy. He put it down, in part, to taking delivery of a new banjo from
Ron Saul and rediscovering the place of the banjo in his guitar-playing.
Ken Hunt is a full-time freelance writer, broadcaster
and translator working exclusively in fields of music that excite him. His
writing appears in numerous periodicals, journals and concert and festival
programmes in North America and Europe, in UK broadsheets such as The Guardian
and The Independent, and in reference works for the All Music Guides, Oxford
University Press, Penguin and The Rough Guides.
dance
sides INVITED TO appear this year -
Gog
magog molly - also doing the dance workshop
Bourne
borderers - MIXED
SIDE PERFORMING BORDER DANCES
st
neots sweeps and milkmaids -
mixed side with unique molly style dances from St Neots
haverhill
harlots-
WOMENS SIDE DANCING COTSWOLD MORRIS
paxton
polka dots-YOUNG
LOCAL SIDE DANCING A VARIETY OF STYLES
DANCE DISPLAYS
ON THE MARKET SQUARE ON SATURDAY MORNING AND AFTERNOON.
