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Fri 4 May 2007



Triumphant clash of many cultures

JIM GILCHRIST

AMONG those congratulating Jim Sutherland in Gateshead on Sunday, following the first performance of his astonishing pan-European ensemble La Banda Europa, was a man who rushed up, shook him by the hand and declared, in a broad Geordie accent: "I just wanted to say that was brilliant. We're not used to this kind of thing heeah."

Understatement of the year, really. It's hard to think of anywhere that might be used to the kind of glorious rumpus that had just finished erupting from a temporary stage in Gateshead's Saltwell Park. It was generated by more than 30 musicians from several European countries, playing an array of instruments that must surely have never shared a stage before, but were united on this occasion not only by their players' nattily matching blue coats and grey periwigs but by the music itself.



This extraordinary vision of multi-instrumentalist, producer and composer Sutherland reached fruition with the help of a 2006 Creative Scotland Award and hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of funding from the countries represented.

Scottish Border pipes shrilled alongside their bagpipe cousins from Spain and Serbia; French hurdy-gurdies buzzed demonically beside distantly-related Swedish nyckelharpa, and a glittering brass section included soprano sax, trombone, tuba, and the rather less familiar boar-headed carnyx, a blaring horn recreated from remains found mouldering in peat bogs. There was reedy duetting from accordion and concertina, and exotic woodwind such as the Armenian duduk. And, as befits the work of a composer who is also a percussionist, a gallery of drums, marimbas and other thumpable items took centre stage.

Amid this richly pan-European assembly, familiar faces from the Scottish music scene include: piper Fraser Fifield, drummer James MacIntosh, solitary cellist (doubling on musical saw) Su-a Lee, trombonist and carnyx player John Kenny, and jazzers Dick Lee (another Creative Scotland winner) and Ryan Quiggly. Conducted by the burly and extravagantly wigged figure of Rick Taylor (normally to be seen toting a trombone with the likes of the Unusual Suspects or the Peatbog Faeries), this defiantly unclassifiable music ebbed and flowed, harrumphing in a clamour of brass, fluting over stealthily pacing drums, or churning and whooping like a vast fairground organ.

At one point the audience, bemused, entranced, astonished, parted to allow a procession of 20 side drummers and two horsemen to escort a locally recruited choir - all similarly uniformed, bewigged and each armed with a red umbrella - on to the stage, where they were flanked by two diminutive members of the Vienna Boys' choir.

Imagine some eccentric Regency tableaux, with a distinct whiff of Alice in Wonderland and Sgt Pepper. With all that billowing red canvas, I half expected the entire ensemble to slide downhill and sail off on the park lake - Handel's Water Music, with bagpipes.

The work receives its Scottish premiere in Callendar Park at the Big In Falkirk street arts festival on Sunday (La Banda's musicians will be playing in the streets over the weekend) and a CD and DVD should emerge, but how often can such a riotous musical assembly be assembled? The costs and logistics are immense, agrees Sutherland, emerging from the sound tent exhilarated, if slightly overwhelmed, at witnessing the first performance of his rumbustiously Protean creation, and relieved that the rain has stayed off despite an ominous rumble of thunder.

He confesses to "a sort of horrible pride, and a wee tear towards the end. I've never had the opportunity to do anything like this. So I'm very lucky that it's come to me at a time when, creatively, I think I was ready for it." In a way, his spree in the park was a natural culmination of a musical career which has peregrinated idiosyncratically from roots in the Thurso folk and country dance scene, through the "Scots swing" of the Easy Club, through a (slightly fraught) engagement with Jimmy Page and Robert Plant's Unledded exercise, the Edinburgh-based Lanterns indie pop trio and, within the last couple of years, his multimedia song sequence Cold Weather Dancing for Celtic Connections, plus a cross-cultural venture which combined Hungarian folk band Muszikas and Scottish musicians.

As a jobbing musician, master of the cittern, the bodhran and a battery of assorted percussion, Sutherland has played and recorded with artists from Van Morrison and Emmylou Harris to pipe bands. Production credits include Salsa Celtica, Shooglenifty and Aberfeldy, while innumerable folk groups and pipe bands play the results of his prolific tune-smithing, such as the ubiquitous Easy Club Reel.

However, it was his scoring for film and television, most recently the BAFTA award-winning Festival (starring Daniella Nardini) which steered the 48-year-old towards this present extravaganza. "Annie Griffin [director of Festival] had this idea of working with a Spanish Semana Santa band, which is essentially a sort of bugle band," he explains. "They play in a high pitch, like the Scottish pipe bands, so the idea emerged to fly the Drambuie Pipe Band to Spain and work with a Semana Santa band. It was an amazing sound and I was inspired to create something with a European atmosphere and ... not just a pastiche of elements, but a feeling of real folk music that was somehow concert music as well."

Sutherland contacted Neil Butler of the Glasgow-based events specialists UZ Events, who proved enthusiastic, as did the European arts consortium In-Situ. "Although the main commissioners for today's event were the Newcastle Gateshead Initiative, through In-Situ various countries contributed money to bring everyone over." Vienna Boys' sopranos apart, the choir was recruited locally - the Glasgow Islay Gaelic Choir will do the honours at Falkirk.

Sutherland's £30,000 Creative Scotland award, while an essential element, only covered a fraction of the frightening six-figure sum involved in bringing La Banda together. So who else can afford to engage such a costly, if unique, musical enterprise? One would have thought the Edinburgh Festival should be a natural contender. In the meantime, it's unlikely that after Falkirk La Banda Europa will assemble anywhere else this year, "but we do have dates lined up for Gratz in Austria in August next year, and very strong interest from places such as the Bergen International Festival and Sydney Festival in Australia."

The executive producer of events associated with the UEFA Cup has apparently expressed interest: "I'll be giving them some film footage and recordings, and Neil Butler and I are also talking to various people involved in the Commonwealth Games." Plus Sutherland has just been offered a residency in Marseilles to further develop the project .

The 40-minute sequence of music played by La Banda Europa, the climax of two days of group and individual performances around Gateshead, was titled Before the Wolf, a somewhat obtuse reference, he agrees, to "wolf tones", the jarring resonances that can emerge from a defective instrument, or sometimes between the notes of a tempered scale: "It was inspired by the idea of instruments that were around before tempered scales." The theatrical aspect of the production was handled by theatre writer and director Hilary Westlake. And those outfits? "Regency meets Star Trek?" grins Sutherland. "We were bringing people from all over Europe and uniting them in music, so we wanted them to have unified look."

He agrees that Before the Wolf pulls together more than musical cultures. "I made a kind of conscious decision about three years ago to try and consolidate all these odd strands in my musical life. I've had a fairly dilettante attitude and while diversifying has made it easier, I've not become a wealthy man out of it. I might have capitalised on working with Page and Plant, for instance, and perhaps by now I might have had a speedboat in the Bahamas. But that wasn't really me anyway."

Asked what's next on his agenda, he gives a self-deprecating laugh: "Having said I'm consolidating, on Tuesday I'm producing an Edinburgh band, Alfonzo, who play 1970s-style rock, then I'm off to Spain [his wife, Ana, is from Valencia] to produce a record by a traditional Asturian band called Los Gatos del Forno." And he declares himself "very proud" of his score for Seachd: The Inaccessible Pinnacle, the Gaelic feature film screened at last month's Celtic Media Festival on Skye and due to be shown at the Edinburgh Film Festival.

As we talk, little groups of musicians, back in plain clothes but clutching interesting-looking instrument cases, are strolling coachward across the park, conversing in various tongues. La Banda Europa is disbanding...until the next time.