Peter Knight’s Gigspanner Big Band – Natural Invention
Gigspanner (GSCD007) – 10 April 2020
Music writers like to invoke the law of diminishing returns. An artist who is fresh and interesting in the 1960s will be jaded and repetitive by the 1990s, a band that took the 1990s by storm may be regarded as insignificant or laughable today. That’s the narrative anyway. Even the greats – Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Neil Young – are not immune to these apparently terminal downturns in career trajectory, and when a long-established artist releases an album that is too good for the music press to ignore, it is often packaged as a surprise, a one-off, a ‘late-career highlight’. It all seems designed, if only subconsciously, to keep each generation in its place. It makes it easier to pigeonhole new things as groundbreaking and old things as staid.
But where does that leave a musician like Peter Knight and a collective like the Gigspanner Big Band? Knight was a key member of Steeleye Span’s classic lineup: he was there at the birth of folk-rock and is responsible for some of its truly revolutionary moments, but even as it sought to innovate, the genre was maligned by portions of the press and public who saw it as a beardier outgrowth of prog, anathema to the concerns of the punk movement that was just around the corner. But to his credit, Knight has always been a step ahead of the critics, without ever seeming to care a jot what they might think. In the mid-70s he could be found in a Womble-suit, playing the part of Uncle Bulgaria, and by 1982 he was exploring free jazz with saxophonist Trevor Watts. These days you are as likely to find him at London’s contemporary music mecca Cafe Oto as at Cambridge Festival or Cropredy.
So Knight has always managed to be current, regardless of the era he finds himself in. His approach, always willing to take in multiple unusual genres, is now multigenerational too. The Gigspanner Big Band draws its inspiration and its members from the four corners of the folk music world. Originally a trio, with Knight’s fiddle accompanied by percussionist Sacha Trochet and guitarist Roger Flack, they expanded in 2016 to include contemporary folk duo Phillip Henry and Hannah Martin (better known as Edgelarks) and former Bellowhead melodeon maestro John Spiers.
The Big Band started out as a live concern (and live performance certainly suited their improvisational qualities), but for Natural Invention they have moved into the studio for the first time. Thankfully, the album perfectly captures the sparkle of their musicianship and the intimacy of their collaboration. Opener Awake Awake revels in its Appalachian roots, with Henry’s dobro dancing around Knight’s fiddle while Martin’s earthy vocals anchor the whole thing. The song blends into a mesmerising tune called Ellen Smith. As an introduction to an album (and to the talents of the musicians), it is perfect, as bracing as a dip in freezing water and as clear a message as Knight could possibly give that he has no intention of playing it safe or resting on his laurels.
Long A Growing is a more familiar song, a tragic ballad about a forced marriage. There are famous versions by Donovan and Martin Carthy (from whom Knight learnt the song), but it can never have been performed with such subtle and matter-of-fact sadness as here. Knight’s talents as a vocalist are often overlooked, but there is a singular, cracked beauty in the resigned air he brings to this performance. The band are blessed with a wealth of talent in every position: Martin takes lead vocals again on Searching For Lambs, a song that seems like the very blueprint of the rural English folk song. But even here a lot is going on under the surface, and the lengthy passage in which Spiers’ melodeon and Henry’s harmonica weave around each other against Trochet’s minimal percussive backdrop is a joy to behold, and that’s before Knight’s fiddle is added to the mix. By the time Flack’s guitar gets its turn towards the end of the song’s eight and a half minutes you realise you are in the company of an exceptional group of musicians.
The whooping, rambunctious Daddy Fox feels like a bit of light relief but is freighted with half a millennium of its own history. The group turn it into a mad, jumping bluegrass number that only gets wilder as it merges into an old morris tune. The pairing of the shanty Haul On The Bowline with a Breton dance tune is sheer alchemy, rural nostalgia meeting the grind of heavy work head-on, while Earl Brand is a tender Appalachian song and the perfect showcase for Martin’s singing. Martin is also prominent on Courting Is A Pleasure, which progresses from a comparatively minimal traditional version into a vehicle for the group’s combined improvisational talents. While Knight remains, in many respects, loyal to his folk-rock roots, it is clear that he is now heavily indebted to jazz and also to the music of non-western cultures. It makes for a heady mix.
The Snows They Melt The Soonest may be the best-known song on the album, but it is unlikely that it has been rendered with such taut, almost claustrophobic closeness before. There are elements of bar-room blues and smoky jazz to the arrangement, and Flack’s guitar is like wire tightening around the song’s lyrical heart. The tunes on Natural Invention are characterised by their willingness to admit genres other than folk, and the often surprising juxtapositions of songs from different cultures. The two-part closing track – The Star Of Munster and Reel Du Tricentenaire – is a case in point. It is a miracle that something so varied (and something that features six different solos) can be so cohesive, and the electric guitar is a particularly impressive surprise.
And that just leaves the album’s most interesting, most challenging song. A few weeks ago I could have written about the Scottish ballad Betsy Bell And Mary Grey in purely historical terms, and I would have described it as a wonderfully haunting and haunted piece of music. Usually, the ambiguous relationship between the song’s protagonists would be the most interesting thing to discuss, but with human life revealing more of its own precariousness by the day, it is impossible not to make a darker and more immediate connection. In simple terms, it is a song about two women whose attempt to escape from the plague mirrors uncannily the current necessity for self-isolation. The song’s tragic end – a lover, bearing gifts and food, tracks down the pair in their hidden bower and inadvertently infects them with the disease – feels like a strange and timely warning. Thousands of words could be written about this song and its relevance, but I will just say that Knight’s instrumental section alone (beautiful and deranged, influenced by his love of free improvisation) is one of the most potent pieces of music you are likely to hear for a while.
Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that Peter Knight has released a piece of music that feels thrillingly, frighteningly, beautifully of our time. He is after all contemporary to the core, and with the Gigspanner Big Band, he has assembled a group of musicians intent on making some of the most important and exhilarating art ever to sit under the banner of folk music.
Watch Awake Awake below
Filmed at The Apex, Bury St Edmunds, November 2019.
‘Natural Invention’ is released on April 10th 2020 and is available from https://www.gigspanner.com/shop
The Gigspanner Big Band are Peter Knight – Fiddle, Vocals
Roger Flack – Guitar, Bass, Vocals
Phillip Henry – Dobro, Slide Guitar, Harmonica, Vocals
Hannah Martin – Fiddle, Banjo, Tenor Guitar, Vocals
John Spiers – Melodeon, Concertina, Vocals
Sacha Trochet – Bass, Percussion, Vocals
www.gigspanner.com
www.edgelarks.co.uk
www.johnspiers.co.uk
Photo Credit: Rob Bridge – Redwood Photography