An appearance at the Costa del Folk festival in Ibiza gave Cormac Byrne (bodhrán and percussion) and Adam Summerhayes (fiddle) an opportunity to present material from their recently released Stone Soup album (a Featured Album of the Month, reviewed here) to a mainstream folk audience. Talking with them, after the first of their two sets, was a chance to explore their thinking, first when making this album of totally improvised music and then performing parts of it live. Text in italics has been added for clarity, during the transcription of the recording.
Their set that afternoon contained three tracks from Stone Soup, but began and ended with pieces of a more traditional origin. So, the conversation started with an explanation of how that had come about, but before that, here’s a taster of Stone Soup:
Adam: Cormac said, look we can’t just dump this on them, we need to give them a vocabulary they understand. So, I figured, get a few tunes I know from my Grandpa and we’ll start with those, and then do Stone Soup stuff. It gives you words to understand before you start, instead of speaking in Hebrew or something.
Cormac: Every gig you do, you adapt to who you’re playing to anyway. And every festival, as a band, no matter what band you’re playing with, whether you’re doing completely arranged stuff or not, you do a set that is a festival set. So, with that in mind, we felt we could adapt it, find a common ground and then go from there. So, we blended in some experimental stuff. I think to go in with a full improv gig would have been high risk. We’re not opposed to that, we’d be quite excited to do that kind of thing, but, for us as well, we need to have starting points, places we can start from and then take it from there.
Adam: But it’s also quite interesting because we recorded those Stone Soup tracks and they were improvised, but now they’re a tune, so that’s a weird thing.
Cormac: Yeah, they are purely improv on Stone Soup. Apart from, we might have said, I’ve got this riff or I’ve got this idea and we’d go there and (then) improvise. But now, when you listen to them over and over again, they become tunes. And then, when we went into the rehearsal room, we had another moment of… that moment in the recording studio when we just stood face to face and, we’re like, right, let’s just make music. In the rehearsal room, we had that moment, but then, do we play the arrangements because we know them so well? Having mixed them and gone through (the whole recording) process… So, I don’t know if we’ve even decided…
Adam: I think, from the album, there are pieces that we can lift, we can say, right we’ll do one of them, but in terms of real tunes there are only the two that we did today. They have become a fixed tune. But they are just, to use jazz terminology, a head. You play it and then you just go wherever you like.
Cormac: One thing I didn’t explicitly say in the gig today was “this music you’re hearing is largely improvised”. I don’t know why, it’s not that I wouldn’t say it, but it can put people off. Because, when you say improvised, people think you don’t know what you’re doing and that’s the very opposite of what we think we’re doing. You have to go through such an ongoing learning process to get to a point where you’re comfortable (enough) to have a free conversation and, for me, music is a conversation. When it’s completely pre-set, that becomes a different skill.
Adam: That’s like acting, in a way. But it’s brilliant to just make the music.
Cormac: Absolutely. (Every performance) is like what they call twice-behaved behaviour, isn’t it? For me, I do so much playing with different bands, when recording you have to learn these different arrangements and they’re so complex. Sometimes I sit in the studio and I think, “this arrangement’s really clever, but what’s the reason why it’s so complex?” And I think I’m in a phase of rejecting that to a certain extent and just going “You know what, I don’t want to be locked down by these things”. The more locked down an arrangement is, the less you can be expressive within it. This (Stone Soup) was the complete opposite. We’d go in and it was like we were at a dinner party, and we’re having a drink and we’re just having a chat. And that’s what real musical exchange is.
Adam: And most of the time you produce something that’s pretty good. With improvisation, if it’s good, it’s a proper conversation with someone whose intellect you respect and you’re creating something as you’re going on. And then occasionally, it all fucks up. Someone shouts “chicken”, and then you can decide whether to have a conversation, briefly, about chickens. Or not! Today, the third track we did, which was kind of from the album…
On the album this was a track called Arising Part 4, they’re now referring to it as Mad Jig.
Adam: …there wasn’t a single note from either of us that was the same as on the album. And I tuned the fiddle differently anyway.
Adam: Thinking back to what Cormac was saying, about not mentioning improvisation. I’ve experienced comments like, “Was that all written or were you just making it up?” in a derogatory tone. I would say it was live composition, trying to make a piece that totally makes sense, then and there. And in some ways, if you get it right, it’s so much more powerful than something you write and arrange. Because it is totally of the moment, created at that point.
Cormac: It’s like if you see someone, a leader say, giving a really good speech. If one person reads it off a script, it doesn’t have the same impact. When they really speak from the heart, it’s a really passionate thing.
Adam: And you can stumble, not that we’re going to stumble…
Cormac: But even if you do, it doesn’t matter, it’s real.
Adam: To be able to be making music where, totally, it’s just what comes out that defines what happens next. The logic that leads to that, gets me very excited. Cormac was saying he was in a place where he feels like rejecting the other stuff, and, for me, I’m coming to that as well. As much as possible, everything I do, I want to be just making an event. But that can include playing a tune that we know. That just means the musicians that are with you have to able to recreate it in a totally new way, in the moment, with you. And it’s that we’re creating, no matter how many times we play Happy at Three as it’s now called (on the album it’s Moving Part 3), it has a defined melody, but it’s got to be different.
Cormac: I don’t want to take anything away from all the music I do play that is highly arranged, I think it’s fantastic. I just think it’s a different discipline from when I’m in something where I’m fully in the creative driving seat, as we are in this. I made a lot of those records with Uiscedwr and stuff back in the day but this is the thing at the moment. I completely respect all those musicians, they really want to have it set and it’s great, and it’s a real skill and a fine art, but it’s just something different.
But it surely must give you pleasure to be able to do both?
Cormac: Yes, absolutely.
Adam: I tour the world with a baroque early music ensemble, Red Priest. And it’s incredibly, highly, arranged baroque, 18th Century, music. Played all from memory, people stand up on stage and do a violin concerto that lasts for 20 minutes. Nearly 2 hours of music played at incredible speed and intricacy. But the guy Piers (Piers Adams, recorder), who also plays with Cormac and I in our Dodo Street band, he’s an absolute nutter, and so it’s absolute energy on stage, and that’s music. It’s fantastic to have that at the other end (of the music I play).
Cormac: There’s room for everything. I think we’re pushing stuff somewhere different. But, again, it depends on where you put us. If we play in a church, to people who are not particularly folk music fans, they just hear music. You come to Costa del Folk, it’s got the word “folk” in it. They’re expecting folk and so, suddenly, you’re kind of experimental.
Adam: Also, as I said on stage, my grandfather was a folk player, but not a folk player in the sense of anything from the 60s folk revival onwards. He was a folk player because that’s what he did, that’s what his uncle did. But his take on it was, if you did what people so often do in a session now, which is keep going round and round the same tune, he would hit you. Ok, so play it, and if it’s for a dance, obviously you have to stay in the same structure, but, come on, give them something else.
Cormac: You look at a band like The Gloaming and they’re just pushing things out in this improv world. It’s just such a fascinating place to be and, I think, being comfortable, artistically, to go there, is really interesting
Adam: Something else for me, that music, (inherited from his grandfather) wasn’t all just the one kind, mixed ancestry and all that. I’ve got a constant soundtrack of melody in my mind but it’s not melodies (plural), it just something I can plug into at any point, see what’s going on. It’s brilliant to be able to do that and it is, essentially, folk music, it just doesn’t happen to have a name for the tune, because nobody’s heard it yet.
When you were recording Stone Soup, what proportion of what you tried went in the bin?
Cormac: Zero Adam: None Cormac: The album is as you hear it.
Cormac: Well maybe it’s not zero, but there wasn’t a track where we went “that’s shit, let’s take it off”
Adam: It’s not much, though. For example, the two last tracks on the album, those were just down in one.
Cormac: One take, done. From start to finish, what you hear is exactly what went through our conversation in the studio.
Adam: There’s one track that starts off with a really funny running line from me that we had to go through a couple of times because Cormac couldn’t work out which was the beat, which was understandable.
Cormac: Hang on now, pause that!
Long laughter sequence, mainly from Cormac.
Adam: And there’s one in the first bunch of tracks that absolutely goes off like (a rocket.) We had to do that really fast section a couple of times because we were going further apart and weren’t completely together. And I was pushing a bit. So, we had to redo that section. Put those two together and I reckon there’s maybe 5 minutes of music that didn’t make it.
Cormac: The first track we recorded … That was the amazing thing. The album (track order) is pretty much as we recorded it, cos it was really documenting the journey. With that first track, (remember) we were trying to make a bodhrán and fiddle album, we were already hours in and I hadn’t picked the bodhrán up. We did the berimbau bit, I was just intrigued, it was like a new toy for me. And we got a great sound in the headphones, Murray Grainger did a great job on the sound stuff. We put the bodhrán mic inside the gourd, which I’d never tried before, I’d never even thought, how do I mic up a berimbau? So, I put it inside the gourd and this massive sound came back, like WOW. So, we played with that and recorded a 2-minute section and when we came back and listened, we were like, that’s really cool. Three quarters the way through, though, and we were like, let’s cut that off, I think I should pick up the bodhrán now, let’s do a bodhrán and fiddle thing from this point. So, there were little ends that were maybe snipped off, but pretty much it (was recorded) as you hear it. And I think it’s kinda cool, the tracks that did go down in one.
The second to last track on the album, the long one (Awakening Part 1), it’s got four sections in it. We recorded it live as three sections, but we had some different ideas, I wanted there to be two bodhrans in it, I could hear two lines. When we listened back, we were like, ooh, it just feels like it needs something else.
It needed a later conversation with Adam to clarify what this meant to the finished track. A fourth section was added, sitting between sections 2 and 3 of the initial recording.
Adam: I tuned my fiddle to a C minor chord for that, which is bizarre. And I’ve no idea how I knew what notes to play, to be honest. But the whole last section is played on a violin tuned to a C minor chord. I must have been guided from above.
They sold a fair number of CDs that afternoon and later in the evening the Festival Club would be packed for their second set. Clearly, their improvisations had found an appreciative audience.
Read our review of Stone Soup here
Find them on Facebook here
Stone Soup is out now on Extinct Records
Cormac Byrne & Adam Summerhayes Live Dates
Supporting Show of Hands:
Wed, May 22 – ARC, Stockton-on-Tees, UK
Thu, May 23 – The Civic, Barnsley, UK
Fri, May 24 – The Stables, Milton Keynes, UK
Find out more about the next Costa Del Folk festival in Portugal here.