Toby Hay: The Longest Day

Toby Hay – The Longest Day

The States51 Conspiracy – 21 June 2018

Toby Hay has a remarkable talent for taking something that is ostensibly abstract – a piece of guitar music – and turning it into something that is uniquely representative of a certain place, time or emotional state. On Mayfair At Rhayader 1927, the lead track from last year’s The Gathering, he managed – with little more than an acoustic guitar and some well-placed strings – to encapsulate a musical and social era with the lightest of touches and without a hint of sentimentality or mawkishness. It was music that was constantly aware of the past without being in thrall to nostalgia. As the impressionist painters of the late 19th century revolutionised the visual arts by focussing on the essential qualities of light and movement, Hay’s guitar playing distils something essential from the world around it, and in doing so creates vignettes full of sumptuous, fluid detail.

Whereas that wonderful debut tackled themes that were social, The Longest Day is, on the face of it at least, a more personal, inward-looking record. What it does share with its predecessor, though, is an intimate engagement with natural landscapes. But although the ideas are perhaps more introverted the landscapes here are larger and more varied. Hay has introduced travel as a major theme in his work, and it has had the effect of giving his new album a broader scope and a wider appeal.

Two tracks are directly influenced by trips to America. Leaving Chicago is inspired by a long train ride between Chicago and Missouri, and is a subtle combination of introspection and that kind of widescreen depiction of longing that train rides and big unknown landscapes can help create. It begins as the sound of a man alone in his own thoughts before opening out into something much more expansive. This is where Hay’s fellow musicians come in, and where this album shows marked progress on the last one. For one thing, there is a definite hint of jazz alongside the apparent folkiness of Hay’s playing. This can be attributed in part to the saxophone of Greg Sterland, which grows in power and vision throughout the song, but also to David Grubb’s violin, which has an interpretive and improvisational quality that sits as close to Jean-Luc Ponty as to most folk fiddlers. And then there is Mark O’Connor’s softly booming percussion, a musical thundercloud.

Marvin The Mustang From Montana begins in a meditative fashion, a musical tribute to a horse Hay rode in Utah. This tune is more skittish but gentler, relying more on Hay’s nimble guitar work and the rich tone of his instrument. Both of these America-inspired tunes bear some of the hallmarks of the so-called primitive guitarists and more recent musicians like William Tyler, but Hay’s style is all his own, and the listener gets the feeling that his pieces are directly linked to the surroundings in which they were composed rather than being reactions to some or other genre. There is always a wild quality to Hay’s playing, and that is a thrilling thing to behold in a time where the boundaries of genre and micro-genre seem to count for so much.

The other track directly influenced by place is Late Summer In Boscastle, a long, slow, rhythmic swirl of a tune full of mournful sax and Aidan Thorne’s pliant double bass. It is the song of the tide, soft and inexorable: you almost expect to hear the cries of oystercatchers or smell seaweed as you listen to its final bars. Rarely has music been so in tune with an environment.

There is a small clue to the magic of this album on its cover. The photograph shows Hay’s border collie, Bear, standing on a snowy path and looking back, ears erect, as if piqued by an intriguing sound. Or else the path leads home, and Bear is looking back with something like a mixture of longing and gladness to be in the open countryside. Either way, it is a fair reflection on Hay’s music, which can be simultaneously homely and exploratory. And to make the artwork all the more poignant, Bear even gets his own tune. Bear’s Dance is a sweet, brisk tribute to the quickness and intelligence of a sheepdog in which the guitar combines effortlessly with Grubb’s country-inflected violin.

There is a more serious side to The Longest Day. In the liner notes Hay quotes a passage from an essay by Blaise Pascal which warns us not to ‘wander about in times that are not ours.’ To steer clear of wallowing in nostalgia or blindly hoping for an impossible future and instead live in the present, this is not always easy, but must be attempted nevertheless. The album’s title track seems to make this point, oscillating between tranquillity and urgency. Even more emotionally charged is the two-part Curlew. The first section begins almost in discord, a clatter of percussion followed by a violin part on the edge of melody, the echo of strident bird calls. Personal sadness is coupled with environmental anxiety – the curlew, of course, is one of many bird species in grave danger of being wiped out due to loss of habitat. There is some resolution in the second part, an optimistic tune bursting with the implication of summer and the promise of new life. It is also the album’s starkest example of the hidden subversiveness, the inherently political nature of art that describes landscapes.

The album concludes with At The Bright Hem Of God. Hay’s lyrical guitar eloquently conjures up images of the Welsh hills he calls home. A casual listener might infer a kind of nostalgic feeling from a tune like this one, but Hay’s music is closer to the Welsh idea of hiraeth than to the more common conception of nostalgia. Hiraeth is essentially untranslatable, but it differs from nostalgia, perhaps, in that the latter is a passive emotional state, a kind of torpor, while the former is an active longing, a wish to truly engage with a landscape. This willingness to engage – emotionally and physically, with internal and external landscapes – is what sets Toby Hay apart from virtually everyone else currently making instrumental folk music. The Longest Day is a triumph, a thing of shimmering beauty.

Order The Longest Day now via Bandcamp https://tobyhay.bandcamp.com/album/the-longest-day

Toby is playing Rough Trade East, London, today as part of their Summer Solstice celebration along with Stick In The Wheel, Jack Sharp and You Are Wolf.

ALBUM LAUNCH: Friday, 20th July 7:30pm, St John’s Church, Canton, Cardiff (with support from Jim Ghedi) – TICKETS HERE